News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

Since it began more than two decades ago, the opioid epidemic has taken an enormous toll on people's lives. Naloxone is a medication that needs to be taken as soon as possible after an overdose. So, scientists at Harvard Medical School sought to develop a nanoparticle-based system that health care providers could inject under the skin of someone with opioid use disorder to deliver naloxone, should that person require the medication. The researchers have now designed injectable nanoparticles that release naloxone when triggered by blue light. 

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a multipurpose, high-performance coating material that self-assembles from 2D nanosheets. The new material could significantly extend the shelf life of consumer products for electronics, energy storage, and health and safety applications. The material is also recyclable, enabling a sustainable manufacturing approach that could keep single-use packaging and electronics out of landfills.

Inspired by the enhanced visual system of the butterfly, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Nanjing University in China have developed an imaging sensor capable of "seeing" into the ultraviolet range inaccessible to human eyes. The design of the sensor uses stacked photodiodes and perovskite nanocrystals capable of imaging different wavelengths in the ultraviolet range. Using the spectral signatures of biomedical markers, such as amino acids, this new imaging technology is even capable of differentiating between cancer cells and normal cells with 99% confidence. 

For the first time, scientists and engineers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands have observed, in real time, how two types of nanoparticles made from different materials combine into new composite materials. The findings could help engineers have more control over the assembly of materials that combine the desirable properties of each particle—such as photoluminescence, magnetism and the ability to conduct electricity. “We are designing new materials that combine different kinds of functions in ways that are not possible with the materials we have today," said Sharon Glotzer, one of the researchers involved in this study.

Researchers from Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, and the Basque Research and Technology Alliance in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, have developed a novel methodology to engineer colloidal quasicrystals using DNA-modified building blocks. The focal point of the study was the assembly of decahedral nanoparticles – which have 10 sides – by using DNA as a guiding scaffold. Through a combination of computer simulations and meticulous experiments, the researchers discovered that these decahedral nanoparticles can be orchestrated to form quasicrystalline structures with intriguing five- and six-coordinated motifs.

Using nanoparticles administered directly into the cerebrospinal fluid, researchers from Yale University and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (Memphis, TN) have developed a treatment that may overcome significant challenges in treating a particularly deadly brain cancer. Targeting tumors in the cerebrospinal fluid has proven difficult, in part because the fluid rapidly cycles through the central nervous system about four times a day in humans, typically flushing away anti-tumor drugs before they've had a chance to accumulate and have any effect. To get around this obstacle, the researchers made nanoparticles that adhere to tumors. 

Venous malformations – tissues made up largely of abnormally shaped veins – are often difficult to treat, especially when located in sensitive areas, such as the eyes, face, and genito-urinary organs. To treat these malformations, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts University, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine have tested a nanoparticle-based photothermal therapy in a mouse model of venous malformations. First, they injected the mice intravenously with gold nanoparticles, which accumulated in the malformations. Next, they irradiated the nanoparticle-filled lesions with near-infrared light. The irradiated gold nanoparticles generated heat, shrinking the malformations dramatically and sometimes eliminating them completely. 

Northwestern Medicine scientists have developed a more effective way of creating a nanotherapeutic vaccine that uses spherical nucleic acids. The scientists loaded the spherical nucleic acid vaccine with a peptide derived from egg protein often used in vaccine development and administered this vaccine to mice with lymphoma (a type of blood cancer). The treated mice had a greater number of T cells and the volumes of the tumors were significantly reduced.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed modular nanoparticles that can be easily customized to target different biological entities, such as tumors, viruses, or toxins. The surfaces of the nanoparticles are engineered to host any biological molecules of choice, making it possible to tailor the nanoparticles for a wide array of applications, ranging from targeted drug delivery to neutralizing biological agents. In the past, creating distinct nanoparticles for different biological targets required going through a different synthetic process from start to finish each time. 

Graphite is a mineral composed of stacked sheets of carbon atoms, and a single sheet is called graphene. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have shown that a material made by isolating five sheets of graphene stacked on top of each other can be tuned to exhibit three important properties never seen in natural graphite. "We found that the material could be insulating, magnetic, or topological," says Long Ju, one of the scientists involved in this study. A topological material allows the unimpeded movement of electrons around the edges of a material but not through the middle, that is, the edge of a topological material is a perfect conductor, while the center is an insulator.