Category Health/Medical

The atomic structure of influenza A virus nucleoprotein. Credit: Jane Tao/Rice University

A new type of vaccine may allow for a new approach to generating live virus vaccines which could conceivably be adapted to any type of virus. Published in the journal Science, the Peking University team outlines how they modified an influenza virus causing it to incite an immune response without a risk of infection.

Most vaccines today contain viruses that have been killed or weakened to the point that they are unlikely to cause an infection when injected into a healthy patient. Such vaccines work by causing the immune system to target similar viruses if found in the body before they have a chance to multiply, causing an infection...

Graphic depicts the tethered enzymes and free-floating enzymes. Credit: Cornell University

Just like workers in a factory, enzymes can create a final product more efficiently if they are stuck together in one place and pass the raw material from enzyme to enzyme, assembly line-style. That’s according to scientists at Cornell’s Baker Institute for Animal Health, the first team to recreate a 10-step biological pathway with all the enzymes tethered to nanoparticles. They were inspired to study how nanoparticles could gain biological functions through the enzymes that drive sperm tails, which turn sugar into lactate and energy so quickly that sperm can speed along at 5 body lengths/s

“Sperm have a highly efficient energy-producing system,” said Chinatsu Mukai, a postdoctoral research associate...

This diagram describes how the device Dr. Hood helped to develop is implanted into a cancerous tumor. Credit: Lyle Hood/UTSA

Medicine diffusion capsule could locally treat multiple ailments and diseases over several weeks. This new device that could revolutionize the delivery of medicine. “The problem with most drug-delivery systems is that you have a specific minimum dosage of medicine that you need to take for it to be effective,” Hood said. “There’s also a limit to how much of the drug can be present in your system so that it doesn’t make you sick.”

As a result of these limitations, a person who needs frequent doses of a specific medicine is required to take a pill every day or visit a doctor for injections. Hood’s creation negates the need for either of these approaches...

The highly sensitive magnetic field sensor. (Photograph: ETH Zurich / Peter Rüegg)

Researchers have succeeded in measuring tiny changes in strong magnetic fields with unprecedented precision. In their experiments, the scientists magnetised a water droplet inside an MRI scanner, a device that is used for medical imaging. They were able to detect even the tiniest variations of the magnetic field strength within the droplet. These changes were up to a trillion times smaller than the 7 tesla field strength of the MRI scanner used in the experiment.

“Until now, it was possible only to measure such small variations in weak magnetic fields,” says Klaas Prüssmann, Professor of Bioimaging at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich...