My infomercial of the day — “just ad water and Ta-dah, you have a vaccine!”

http://thejerseytomatopress.com/stories/To-produce-biopharmaceuticals-on-demand-just-add-water,1851

Researchers at MIT and other institutions have created tiny freeze-dried pellets that include all of the molecular machinery needed to translate DNA into proteins, which could form the basis for on-demand production of drugs and vaccines. Image: Christine Daniloff/MIT. Antimicrobial peptide illustration by Ymahn/Wikimedia Commons.

Anne Trafton | MIT

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Tufts University engineers have created a new format of solids made from silk protein that can be preprogrammed with biological, chemical, or optical functions, such as mechanical components that change color with strain, deliver drugs, or respond to light, according to a paper published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Using a water-based fabrication method based on protein self-assembly, the researchers generated three-dimensional bulk materials out of silk fibroin, the protein that gives silk its durability. Then they manipulated the bulk materials with water-soluble molecules to create multiple solid forms, from the nano- to the micro-scale, that have embedded, pre-designed functions.

For example, the researchers created a surgical pin that changes color as it nears its mechanical limits and is about to fail, functional screws that can be heated on demand in response to infrared light, and a biocompatible component that enables the sustained release of bioactive agents, such as enzymes.

PanARMENIAN.Net — In the future, getting customized cancer treatments might just be a matter of injecting virtually invisible discs into your body, Engadget said.

University of Michigan scientists have had early success testing 10nm “nanodiscs” that teach your body to kill cancer cells. Each disc is full of neoantigens, or tumor-specific mutations, that tell your immune system’s T-cells to recognize those neoantigens and kill them. When you pair them up with immune checkpoint inhibitors (which boost the T-cells’ responses), they can not only wipe out existing tumors, but prevent them from reemerging later.

This testing has been limited to mice so far, but it’s promising. The nanodiscs took 10 days to eliminate tumors, and they shut down identical tumors when they were reinserted 70 days later. For the researchers, the big challenge right now is scaling the tests to see if they still hold up with larger animals. If the approach proves successful with humans, the days of generic cancer solutions might be limited — so long as doctors could get a sample of your cancer, they’d stand a realistic chance of eliminating the disease, Engadget said.