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High magnification micrograph of Crohn’s disease. Biopsy of esophagus. H&E stain. Credit: Nephron/Wikipedia

A single protein from a worm parasite may one day offer new therapeutic options for treating inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s or Ulcerative Colitis, that avoid the potentially serious side effects of current immunosuppressant medications. The study, published today in Nature Communications, demonstrates the discovery of a distinct new worm protein which mimics a cytokine found in humans, known as transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β). The newly-discovered protein switches off inflammation by inducing “regulatory T cells”, the body’s own means of dampening excessive reactivity.

The “Hygiene Hypothesis” suggests that some bugs and parasites may protect you from an overly-rea...

Heat transport through pillared graphene could be made faster by manipulating the junctions between sheets of graphene and the nanotubes that connect them, according to Rice University researchers. Credit: Lei Tao/Rice University

3D carbon nanostructures’ thermal transport abilities. Pillared graphene would transfer heat better if the theoretical material had a few asymmetric junctions that caused wrinkles, according to Rice University engineers. Materials scientist Rouzbeh Shahsavari and alumnus Navid Sakhavand first built atom-level computer models of pillared graphene – sheets of graphene connected by covalently bonded carbon nanotubes – to discover their strength and electrical properties as well as their thermal conductivity.

In a new study, they found that manipulating the joints bet...

Curative Multicycle Radioimmunotherapy Monitored by Quantitative SPECT/CT-Based Theranostics, Using Bispecific Antibody Pretargeting Strategy in Colorectal Cancer. Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 2017; 58 (11): 1735 DOI: 10.2967/jnumed.117.193250

Novel 3-step pretargeted radioimmunotherapy offers safe, effective treatment. In this study with a mouse model, researchers achieved a 100% cure rate -without any treatment-related toxic effects. Until now, radioimmunotherapy (targeted therapy) of solid tumors using antibody-targeted radionuclides has had limited therapeutic success. “This research is novel because of the benchmarks reached by the treatment regimen, in terms of curative tumor doses, with non-toxic secondary radiation to the body’s normal tissues,” explains Steven M...

Dendritic fibrous nanosilica (DFNS), also known as KCC-1, has a unique fibrous morphology and a high surface area with improved accessibility to the internal surface, tunable pore size and volume, controllable particle size, which made it useful in the fields of energy, environment, and health. Credit: Ayan Maity, Vivek Polshettiwar

Dendritic fibrous nanosilica (DFNS) attracted a great deal of attention in a large number of scientific disciplines such as catalysis, solar energy harvesting (photocatalysis, solar cells, etc...