A new tool speeds up development of vaccines and other pharmaceutical products by more than 1 million times while minimizing costs.
More than 40,000 molecules can be synthesized and analyzed within an area smaller than a pinhead. The method, developed through a highly interdisciplinary research effort in Denmark, promises to drastically reduce the amounts of material, energy, and economic cost for pharmaceutical companies.
The method works by using soap-like bubbles as nano-containers. With DNA nanotechnology, multiple ingredients can be mixed within the containers.
“The volumes are so small that the use of material can be compared to using one liter of water and one kilogram of material instead of the entire volumes of water in all oceans to test material corresponding to the entire mass of Mount Everest. This is an unprecedented save in effort, material, manpower, and energy,” says head of the team Nikos Hatzakis, Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen.
“Saving infinitely [on] amounts of time, energy and manpower would be fundamentally important for any synthesis development and evaluation of pharmaceuticals,” says Ph.D. Student Mette G. Malle, lead author of the article, and currently Postdoc researcher at Harvard University, U.S..
Results within just seven minutes
The work has been carried out in collaboration between the Hatzakis Group, University of Copenhagen, and Associate Professor Stefan Vogel, University of Southern Denmark. The project has been supported by a Villum Foundation Center of Excellence grant. The resulting solution is named “single particle combinatorial lipidic nanocontainer fusion based on DNA mediated fusion”—abbreviated SPARCLD.
The breakthrough involves integration of elements from normally quite distant disciplines: synthetic biochemistry, nanotechnology, DNA synthesis, combinational chemistry, and even Machine Learning, which is an AI (artificial intelligence) discipline.
The method provides results within just seven minutes.
“What we have is very close to a live read-out. This means that one can moderate the setup continuously based on the readings adding significant additional value. We expect this to be a key factor for industry wanting to implement the solution,” says Mette G. Malle.
‘Had to keep things hush-hush’
The individual researchers in the project have several industry collaborations, yet they do not know which companies may want to implement the new high-throughput method.
“We had to keep things hush-hush since we didn’t want to risk for others to publish something similar before us. Thus, we could not engage in conversations with industry or with other researchers that may use the method in various applications,” says Nikos Hatzakis.
Still, he can name some possible applications:
“A safe bet would be that both industry and academic groups involved in synthesis of long molecules such as polymers could be among the first to adopt the method. The same goes for ligands of relevance for pharmaceutical development. A particular beauty of the method [is] that it can be integrated further, allowing for direct addition of a relevant application.”
Here, examples could be RNA strings for the important biotech tool CRISPR, or an alternate for screening and detecting and synthesizing RNA for future pandemic vaccines.
“Our setup allows for integrating SPARCLD with post-combinatorial readout for combinations of protein-ligand reactions such as those relevant for use in CRISPR. Only, we have not been able to address this yet, since we wanted to publish our methodology first.”
News
X Marks the Spot: AI’s Treasure Maps Lead to Early Disease Detection
Medical diagnostics expert, doctor’s assistant, and cartographer are all fair titles for an artificial intelligence model developed by researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Their new model accurately identifies tumors [...]
Scientists Discover Method To Identify Alzheimer’s Disease Before It Progresses to Dementia
Researchers at Aarhus University have discovered a method to identify Alzheimer’s disease before it progresses to dementia, potentially opening up new avenues for treatment. A groundbreaking study could pave the way for early detection [...]
Startling Discovery: COVID-19 Virus Can Stay in the Body More Than a Year After Infection
The COVID-19 virus can persist in the blood and tissue of patients for more than a year after the acute phase of the illness has ended, according to new research from UC San Francisco that offers potential [...]
New bioengineered protein design shows promise in fighting COVID-19
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have been racing to develop effective treatments and preventatives against the virus. A recent scientific breakthrough has emerged from the work of researchers aiming to combat [...]
Sugar-coated gold nanoparticles can quickly eliminate bacterial infections, no antibiotics required
If left to their own devices, bacteria on our teeth or wounded skin can encase themselves in a slimy scaffolding, turning into what is called biofilm. These bacteria wreak havoc on our tissue and, [...]
Liquid Lightning: Nanotechnology Unlocks New Energy
EPFL researchers have discovered that nanoscale devices harnessing the hydroelectric effect can harvest electricity from the evaporation of fluids with higher ion concentrations than purified water, revealing a vast untapped energy potential. Evaporation is a natural [...]
Unmasking the Illusion: AI-Generated Faces Challenge Perceptions
Research shows survey participants duped by AI-generated images nearly 40 percent of the time. If you recently had trouble figuring out if an image of a person is real or generated through artificial intelligence [...]
New Discovery Reveals How Cells Defend Themselves During Stressful Situations
Stress granules play a crucial role in the stress response, arising from the aggregation of non-translating mRNAs and proteins. Although significant knowledge exists about stress granules, the mechanisms behind their mRNA localization remain partially [...]
Scientists use a new type of nanoparticle that can both deliver vaccines and act as an adjuvant
Many vaccines, including vaccines for hepatitis B and whooping cough, consist of fragments of viral or bacterial proteins. These vaccines often include other molecules called adjuvants, which help to boost the immune system's response [...]
Not Science Fiction: How Optical Neural Networks Are Revolutionizing AI
A novel architecture for optical neural networks utilizes wavefront shaping to precisely manipulate the travel of ultrashort pulses through multimode fibers, enabling nonlinear optical computation. Present-day artificial intelligence systems rely on billions of adjustable [...]
Turning skin cells into limb cells sets the stage for regenerative therapy
In a collaborative study, researchers from Kyushu University and Harvard Medical School have identified proteins that can turn or “reprogram” fibroblasts — the most commonly found cells in skin and connective tissue — into [...]
AI reveals prostate cancer is not just one disease
Artificial Intelligence has helped scientists reveal a new form of aggressive prostate cancer, which could revolutionise how the disease is diagnosed and treated in the future. A Cancer Research UK-funded study, published in Cell Genomics, has revealed [...]
New Study Finds That Persistent COVID-19 Infections Are Surprisingly Common
Recent research conducted by the University of Oxford has found that a high proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the general population lead to persistent infections lasting a month or more. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. [...]
Innovative nanosheet method revolutionizes brain imaging for multi-scale and long-term studies
The human brain has billions of neurons. Working together, they enable higher-order brain functions such as cognition and complex behaviors. To study these higher-order brain functions, it is important to understand how neural activity [...]
Scientists Have Discovered a Potential Universal Antivenom
Scientists at Scripps Research identified antibodies that protect against a host of lethal snake venoms. Scripps Research scientists have developed an antibody that can block the effects of lethal toxins in the venoms of [...]
Scientists discover the human brain is even more powerful than we thought
The human brain could be far more powerful than we ever imagined, scientists have discovered. Researchers have identified cell messaging which have never been uncovered before, which suggests our brains are capable of more than previously realised. It’s [...]