Quest for New Cancer Treatment crosses Milestone: Therapy excels in pilot clinical trials

Naomi Halas (left) and Jennifer West at Houston’s 2012 Art Car Parade. Rice’s parade entry honored the engineering researchers for their invention of AuroLase Therapy, a cancer treatment that uses gold to destroy cancer without damaging healthy tissue. (Photo by Mike Williams/Rice University)

A cancer therapy invented at Rice University has crossed a milestone in clinical trials, a major development in a decades long quest to develop a treatment that destroys tumors without the debilitating side effects of chemotherapy, invasive surgery and radiation.

13 of the first 15 prostate cancer patients treated in a clinical trial of the nanoparticle-based, focal therapy showed no detectable signs of cancer a year after treatment, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings...

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Mosquito incognito: Could Graphene-lined Clothing help Prevent Mosquito Bites?

Mosquitos in an experiment
Researchers created an experimental setup to see if graphene could prevent mosquito bites.

A new study shows that graphene sheets can block the signals mosquitoes use to identify a blood meal, potentially enabling a new chemical-free approach to mosquito bite prevention. In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers showed that multilayer graphene can provide a two-fold defense against mosquito bites. The ultra-thin yet strong material acts as a barrier that mosquitoes are unable to bite through. At the same time, experiments showed that graphene also blocks chemical signals mosquitoes use to sense that a blood meal is near, blunting their urge to bite in the first place...

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Astrophysicists link Brightening of Pulsar Wind Nebula to Pulsar Spin-down Rate Transition

An illustration of the pulsar and pulsar wind nebula (PWN) system (not to scale). The relativistic wind from the central pulsar is terminated by a shock at a radius of about one light-year and starts to radiate. The typical size of a PWN is a few light-years. The image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy shown in the lower left was taken by YE Ziyi . Credit: Institute of High Energy Physics

Astrophysicists have discovered that the pulsar wind nebula (PWN) surrounding the famous pulsar B0540-69 brightened gradually after the pulsar experienced a sudden spin-down rate transition (SRT)...

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Bioprinting Complex Living Tissue in just a Few Seconds

Hollow mouse pulmonary artery model © Alain Herzog / 2019 EPFL
. Volumetric Bioprinting of Complex Living‐Tissue Constructs within Seconds. Advanced Materials, 2019; 1904209 DOI: 10.1002/adma.201904209

Researchers have developed an extremely fast optical method for sculpting complex shapes in stem-cell-laden hydrogels and then vascularizing the resulting tissue. Their groundbreaking technique stands to change the field of tissue engineering.

Tissue engineers create artificial organs and tissues that can be used to develop and test new drugs, repair damaged tissue and even replace entire organs in the human body. However, current fabrication methods limit their ability to produce free-form shapes and achieve high cell viability.

Researchers at the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD), in EPFL’s School of Engineering, working wi...

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