Topic
Field applying engineered nanoscale materials—particles, tubes, and nanozymes—for in vivo diagnosis, imaging, and treatment of disease.
Researchers at Washington State University and the University of Michigan slowed endometriosis lesion spread in mice with a repackaged tapeworm drug. The treatment also reduced inflammation, and the team is working toward clinical trials for a disease with limited treatment options.
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Researchers in Wuhan report that spinach-derived nanoparticles, switched on with red light, improved pumping in rats with surgically induced heart failure. It is early animal work, and getting both the particles and the light to a human heart is unresolved.
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Oregon State researchers used a single magnetic nanoparticle to show mouse placentas on MRI and then disrupt them with heat of 45C or less. If it holds up in other animals, one injected agent could both locate a misplaced pregnancy and end it without surgery.
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IIT researchers built 500-nanometer polydopamine nanotubes that heat under infrared light and generate current and release dopamine under ultrasound. The group, writing in ACS Nano, calls the trio a first for one organic structure, though ultrasound drives two of its effects together.
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Memorial Sloan Kettering researchers used nanoparticles to kill a scar-driving macrophage subset, restoring immunotherapy in mice with liver and lung cancer. The Science paper points to the tumor's fibrotic barrier as a route past immunotherapy resistance.
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An Aarhus-led team reports that injectable photocatalytic nanoparticles gave surviving retinal neurons in blind mice a light input, enough for visual cortex activity and a behavioural change, with the cells left genetically untouched.
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An Aarhus-led team injected 300-nanometre semiconductor particles into mice with advanced retinitis pigmentosa and recorded light-driven activity in the visual cortex, a route to restoring light sensitivity that does not depend on the patient's mutation.
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The MIT Media Lab's injectable devices convert an external magnetic field into an electric field at the tumor itself, which killed chemoresistant patient cells in a dish and slowed the same tumors in mouse brains.
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University of Sydney researchers want to spare cleft-palate children the decade-long wait for a graft cut from their own body. So far the case rests on one eight-week endpoint in a preclinical model the announcement does not name.
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The UTS-led platform switches from fluorescent guide to oxygen-generating phototherapy under a single near-infrared wavelength, which is neat engineering and also the reason the mouse survival result resists attribution.
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