Tag Archives: nanomedicine

nanotechnology

Making organs clear to track nanoparticle meds

Molecular imaging for cancer cells
Molecular imaging for cancer cells

One of the biggest promises of nanomedicine is that doctors will be able to deliver needed medications directly to a site within your body without negatively affecting other tissues. That’s still a moving target, though.

One of the most challenging obstacles is the density and opaqueness of human tissue such as blood vessel walls and organs. A recent study reported in ACS nano (American Chemical Society Nano) has revealed a way to more accurately track where nanoparticles go once inside the body by allowing visibility a little deeper into living tissue. A gel, injected into tissues removed from mice, linked all the molecules of the tissue together except for lipids – the substances responsible for making tissue opaque. Lipids washed easily away and “left the tissues clear but otherwise intact.”

Lest you picture a big chunk of clear material, the actual depth to which researchers could image nanoparticles was only 1 millimeter, but that’s 25 times deeper than with existing methods. The hope is that in addition to helping track nanoparticles, this approach will assist researchers with tissue engineering, implant and biosensor applications.

Slowly, we peel away one tiny layer at a time from the mysteries of nature.

BiomedNews, stem cell research, stem cells

A new way to guide stem cells to become what’s needed

One of the toughest challenges to meeting the many exciting goals scientists have set is getting stem cells to grow into precisely the types of cells needed for the particular illness or condition. Now a researcher has discovered a way to do just that and is waiting for a patent to be granted.

This Rutgers professor Ki-Bum Lee and colleagues at Rutgers and Kyoto University in Japan have invented a platform they call NanoScript. It represents a breakthrough  in the area of gene expression. The way genes express themselves encodes information in a gene specifically to direct how a protein molecule gets assembled. That process is integral to developing tissue through stem cell therapeutics. Stem cells divide and replenish other cells, serving as an almost unlimited internal repair system.

Anything we can do to speed human knowledge along this extraordinary and exciting pathway to better healing and health is very welcome. Let’s hope – as often happens when a patent is involved – they don’t charge too much of an arm and a leg to get to the end-products.

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