Tiny Swimming Robots Treat Deadly Pneumonia in Mice

I had to look back a few months to refresh my memory about the female researcher to labored in obscurity for decades before her discoveries and knowledge became the basis for the billions of vaccinations that BioNTech, Pfizer and Moderna. Check out this article for an inspiring story:

A one-way ticket. A cash-stuffed teddy bear. A dream decades in the making.

For Katalin Kariko, a life in full: Awe-inspiring ideas, careful experiments, unnoticed successes and the repeated sting of rejection

By Carolyn Y. JohnsonOctober 1, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

JENKINTOWN, Pa. — Nearly three decades ago, Katalin Kariko called her husband and 10-year-old daughter into her home office in the Philadelphia suburbs to share a thrilling new scientific idea.

“You have to sit down and now listen to my argument!” she told them.

Kariko, a research assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, told her family about a fragile genetic material called messenger RNA. This profound molecule, a simple strand of four chemical letters, instructed cells how to make proteins. REST

November 9, 2021 – Researchers have made a huge leap forward in finding a targeted therapy for acute myeloid leukaemia.

The innovative ‘magic bullet’ technique uses specific antibody-targeting technology that would reduce the need for current treatments that can be arduous, invasive and require long hospital admissions. 

Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) generally affects older people with around three thousand people diagnosed per year in the UK alone. Current treatments can involve the use of bone marrow transplantation which can be painful, arduous and can sometimes bring with it unpleasant side effects.  

The researchers found that in AML, there is a high concentration of a molecule named Siglec-15 found on the surface of the diseased cell.  The team identified a molecule that could bind to Siglec-15, piggyback into the cell and take with it a toxin that could potentially kill off the diseased cell, thereby eradicating the disease without damaging healthy cells. 

Published in the British Journal of Haematology, and funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the study was led by Dr Huan Cao, Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, alongside colleagues at Cambridge University where much of the work was carried out.  REST OF ARTICLE

In a surprise find, scientists have discovered sugar-coated RNA molecules decorating the surface of cells.

These so-called “glycoRNAs” poke out from mammalian cells’ outer membrane, where they can interact with other molecules. This discovery, reported May 17, 2021, in the journal Cell, upends the current understanding of how the cell handles RNAs and glycans.

“This was probably the biggest scientific shock of my life,” says study author Carolyn Bertozzi, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Stanford University. “Based on the framework by which we understand cell biology, there’s no place where glycan sugars and RNA would physically touch each other.” REST

Viewing a bacterial flagellar motor in atomic detail

Source: © 2021 Elsevier Inc

Cryo-electron microscopy reveals a bacterial flagellar motor in atomic-level detail

In 1986, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation, a vision of what the nascent science of nanotechnology might mean for the future. Drexler claimed that nanoscale robots would one day swim through our bloodstream, attacking invaders like viruses and removing sclerotic deposits from the blood-vessel walls.

Drexler laid out the technical aspects of his vision in a 1992 book, Nanosystems, which argued that a ‘molecular assembler’ would position atoms exactly where we want them to build nanoscale devices such as motors and gears out of diamond-like carbon. If such assemblers could build themselves, this manufacturing process could be cheaply scaled up to make us masters of matter with atomic precision.

The books were hugely influential on futurologists. In Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Drexlerian nanotechnology played a key role in the imagined merging of human and machine that Kurzweil believed would usher in a form of immortality. REST

Scientists are developing virus-sized robots that could defuse blood clots, explore human cells or even scrub water of impurities.

But as these inventions get smaller, the laws of motion that govern these machines are not very intuitive, so researchers are drawing inspiration from nature, says Brad Nelson, professor of robotics at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, who focuses on these tiny intelligent machines down to nanometres in size. REST

Nanomedicine comes of age with mRNA vaccines

There have been few scientific announcements that have made as big an impact as the recent news that a vaccine, developed in a collaboration between German biotech company BioNTech and the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, has been shown to effective against covid-19. What’s even more striking is that this vaccine is based on an entirely new technology. It’s an mRNA vaccine; rather than injecting weakened or dead virus materials, it harnesses our own cells to make the antigens that prime our immune system to fight future infections, exactly where those antigens are needed. This is a brilliantly simple idea with many advantages over existing technologies that rely on virus material – but like most brilliant ideas, it takes lots of effort to make it actually work. REST

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In the nanoworld, tiny particles such as proteins appear to dance as they transform and assemble to perform various tasks while suspended in a liquid. Recently developed methods have made it possible to watch and record these otherwise-elusive tiny motions, and researchers now take a step forward by developing a machine learning workflow to streamline the process. 

Graduate student Zihao Ou, left, professor Qian Chen, center, and graduate student and lead author Lehan Yao.

Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

The new study, led by Qian Chen, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, builds upon her past work with liquid-phase electron microscopy and is published in the journal ACS Central Science.

Being able to see – and record – the motions of nanoparticles is essential for understanding a variety of engineering challenges. Liquid-phase electron microscopy, which allows researchers to watch nanoparticles interact inside tiny aquariumlike sample containers, is useful for research in medicine, energy and environmental sustainability and in fabrication of metamaterials, to name a few. However, it is difficult to interpret the dataset, the researchers said. The video files produced are large, filled with temporal and spatial information, and are noisy due to background signals – in other words, they require a lot of tedious image processing and analysis. REST

Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego are working on a COVID-19 vaccine using an unconventional candidate: a plant virus. REST

A team of scientists from Stanford University is working with researchers at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility located at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), to develop a gene-targeting, antiviral agent against COVID-19. Full Post