Lifeboat Foundation

Chemotherapy as a treatment for cancer is one of the major medical success stories of the 20th century, but it’s far from perfect. Anyone who has been through chemotherapy or who has had a friend or loved one go through it will be familiar with its many side effects: hair loss, nausea, weakened immune system, and even infertility and nerve damage.

This is because chemotherapy drugs are toxic. They’re meant to kill cancer cells by poisoning them, but since cancer cells derive from healthy cells and are substantially similar to them, it is difficult to create a drug that kills them without also harming healthy tissue.

But now a pair of Caltech research teams have created an entirely new kind of drug delivery system, one that they say may finally give doctors the ability to treat cancer in a more targeted way. The system employs drugs that are activated by ultrasound —and only right where they are needed in the body.

Sunlight is an inexhaustible source of energy, and utilizing sunlight to generate electricity is one of the cornerstones of renewable energy. More than 40% of the sunlight that falls on Earth is in the infrared, visible and ultraviolet spectra; however, current solar technology utilizes primarily visible and ultraviolet rays. Technology to utilize the full spectrum of solar radiation—called all-solar utilization—is still in its infancy.

A team of researchers from Hokkaido University, led by Assistant Professor Melbert Jeem and Professor Seiichi Watanabe at the Faculty of Engineering, have synthesized tungstic acid–based materials doped with copper that exhibited all-solar utilization. Their findings are published in the journal Advanced Materials.

“Currently, the near-and mid-infrared spectra of solar radiation, ranging from 800 nm to 2,500 nm, is not utilized for energy generation,” explains Jeem. “Tungstic acid is a candidate for developing nanomaterials that can potentially utilize this spectrum, as it possesses a crystal structure with defects that absorb these wavelengths.”

A study showing how electrons flow around sharp bends, such as those found in integrated circuits, has the potential to improve how these circuits, commonly used in electronic and optoelectronic devices, are designed.

It has been known theoretically for about 80 years that when electrons travel around bends, they tend to heat up because their flow lines get squished locally. Until now, however, no one had measured the heat, for which imaging the flow lines is first needed.

The research team, led by Nathaniel M. Gabor at the University of California, Riverside, imaged streamlines of electric current by designing an “electrofoil,” a new type of device that allows for the contortion, compression, and expansion of streamlines of electric currents in the same way airplane wings contort, compress, and expand the flow of air.

More noninvasive cancer treatments are being made:

A research group from Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) developed light-activatable, liquid metal (LM) nanoparticles for cancer diagnosis and treatment via photoimmunotherapy. The LM nanoparticles can target and destroy cancer cells and can be fluorescently tagged to function as reporters to identify and eliminate tumors in vivo.

Gallium (Ga)-based LM nanoparticles are promising nanoscale materials for biomedical applications due to their physicochemical properties, including flexibility, easy surface modification, efficient photothermal conversion, and high biocompatibility.

CRISPR-based genome editing has the potential to treat many human genetic diseases, but achieving stable, efficient and safe in vivo delivery remains a challenge. This Review assesses current delivery systems for genome editors—focusing on adeno-associated viruses and lipid nanoparticles—and highlights data from recent clinical trials. Emerging delivery systems and ongoing challenges in the field are discussed.

Magnetic skyrmions have received much attention as promising, topologically protected quasiparticles with applications in spintronics. Skyrmions are small, swirling topological magnetic excitations with particle-like properties. Nevertheless, the lower stability of magnetic skyrmions only allow them to exist in a narrow temperature range, with low density of the particles, thus implying the need for an external magnetic field, which greatly limits their wider applications.

In a new report published in Science Advances, Yuzhu Song and a team of researchers formed high-density, spontaneous magnetic biskyrmions without a magnetic field in ferrimagnets via the thermal expansion of the lattice.

The team noted a strong connection between the atomic-scale ferrimagnetic structure and nanoscale magnetic domains in a ferrimagnet compound by using neutron powder diffraction and Lorentz transmission electron microscopy measurements.

Vanderbilt researchers have developed a way to more quickly and precisely trap nanoscale objects such as potentially cancerous extracellular vesicles using cutting-edge plasmonic nanotweezers.

The practice by Justus Ndukaife, assistant professor of electrical engineering, and Chuchuan Hong, a recently graduated Ph.D. student from the Ndukaife Research Group, and currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Northwestern University, has been published in Nature Communications.

Optical tweezers, as acknowledged with a 2018 Physics Nobel Prize, have proven adept at manipulating micron-scale matter like biological cells. But their effectiveness wanes when dealing with nanoscale objects. This limitation arises from the diffraction limit of light that precludes focusing of light to the nanoscale.

Scientists and engineers keep developing ever faster and more powerful technological devices. But there is a need for even faster and more efficient electronics. A promising route is to take advantage of terahertz waves, a less-explored part of the electromagnetic spectrum nestled between the infrared and microwave regions. Terahertz waves are uniquely sensitive to charge carriers in conducting systems, proving a powerful probe to understand the magnetic properties of new materials.

The quest for ultrafast electronics and coherent terahertz sources can be significantly aided by the precise and ultrafast control of light-induced charge currents at nanoscale interfaces.

Existing methods, including inverse spin-Hall effect (ISHE), inverse Rashba–Edelstein effect, and inverse spin-orbit-torque effect, convert longitudinally injected spin-polarized currents from magnetic materials to transverse charge currents, thus generating terahertz waves. However, these relativistic mechanisms rely on external magnetic fields and suffer from low spin-polarization rates and relativistic spin-to-charge conversion efficiencies characterized by spin-Hall angle.

Breast cancer in its various forms affects more than 250,000 Americans a year. One particularly aggressive and hard-to-treat type is triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), which lacks specific receptors targeted by existing treatments. The rapid growth and metastasis of this cancer also make it challenging to manage, leading to limited therapy options and an often poor prognosis for patients.

A promising new approach that uses minuscule tubes to deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly to the tumor site while preserving healthy cells has been developed by Johns Hopkins engineers. The team’s research appeared in Nanoscale.

“In this paper, we showed that we can use nanotubes to specifically target both proliferating and senescent TNBC cells with chemotherapeutics and senolytics, killing them without targeting healthy breast cells,” said Efie Kokkoli, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, a core researcher at the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology, and a specialist in engineering targeted nanoparticles for the delivery of cancer therapeutics.