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Category: nanotechnology

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Researchers have developed a new and highly efficient method for gene transfer. The technique, which involves culturing and transfecting cells with genetic material on an array of carbon nanotubes, appears to overcome the limitations of other gene editing technologies.

The device, which is described in a study published today in the journal Small, is the product of a collaboration between researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).

“This platform holds the potential to make the process more robust and decrease toxic effects, while increasing amount and diversity of genetic cargo we can deliver into ,” said Ian Dickerson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the URMC and co-author of the paper.

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BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – The number of people being diagnosed with diabetes is growing. Every third American adult will develop type 2 diabetes within the next 35 years. But there may be a new way to manage the illness.

A new device might make managing your insulin levels or even treating allergies virtually painless. We know Western New York is becoming a hub for nano-medicine. Now a local organization is on the front lines of whats called nano- patch technology.

At the New York Center for Nanomedicine Research in downtown Buffalo, the team is working on patch technology. A similar kind of patch may soon be on the market. It uses nano- technology micro-needles to transmit medication and test blood sugar levels through the device is so small, you don’t even feel them. Scottpatrick Sellitto was part of the original team which developed nano-patch technology. He and his team say this “personalized” treatment is what’s next in the medical field. Selitto said, “It’s very precise, and it’s tailored literally just for you and that is the next frontier of medicine.”

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The efficiency of many applications deriving from natural sciences depends dramatically on a finite-size property of nanoparticles, so-called surface-to-volume ratio. The larger the surface of nanoparticles for the same volume is achieved, the more efficiently nanoparticles can interact with the surrounding substance. However, thermodynamic equilibrium forces nanostructures to minimize open surface driven by energy minimization principle. This basic principle predicts that the only shape of nanoparticles can be spherical or close-to-spherical ones.

Nature, however, does not always follow the simple principles. An intensive collaboration between University of Helsinki, Finland, and Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, showed that in some condition iron nanoparticles can grow in cubic shape. The scientists also succeeded in disclosing the mechanisms behind this.

“Now we have a recipe how to synthesize cubic shapes with high surface-to-volume ratio which opens the door for practical applications”, says Dr. Flyura Djurabekova from the University of Helsinki.

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A new nanomaterial printing method could make it both easier and cheaper to create devices such as wearable chemical and biological sensors, data storage and integrated circuits — even on flexible surfaces such as paper or cloth. The secret? Plamsa.

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Scientists at the University of Lund in Sweden have found a way to use “biological motors” for parallel computing. The findings could mean vastly more powerful and energy efficient computers in a decade’s time.

Nanotechnologists at Lund University in Sweden have discovered a way to miniaturize the processing power that is found today only in the largest and most unwieldy of supercomputers. Their findings, which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, point the way to a future when our laptops and other personal, handheld computing devices pack the computational heft of a Cray Titan or IBM Blue Gene/Q.

But the solution may be a little surprising.

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Synthetic biology involves creating or re-engineering microbes or other organisms to perform specific tasks, like fighting obesity, monitoring chemical threats or creating biofuels. Essentially, biologists program single-celled organisms like bacteria and yeast much the same way one would program and control a robot.

But 10 years ago, it was extremely challenging to take a DNA sequence designed on a computer and turn it into a polymer that could implement its task in a specific host, say a mouse or human cell. Now, thanks to a multitude of innovations across computing, engineering, biology and other fields, researchers can type out any DNA sequence they want, email it to a synthesis company, and receive their completed DNA construct in a week. You can build entire chromosomes and entire genomes of bacteria in this way.

“Biology is the most powerful substrate for engineering that we know of,” said Christopher Voigt, Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. “It’s more powerful than electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, materials science and others. Unlike all the other fields, we can look at what biology is already able to do. When we look at the natural world, we see things like the brain. That’s a complex place computing, electrical engineering and computer science can’t reach. The brain even constructs nanostructures very deliberately, something materials science has not accomplished.”

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Despite all our advances in cancer research, our best strategy of fighting the disease is still brute force, with only a fraction of the drugs administered actually reaching the tumour cells, and most being absorbed into healthy tissue. When cancer spreads, the likelihood of medication reaching it gets even lower, which is why secondary, or metastatic, tumours can be so deadly.

But now, researchers have used cancer’s own tricks against it, by developing dissolvable nanoparticles that target the heart of metastatic tumours directly. And they’ve already seen unprecedented success in mouse studies, with 40–50 percent of the animals being “functionally cured”, and tumour-free after eight months — the equivalent of about 24 years for a human patient. The team is so excited by these results, they hope to fast-track the research and begin human trails in 2017.

“I would never want to overpromise to the thousands of cancer patients looking for a cure, but the data is astounding,” said one of the researchers, Mauro Ferrari, from the Houston Methodist Research Institute. “We’re talking about changing the landscape of curing metastatic disease, so it’s no longer a death sentence.”

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