Biodegradable nanospheres offer novel approach for treatment of toxin exposure and drug delivery

A new technology to clean the blood of victims of radiological, chemical and biological terrorist attacks is being developed jointly by Argonne National Laboratory, the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute and The University of Chicago Hospitals.

In addition to cleaning biological and radiological toxins from blood, the technology shows promise for delivering therapeutic drugs to targeted cells and organs. The technology uses components approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a novel approach to magnetic filtration.

“The best that doctors can do for most biohazard exposure is supportive treatment,” said Michael Kaminski of Argonne ’s Chemical Engineering Division. “This new system will be designed to directly remove the toxic agents from the bloodstream — quickly and efficiently.”

… “The key to the technology is biodegradable nanospheres 100 to 5,000 nanometers in diameter,” Kaminski said, “small enough to pass through tiny blood vessels, yet large enough to avoid being filtered from the bloodstream by the kidneys.” One nanometer is one millionth of a meter, about 70,000 times smaller than the diameter of an average human hair.

The particles contain a magnetic iron compound and are coated with a type of polyethylene glycol that prevents white blood cells from attacking them. Attached to the particles’ surfaces are proteins that bind to specific toxic agents. Intravenously injected into the patient, the nanospheres circulate through the bloodstream, where their surface proteins bind to the targeted toxins.

(Credit: Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute)

via BBC

A US-British team of scientists has successfully tested a cloak of invisibility in the laboratory.

The device mostly hid a small copper cylinder from microwaves in tests at Duke University, North Carolina.

It works by deflecting the microwaves around the object and restoring them on the other side, as if they had passed through empty space.

… The cloak consists of 10 fibreglass rings covered with copper elements and is classed as a “metamaterial” - an artificial composite that can be engineered to produce a desired change in the direction of electromagnetic waves.

…The metamaterial cloak channelled the microwaves around the object like water flows around the rock.

“These metamaterials have opened a new chapter in electromagnetism. We’ve opened the door into the secret garden,” co-author Professor John Pendry, from Imperial College London, told BBC News.

via Wired

A company that developed technology capable of creating water out of thin air nearly anywhere in the world is now under contract to nourish U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq.

The water-harvesting technology was originally the brainchild of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sought ways to ensure sustainable water supplies for U.S. combat troops deployed in arid regions like Iraq.

“The program focused on creating water from the atmosphere using low-energy systems that could reduce the overall logistics burden for deployed forces and provide potable water within the reach of the war fighter any place, any time,” said Darpa spokeswoman Jan Walker.

…The 20-foot machine can churn out 600 gallons of water a day without using or producing toxic materials and byproducts. The machine was displayed on Capitol Hill last week where a half-dozen lawmakers and some staffers stopped by for a drink.

via Nanodot

MIT scientists reached a major nanotech milestone: re-engineering a virus to create a self-assembling product.

THE GOAL OF nanofabrication is to make tiny machines build themselves using molecules they grab from their surroundings. It’s easy to dismiss the concept as science fiction — or hype. Until you hear what’s been going on in the lab of MIT materials scientist Angela Belcher, a star in nanotechnology circles.

Working with colleagues Paula Hammond and Yet-Ming Chiang, Belcher genetically altered a virus, the M-13 bacteriophage, inducing it to grab a pair of conductive metals — cobalt oxide and gold — from a solution. As the viruses rearrange themselves, they form highly aligned organic nanowires that can be used as a lithium-ion battery electrode — one so densely packed it can store two or three times the energy of conventional electrodes of the same size and weight.

via RSC

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, have created a liquid that stops bleeding in any tissue in a matter of seconds. It is a discovery that they claim has the potential to revolutionise surgery and emergency medicine and could even make it easier to reattach severed limbs.

Rutledge Ellis-Behnke and colleagues worked from the nanoscale, using individual amino acids to create a self-assembling peptide. It looks exactly like water but when applied directly onto injured tissue it halts bleeding. This is the first time nanotechnology has been used to control bleeding, claims Rutledge.

…Once the liquid touches an internal organ, it forms a gel; the amino acids assemble into fibres and stop the bleed. The degradable peptide then breaks down into non-toxic products as the tissue heals.

via via CRNano

Animation: Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell

nature nanotechnology

Consider a world composed of nanometre-sized factories and self-repairing molecular machines where complex and responsive processes operate under exquisite control; where translational and rotational movement is directed with precision; a nano-world fuelled by chemical and light energy. What images come to mind? The fantastical universes described in the science fiction of Asimov and his contemporaries? To a scientist, perhaps the ’simple’ cell springs more easily to mind with its intricate arrangement of organelles and enzymatic systems fuelled by solar energy (as in photosynthetic systems) or by the chemical energy stored in the molecular bonds of nucleotide triphosphates (for example, ATP). Understanding and harnessing such phenomenal biological systems provides a strong incentive to design active nanostructures that can operate as molecular machines, and although our current efforts to control motion at the molecular level may appear awkward compared with these natural systems, it should not be forgotten that nature has had a 4.5 billion year head start.

Biological motors convert chemical energy to effect stepwise linear or rotary motion, and are essential in controlling and performing a wide variety of biological functions. Linear motor proteins are central to many biological processes including muscle contraction, intracellular transport and signal transduction, and ATP synthase, a genuine molecular rotary motor, is involved in the synthesis and hydrolysis of ATP. Other fascinating examples include membrane translocation proteins, the flagella motor that enables bacterial movement and proteins that can entrap and release guests through chemomechanical motion In recent years the development of biomolecular motors (and natural–synthetic hybrid systems) towards the construction of sensors, actuators and transporters has seen tremendous progress. Biological motors are important components in the fabrication of dynamic smart materials, and semi-synthetic DNA-based structures have been explored in building a variety of mechanical motor-like functions.

…The exquisite solutions nature has found to control molecular motion, evident in the fascinating biological linear and rotary motors, has served as a major source of inspiration for scientists to conceptualize, design and build — using a bottom-up approach — entirely synthetic molecular machines. The desire, ultimately, to construct and control molecular machines, fuels one of the great endeavours of contemporary science. The first primitive artificial molecular motors have been constructed and it has been demonstrated that energy consumption can be used to induce controlled and unidirectional motion. Linear and rotary molecular motors have been anchored to surfaces without loss of function — a significant step towards future nanomachines and devices. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated unequivocally that both linear and rotary motors can perform work and can move objects. However, although the first applications of molecular motors to the control of other functions have been realized, the whole field is still very much in its infancy and offers ample opportunity in the design of nanomechanical devices.

(Credit: Ntnl Academy Sciences)

via SciAm

At long last researchers have teleported the information stored in a beam of light into a cloud of atoms, which is about as close to getting beamed up by Scotty as we’re likely to come in the foreseeable future. More practically, the demonstration is key to eventually harnessing quantum effects for hyperpowerful computing or ultrasecure encryption systems.

Quantum computers or cryptography networks would take advantage of entanglement, in which two distant particles share a complementary quantum state. In some conceptions of these devices, quantum states that act as units of information would have to be transferred from one group of atoms to another in the form of light. Because measuring any quantum state destroys it, that information cannot simply be measured and copied. Researchers have long known that this obstacle can be finessed by a process called teleportation, but they had only demonstrated this method between light beams or between atoms.

(Credit: METTE HØST, Niels Bohr Institute)