Biomedical

Researchers from Rice University, Vanderbilt University, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a system for culturing cancer cell clusters that can shed light on hard-to-study tumor properties. The new zinc oxide-based culturing surface mimics the nanoscale roughness of the lotus leaf surface structure, providing a highly tunable platform for the high-throughput generation of three-dimensional nanoscale tumor models.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School have demonstrated in mice a new method to combat pancreatic cancer that relies on a nanoparticle drug-delivery system to activate an immune pathway, which usually recognizes viral infections in the body, in combination with tumor-targeting agents.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have developed an automated device that can diagnose glioblastoma, an incurable brain cancer, in less than an hour. The device features a biochip that uses a sensor that detects biomarkers, called active Epidermal Growth Factor Receptors (EGFRs), that are overexpressed in glioblastoma. EGFRs are found on extracellular vesicles – structures that carry cargo between cells. The device also features silica nanoparticles that report the presence of active EGFRs on the captured extracellular vesicles, while bringing a high negative charge. 

Researchers from Caltech, the University of Washington, the University of Pennsylvania, the University at Albany, the Rockefeller University, the University of Edinburgh, Creative BioSolutions, LLC (Miami, FL), HDT Bio (Seattle, WA), Acuitas Therapeutics (Vancouver, Canada), and Ingenza Ltd. (RoslIn, United Kingdom) have developed and tested a new COVID-19 vaccine candidate called mosaic-8 that has shown potential to protect against different types of sarbecoviruses, including SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and its variants.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found that small extracellular vesicles are secreted by tumor cells and act as a "forcefield," blocking nanoparticle-based therapies aimed at targeting cancers. "A lot like the Death Star with its surrounding fleet of fighter ships and protective shields, solid tumors can use features like immune cells and vasculature to exert force, acting as a physical barrier to rebel forces (nanoparticles) coming in to deliver the payload that destroys it," said Michael Mitchell, one of the researchers involved in this study.

Researchers from the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Minnesota have developed magnetic nanoparticles that ensure safe rewarming of frozen tissues for transplant and address the issue of uneven heating due to inhomogeneous nanoparticle distribution. The researchers immersed animal tissues in a solution containing magnetic nanoparticles and a cryoprotective substance, and the solution was subsequently frozen with liquid nitrogen.

Researchers from Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Iowa, and the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom have developed a platform to streamline the discovery and cost-effective manufacturing of nanosensors that can detect proteins, peptides, and small molecules by increasing their fluorescence up to 100-fold in less than a second. A key component of the platform is fluorogenic amino acids that can be encoded into target-binding small protein sequences.

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a new way to see organs within a body by rendering overlying tissues transparent to visible light. The counterintuitive process – a topical application of a common food dye – was reversible in tests with animal subjects and may ultimately apply to a wide range of medical diagnostics, from locating injuries to monitoring digestive disorders to identifying cancers.

A research team from Brown University has developed a new method for transferring the ions that mass spectrometers analyze, dramatically reducing sample loss so that nearly all of it remains intact. "Basically, it's a process where you're really spraying your sample all over the place to produce these ions and only get a tiny portion of them into the mass spectrometer's vacuum for analysis,” said Nicholas Drachman, a physics Ph.D. student who led the work. “Our approach skips all of that." The key is a nanotube the researchers developed that has an opening about 30 nanometers across.

A team of researchers from Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, and Emory University has developed a therapy to target and kill dengue virus using the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas13. The team used lipid nanoparticles that carried a custom-coded messenger RNA (mRNA) molecule. The mRNA encodes for a CRISPR protein that cuts viral RNA. When the encoded mRNA was delivered to infected cells, the cells used the mRNA instructions to build the CRISPR protein, which degraded the viral RNA within the cells. Thanks to this treatment, the team was able to treat dengue virus in mice.