When the autumn booster programme begins next month, many people are likely to receive Moderna’s new bivalent vaccine, designed to protect against the original Covid strain and the more transmissible Omicron variant. As Covid continues to evolve, so will vaccination strategies. Here we look at some of the developments in the pipeline. Variant-specific boosters In [...]
Scientists of the department of Advanced Organ Bioengineering and Therapeutics (TechMed Centre) recently published a novel cancer immune therapy in the scientific journal Nature Communications ("Cancer immune therapy using engineered ‛tail-flipping’ nanoliposomes targeting alternatively activated macrophages"). In their research, Prof Dr Jai Prakash and his team developed newly designed nanoparticles which can target the body’s immune [...]
Scientists from the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI) have developed a contact lens that can capture and detect exosomes, nanometer-sized vesicles found in bodily secretions which have the potential for being diagnostic cancer biomarkers (Advanced Functional Materials, "A microchambers containing contact lens for the non-invasive detection of tear exosomes"). The lens was designed with [...]
Among the total number of deaths caused by different types of cancer, esophageal cancer is the sixth most significant. Several conventional treatments, such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and surgery have multiple side effects, including off-target toxicity and multidrug resistance (MDR). Another strategy for esophageal cancer treatment is chemo-photodynamic therapy, the efficacy of which is limited [...]
Cell membrane-coated nanoparticles, applied in targeted drug delivery strategies, combine the intrinsic advantages of synthetic nanoparticles and cell membranes. Although stem cell-based delivery systems were highlighted for their targeting capability in tumor therapy, inappropriate stem cells may promote tumor growth. A review published in the journal Materials Today Bio summarized the role of stem cell membrane-camouflaged [...]
When babies in the African countries of Guinea Bissau and Uganda were given the tuberculosis vaccine, something remarkable happened. Instead of the vaccine only protecting against the target bacteria – Myocbacterium tuberculosis – the tuberculosis vaccine offered broad protection against a range of unrelated infections, including respiratory infections and serious complications such as sepsis. Australian researchers have now pinpointed the biological mechanism behind the [...]
Thousands of years ago, across the Eastern Mediterranean, multiple Bronze Age civilizations took a distinct turn for the worse at around the same time. The Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire both collapsed, and there was a widespread societal crisis across the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, manifesting as declining populations, destruction, reduced trade, and significant cultural [...]
IN OCTOBER 2014, virologist Edward Holmes took a tour of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a once relatively overlooked city of about 11 million people in the central Chinese province of Hubei. The market would have presented a bewildering environment for the uninitiated: rows of stalls selling unfamiliar creatures for food, both dead and alive; [...]
Self-healable ionic sensing materials with fatigue resistance are imperative in robotics and soft electronics for extended service life. The existing artificial ionic skins with self-healing capacity were prepared by network reconfiguration, constituting low-energy amorphous polymer chains. Consequently, these materials suffer from a low fatigue threshold and are susceptible to crack propagation. In an article [...]
As demand for solar energy rises around the world, scientists are working to improve the performance of solar devices—important if the technology is to compete with traditional fuels. But researchers face theoretical limits on how efficient they can make solar cells. One method for pushing efficiency beyond those limits involves adding up-conversion nanoparticles to [...]
