Understanding Cancer
Drug Efficacy and Development of the Oncosimulator “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Ravi Radhakrishnan. “We don’t even know what we are looking for.” What he wants to know sounds simple: why a drug therapy for non-small cell lung cancer and glioblastoma (cancer of the brain) works in only about 5 […]
Translational Research
From Bench to Bedside and Back Again in Pediatric Brain Injury Susan Margulies and her colleagues used to study a brain or lung injury in vivo in the lab and only record what happened. If an animal stopped breathing, they observed. If its blood pressure fell, they waited. But clinicians who are integral members of […]
Soul of Invention: Brian Litt’s Quest to Bring Moore’s Law to Therapeutic Devices
Though his work promises to transform medical care for the brain and heart, Brian Litt is motivated by a less scientific realm: his soul. Memories of patients with epilepsy whose lives were tragically altered by uncontrollable and unpredictable seizures drive Litt’s determination to find new therapeutics. Recalling, for example, the mother who drowned in the […]
Turning Light into Electrical Current
Material scientists at the Nano/Bio Interface Center have demonstrated the transduction of optical radiation to electrical current in a molecular circuit. The system, an array of nano-sized molecules of gold, responds to electromagnetic waves by creating surface plasmons that induce and project electrical current across molecules, similar to that of photovoltaic solar cells. Dawn Bonnell, […]
Molecules that detect, monitor, and help to treat disease
On the third floor of Skirkanich Hall, Andrew Tsourkas is creating new magnetic nanoparticles that may revolutionize the detection of early cancer cells. By “early,” he means when molecular changes in the disease are occurring, but before any anatomical changes are visible. Detecting Cancer with Nanoparticles Today’s magnetic resonance imaging scans typically only reveal tumors […]
Ritesh Agarwal: Accelerating Advances in Electronic Memory
The race to create next-generation computer memory devices that are off-the-charts smaller, faster and more stable than current memory technologies has entered promising new territory thanks to recent innovations in Ritesh Agarwal’s lab. Agarwal, Assistant Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, has pioneered a technique for fabricating self-assembled nanowires. His breakthrough was published in October […]
Producing Nanoscale Patterns, In One Step
Shu Yang’s latest discovery in the field of nanoscale polymer science may be her most significant yet. It was also something of an accident. Yang, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, initially set out with her students to study the intrinsic properties of a flexible polymer membrane called polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS. The silicone […]