(Funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
A major challenge in self-powered wearable sensors for health care monitoring is distinguishing different signals when they occur at the same time. Now, researchers from Penn State and Hebei University of Technology in China have addressed this issue by developing a new type of flexible sensor that can accurately measure both temperature and physical strain simultaneously but separately, potentially enabling better wound healing monitoring. The sensor is made with laser-induced graphene, which forms when a laser heats certain carbon-rich materials in a way that converts their surface into a graphene structure.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the National Institutes of Health)
Researchers from Caltech; the Beckman Research Institute at City of Hope in Duarte, CA; and the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a technique for inkjet-printing arrays of special nanoparticles that enables the mass production of long-lasting wearable sweat sensors. These sensors could be used to monitor a variety of biomarkers – such as vitamins, hormones, metabolites, and medications – in real time, providing patients and their physicians with the ability to continually follow changes in the levels of those molecules. Wearable biosensors that incorporate the new nanoparticles have been successfully used to monitor metabolites in patients suffering from long COVID and the levels of chemotherapy drugs in cancer patients at City of Hope. “There are many chronic conditions and their biomarkers that these sensors now give us the possibility to monitor continuously and noninvasively,” says Wei Gao, one of the researchers involved in this study.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the University at Buffalo; Central South University in Changsha, China; Shandong Normal University in Jinan, China; TU Wien in Vienna, Austria; the University of Salerno in Italy; and Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea, have demonstrated that using thin two-dimensional (2D) materials, like the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), in combination with silicon can create highly efficient electronic devices with excellent control over how an electrical charge is injected and transported. The presence of the 2D material between the metal and silicon – despite the MoS2 being less than one nanometer thick – can change how electrical charges flow. “Our work investigates how emerging 2D materials can be integrated with existing silicon technology to enhance functionality and improve performance, paving the way for energy-efficient nanoelectronics,” says Huamin Li, the study’s lead author.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Researchers at Penn State have developed novel contrast agents that target two proteins implicated in osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease. By marking the proteins with the contrast agents, which comprise newly designed metal nanoprobes, the researchers can use advanced imaging, called photon-counting computed tomography, to simultaneously track separate biological processes in color, which, together, reveal more about the disease’s progression than a traditional scan. “This high-resolution … imaging approach could potentially be used to image multiple biological targets, thus enabling disease progression tracking over time,” said Dipanjan Pan, one of the scientists involved in this study. Read additional details about the research here: https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-technique-allows-technicolor-imaging-degenerative-joint-disease.

(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.