(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health)
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley; the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and the University of Cambridge have developed a practical way to make hydrocarbons – molecules made of carbon and hydrogen – powered solely by the sun. The device combines a light absorbing “leaf” made from a high-efficiency solar cell material called perovskite, with a flower-shaped copper nanocatalyst, to convert carbon dioxide into useful molecules. Unlike most metal catalysts, which can only convert carbon dioxide into single-carbon molecules, the copper flowers enable the formation of more complex hydrocarbons with two carbon atoms, such as ethane and ethylene, which are key building blocks for liquid fuels, chemicals, and plastics.

(Funded by the National Institutes of Health)
Scientists from the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Ohio State University, Northwestern University, the University of Tokyo, and the Sakakibara Heart Institute in Tokyo have developed a nanotechnology-based drug delivery system to save patients from repeated surgeries. The approach would allow surgeons to apply a paste of nanoparticles containing hydrogel on transplanted veins to prevent the formation of harmful blockages inside the veins. Not only did this innovation, dubbed “Pericelle,” work at three months – when the applied drug supply ran out – but it continued to work at six months and was still working at nine months. The scientists can’t fully explain the unexpectedly durable benefits, but they are excited about what it suggests for the potential of their technique.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health)
A few years ago, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University made an intriguing discovery: adding a branch to the end of lipid nanoparticles’ normally linear lipid tails dramatically improved messenger RNA (mRNA) delivery. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have tested branched lipids in a variety of experiments and found that these lipids reliably outperform even the lipid nanoparticles used by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, the makers of the COVID-19 vaccines. The researchers hope the branched lipids will not only improve lipid nanoparticle delivery but also inspire a new approach to designing lipids, moving away from trial-and-error methods.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health)
Scientists from the City University of New York, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Weill Cornell Medicine have developed a groundbreaking approach using nanoparticles that are primarily composed of a drug and a thin peptide coating which improves solubility, enhances stability in the body, and optimizes delivery to targeted areas. In leukemia models, the nanoparticles were more effective at shrinking tumors compared to the drug alone. “Using specially designed peptides, we can build nanomedicines that make existing drugs more effective and less toxic and even enable the development of drugs that might not be able to work without these nanoparticles,” said Daniel Heller, one of the scientists involved in this study.

(Funded by the National Institutes of Health)
A new experimental vaccine developed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Caltech, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom could offer protection against emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2, as well as related coronaviruses, known as sarbecoviruses, that could spill over from animals to humans. Sarbecoviruses include SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and the virus that led to the outbreak of the original SARS in the early 2000s. By attaching up to eight different versions of sarbecovirus receptor-binding proteins to nanoparticles, the researchers created a vaccine that generates antibodies that recognize regions of receptor-binding proteins that tend to remain unchanged across all strains of the viruses.