News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

Researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a proof-of-concept model for delivering gene-editing tools to treat blood disorders. Their approach uses mRNA encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles as a technology platform to carry out in vivo cellular reprogramming, modifying diseased blood cells directly within the body. Use of this platform in clinical settings could expand access and reduce the cost of gene therapies for blood disorders, many of which currently require chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have shown that a type of engineered nanostructured surface can be used to trap micrometer and sub-micrometer particles within seconds. The researchers state that the enhanced absorption of light in the nanostructures helps in the transport of analytes to biosensing surfaces and could help in the detection of cancer.

Researchers from Columbia University, the University of Connecticut, and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have built a structure out of DNA and then coated it with glass, creating a very strong material with very low density. The glass coated only the strands of DNA, leaving a large part of the material volume as empty space, much like the rooms within a house or building. The DNA skeleton reinforced the thin, flawless coating of glass, making the material strong, and the voids constituting most of the material's volume made it lightweight. Such glass nanolattice structures have four times higher strength but five times lower density than steel. 

For nearly 20 years, scientists have known that some DNA-stabilized nanometer-sized clusters of silver atoms glow visibly in red and green, making them useful in a variety of chemical and biosensing applications. Now, researchers from the University of California, Irvine; the University of Jyväskylä in Finland; the University of Copenhagen in Denmark; and Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, are using machine learning to determine what part of the DNA sequence is correlated to the different fluorescence colors of the nanoclusters. In particular, they are looking for DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters that would emit near-infrared light, enabling researchers to see through living cells and centimeters of biological tissue.

Researchers from Oregon State University and Oregon Health & Science University have developed a drug delivery system that shows promise for greatly enhancing the efficacy of a medicine given to women with the life-threatening condition of #ectopic pregnancy. This condition, which is non-viable and is the leading cause of maternal death in the first trimester, occurs when a fertilized egg implants somewhere other than the lining of the uterus. The medicine, methotrexate, ends ectopic pregnancy by causing embryonic cells to stop dividing, but it comes with a number of side effects. The researchers used a mouse model to show that when methotrexate is administered via nanoparticles, called polymersomes, it can end pregnancy at a comparatively low dose – a step in the right direction for reducing side effects and increasing efficacy. 

Scientists from Binghamton University; Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Yizheng Hospital of the Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital Group in China; and Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany are researching the use of cell-derived nanovesicles to deliver therapeutic agents to the interior of cancer cells with better accuracy and efficiency. By identifying overexpressed or cancer-specific antigens that occur in malignant cells and targeting the nanovesicles, encapsulated drugs were injected into cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone.

Scientists from the Texas A&M University Health Science Center, Rice University, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and Indiana University School of Medicine-South Bend have discovered that a nano-sized carbon material derived from the oxidation of carbon-rich sources could be used to treat Down syndrome and other disorders associated with high levels of hydrogen sulfide. The scientists showed that when hydrogen sulfide is converted into its metabolites, these metabolites offer favorable functions such as modifying proteins to improve their ability to act as antioxidants. 

Researchers from the University of Washington; the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan; and Osaka University in Japan have discovered that it is possible to imbue graphite – the bulk, 3D material found in pencils – with physical properties similar to graphite's 2D counterpart, graphene. The scientists adapted an approach commonly used to probe and manipulate the properties of 2D materials: stacking 2D sheets together at a small twist angle. They placed a single layer of graphene on top of a thin, bulk graphite crystal, and then introduced a twist angle of around 1 degree between graphite and graphene. They detected novel and unexpected electrical properties not just at the twisted interface but deep in the bulk graphite, as well.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Genentech have improved the design of lipid nanoparticles used for drug delivery. The scientists discovered that lipid nanoparticles with neatly ordered, closely packed internal structures led to better silencing of a faulty gene in human neurons that is associated with a degenerative disease, compared with lipid nanoparticles that had a more disordered structure. 

Rice University engineers have created containers that can keep volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from accumulating on the surfaces of stored nanomaterials. VOCs are carbon-based molecules that are emitted from many common products, including cleaning fluids, paints, and office and crafting supplies. The researchers showed that this new type of storage container prevented surface contamination for at least six weeks and could even clean VOC-deposited layers from previously contaminated surfaces.