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

A team of electrical engineering researchers from Penn State and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has created an ultrathin optical element that can control the direction of polarized electromagnetic light waves. The optical element, akin to a glass slide, uses a forest of tiny, antenna-like nanorods that together create a metamaterial – a material engineered to have specific properties not typically found in nature. According to Christos Argyropoulos, one of the scientists involved in this study, the optical element can quickly image the molecular structure of pharmaceuticals, allowing scientists to better understand the nuances of drug behavior.

Scientists at the University of Oklahoma have found that endothelial cells in breast cancer tumors are two times more likely to interact with medicine-carrying nanoparticles than endothelial cells in healthy breast tissue. Endothelial cells line blood vessels and manage the exchange between the bloodstream and surrounding tissues. The research was conducted on endothelial cells isolated from breast cancer tissues and isolated from healthy breast tissues. The next steps for the research will involve examining how the nanoparticles react in the context of the whole tissue. 

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed an electrochemical process that could offer new protection against bacterial infections without contributing to antibiotic resistance. The researchers first developed an electrochemical method to etch the surface of stainless steel, creating nano-sized needle-like structures on the surface that can puncture bacteria's cell membranes. Then, with a second electrochemical process, the researchers deposited copper ions on the steel's surface. Copper interacts with the cell membranes and ultimately compromises them. Together, the dual attacks resulted in 97% reduction of Gram-negative E. coli and 99% reduction in Gram-positive Staphylococcus epidermis bacteria in the group's study.

Scientists from Penn State and Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan have developed a new method to generate sulfur compounds, called polysulfides, inside cells. The method induces a chemical reaction that converts hydrogen sulfide to polysulfides inside cells by using self-assembled nano-sized core-shell structures. These structures can be taken up by cells and protect what's inside – in this case, a metal complex that can convert hydrogen sulfide to polysulfides. Delivering polysulfides as a treatment could have implications for treating wounds and repairing tissues, the scientists said.

A team of researchers from The Ohio State University, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom have shown that gene therapy delivered by naturally derived nanocarriers repaired damaged disks in the spine of mice. The nanocarriers were engineered using mouse connective-tissue cells, called fibroblasts, and loaded with genetic material for a protein that is key to tissue development. The team injected a solution containing the nanocarriers into damaged disks in mice and noticed that their tissues plumped back up and became more stable. The findings speak to the value of using universal adult donor cells to create these extracellular vesicle therapies, the researchers said.

Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany have shown that when graphene is irradiated with ions, or electrically charged atoms, the electrons that are ejected give information about the graphene’s electronic behavior. “Irradiating materials and observing the change in properties to deduce what’s going on inside the material is a well-established technique, but now, we are taking first steps towards using ions instead of laser light for that purpose,” said André Schleife, one of the scientists involved in this study. “The advantage is that ions allow highly localized, short-time excitations in the material compared to what laser light can do. This enables high-precision studies of how graphene and other 2D materials evolve over time.” 

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Dallas, and  the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have created a “five-lane superhighway” for electrons in a material called rhombohedral graphene, which is composed of five layers of graphene stacked in a specific overlapping order. In October 2023, the scientists had shown that rhombohedral graphene could allow the unimpeded movement of electrons around the edge of the material but not through the middle. That resulted in a superhighway and required the application of a large magnetic field some tens of thousands times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. In the current work, the team reports creating a five-lane superhighway without any magnetic field.

Researchers from the University of California San Diego have shown that an experimental treatment made from a plant virus is effective at protecting against a broad range of metastatic cancers in mice. The treatment, composed of nanoparticles created with cowpea mosaic viruses, suppressed the growth of metastatic tumors across various cancer models, including colon, ovarian, melanoma, and breast cancer. The new study builds upon previous research by the lab of Nicole Steinmetz, a professor of nanoengineering at UC San Diego. "Here, we do not treat established tumors or metastatic disease – we prevent them from forming,” Steinmetz said. “We are providing a systemic treatment to wake up the body's immune system to eliminate the disease before metastases even form and settle."

Silver has long been used to thwart the spread of illness, and in recent years, silver nanoparticles have been incorporated into many products, including odor-resistant clothes, makeup, food packaging, and sports equipment. Despite their ubiquity, little is known about their environmental toxicity or how it might be mitigated. So, researchers at Oregon State University and the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (Corvallis, OR) have taken a key step toward closing the knowledge gap with a study that indicates silver nanoparticles' shapes and surface chemistries play key roles in how they affect aquatic ecosystems.

Researchers from Oregon State University and Funai Microfluidic Systems (Lexington, KY) have developed a novel technique for the aerosolization of inhalable nanoparticles that can be used to carry messenger RNA (mRNA) to the lungs of patients with inherited lung diseases. The findings are important because the current nebulization method for nanoparticles subjects them to shear stress, hindering their ability to encapsulate the genetic material and causing them to aggregate in certain areas of the lungs rather than spread out evenly, the researchers said. "We utilized a novel microfluidic chip that helps in generation of plumes that carry nanoparticles and does not cause any shear stress," said Gaurav Sahay, a scientist who led this study. "This device is based on the similar idea of an ink-jet cartridge that generates plumes to print words on paper."