(Funded by the National Institutes of Health)
Researchers from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Van Andel Institute in Grand Rapids, MI, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered that a mouse protein, called STELLA, disrupts cancer-causing chemical changes to genes associated with human colorectal cancer cells. First, the researchers found the part of the protein, or peptide, that was required to activate tumor suppressor genes in human colorectal cancer cells. Then, they designed a lipid nanoparticle – an ultratiny drug delivery vehicle made of fatty molecules – to deliver the messenger RNA (mRNA) that codes for this peptide to cells. The therapy performed well in mice, activating tumor suppressor genes and impairing tumor growth. Next, the researchers plan to test this therapy on human patients through clinical trials.

(Funded by the National Institutes of Health)
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania; the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, PA; Central South University in Changsha, China, have engineered small nano-sized capsules called extracellular vesicles from human cells to target a cell-surface receptor called DR5 (death receptor 5) that many tumor cells have. When activated, DR5 can trigger the death of these tumor cells by a self-destruct process called apoptosis. Researchers have been trying for more than 20 years to develop successful DR5-targeting cancer treatments. The new approach outperformed DR5-targeting antibodies, which have been considered a leading DR5-targeting strategy. The small extracellular vesicles efficiently killed multiple cancer cell types in lab-dish tests and blocked tumor growth in mouse models, enabling longer survival than DR5-targeting antibodies.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, Stanford University, Rice University, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have described how a type of quasiparticle, called a polaron, behaves in tellurene, a nanomaterial made up of tiny chains of tellurium atoms. A polaron forms when charge-carrying particles such as electrons interact with vibrations in the atomic or molecular lattice of a material. The researchers had hypothesized that as tellurene transitions from bulk to nanometer thickness, polarons change from large, spread-out electron-vibration interactions to smaller, localized interactions. Computations and experimental measurements backed up this scenario.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health)
Researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of California Riverside have developed biosensors made of iron oxide nanoparticles and special molecules called cyclic peptides that recognize tumor cells better than current biosensors. The cyclic peptides respond only when they encounter two specific types of enzymes – one secreted by the immune system, the other by cancer cells. In animal studies, the biosensors distinguished between tumors that responded to a common cancer treatment that enhances the immune system from tumors that resisted treatment.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Defense)
Researchers from Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the University of Vienna in Austria, Politecnico di Milano in Italy, and Universita Degli Studi Dell’ Aquila in Italy have created a device that can generate photon pairs more efficiently than previous methods while being less prone to error. To create the device, the researchers used thin crystals of a van der Waals semiconducting transition metal called molybdenum disulfide. Then, they layered six of these crystal pieces into a stack, with each piece rotated 180 degrees relative to the crystal slabs above and below. As light travels through this stack, a phenomenon called quasi-phase-matching manipulates properties of the light, enabling the creation of paired photons. “We believe this breakthrough will establish van der Waals materials as the core of next-generation nonlinear and quantum photonic architectures,” said James Schuck, one of the scientists involved in this study.