Publisher Health

Women who eat bananas, avocados and salmon could reduce the negative effects of salt in the diet, according to a study published today in European Heart Journal, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1 The study found that potassium-rich diets were associated with lower blood pressure, particularly in women with high salt intake.
“It is well known that high salt consumption is associated with elevated blood pressure and a raised risk of heart attacks and strokes,” said study author Professor Liffert Vogt of Amsterdam University Medical Centers, the Netherlands. “Health advice has focused on limiting salt intake but this is difficult to achieve when our diets include processed foods. Potassium helps the body excrete more sodium in the urine. In our study, dietary potassium was linked with the greatest health gains in women.”
The study included 24,963 participants (11,267 men and 13,696 women) of the EPIC-Norfolk study, which recruited 40 to 79 year olds from general practices in Norfolk, UK, between 1993 and 1997. The average age was 59 years for men and 58 years for women. Participants completed a questionnaire on lifestyle habits, blood pressure was measured, and a urine sample was collected. Urinary sodium and potassium were used to estimate dietary intake. Participants were divided into tertiles according to sodium intake (low/medium/high) and potassium intake (low/medium/high).
The researchers analysed the association between potassium intake and blood pressure after adjusting for age, sex and sodium intake. Potassium consumption (in grams per day) was associated with blood pressure in women — as intake went up, blood pressure went down. When the association was analysed according to sodium intake (low/medium/high), the relationship between potassium and blood pressure was only observed in women with high sodium intake, where every 1 gram increase in daily potassium was associated with a 2.4 mmHg lower systolic blood pressure. In men, there was no association between potassium and blood pressure.
During a median follow-up of 19.5 years, 13,596 (55%) participants were hospitalised or died due to cardiovascular disease. The researchers analysed the association between potassium intake and cardiovascular events after adjusting for age, sex, body mass index, sodium intake, use of lipid lowering drugs, smoking, alcohol intake, diabetes and prior heart attack or stroke. In the overall cohort, people in the highest tertile of potassium intake had a 13% lower risk of cardiovascular events compared to those in the lowest tertile. When men and women were analysed separately, the corresponding risk reductions were 7% and 11%, respectively. The amount of salt in the diet did not influence the relationship between potassium and cardiovascular events in men or women.
Professor Vogt said: “The results suggest that potassium helps preserve heart health, but that women benefit more than men. The relationship between potassium and cardiovascular events was the same regardless of salt intake, suggesting that potassium has other ways of protecting the heart on top of increasing sodium excretion.”
The World Health Organization recommends that adults consume at least 3.5 grams of potassium and less than 2 grams of sodium (5 grams of salt) per day.2 High potassium foods include vegetables, fruit, nuts, beans, dairy products and fish. For example, a 115 gram banana has 375 mg of potassium, 154 grams of cooked salmon has 780 mg, a 136 gram potato has 500 mg, and 1 cup of milk has 375 mg.
Professor Vogt concluded: “Our findings indicate that a heart healthy diet goes beyond limiting salt to boosting potassium content. Food companies can help by swapping standard sodium-based salt for a potassium salt alternative in processed foods. On top of that, we should all prioritise fresh, unprocessed foods since they are both rich in potassium and low in salt.”
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A man who lives in Rockland County was infected by someone who received the oral polio vaccine, which is no longer used in the United States, officials said.A case of polio has been identified in an unvaccinated adult man in Rockland County, officials said.The New York State Department of Health and its Rockland County counterpart confirmed that the infection was transmitted from someone who received the oral polio vaccine, which has not been administered in the United States since 2000. Officials said in a news release that the virus may have originated outside the United States, where the oral vaccine is still administered.“I want to stress that this individual is no longer contagious,” said Ed Day, the Rockland County executive, in a news conference Thursday afternoon. “Our efforts now are focused on two issues: vaccinations and figuring out if anyone else has been impacted by this disease.”Those who are unvaccinated or haven’t completed their vaccination series should get vaccinated, officials said. The current polio case presents a very low risk to those who are already vaccinated against polio: Those who have had all three shots have close to 100 percent protection.The person’s symptoms began about a month ago, said Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, Rockland County’s health commissioner, at the news conference. The patient presented with “weakness and paralysis,” she said, and the department was notified on Monday about the confirmed case.The Progress Against PolioThe highly contagious virus was one of the most feared diseases until the 1950s, when the first vaccine was developed.A Multibillion-Dollar Effort: A partnership of national governments and health organizations has a plan to rid the world of polio by 2026, which is now endemic in just two countries.Major Obstacles: Two of the three strains of polio have been eliminated from the Earth. But new barriers to full eradication keep cropping up.Childhood Vaccinations Drop: A sharp decline in childhood vaccinations around the world during the coronavirus pandemic — including those for polio — could threaten the lives of millions of children.Remembering the Polio Era: For Americans of a certain generation, the rollout of the Covid shot evoked memories of receiving the polio vaccine.“We are now surveying the family and close contacts of this individual to assess the risk to the community,” Dr. Ruppert said. She did not share any additional information about the patient’s current state of health or prognosis.Although the health officials did not reveal the gender of the patient, local elected officials said he is a man from the Orthodox Jewish community. In 2018 and 2019, there was a measles outbreak in Rockland County concentrated among ultra-Orthodox Jewish people, whose vaccination rates have tended to be lower than the broader population. In that outbreak, more than 150 people were infected with the measles. The last case of polio in the United States was in 2013, in someone who brought the disease in from abroad. There has not been a case originating in the United States since 1979, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The disease was one of the most feared in the country until the 1950s, when the first vaccine was developed.Sixty percent of Rockland County’s 2-year-olds have received all three doses of the polio vaccine, according to state data — a considerably lower rate than the 80 percent rate in the rest of the state excluding New York City.To achieve herd immunity for polio, the target vaccination rate is 80 percent, according to the World Health Organization.Disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic depressed vaccination rates for routine immunizations for children around the globe and in the United States, according to some studies. Misinformation and mistrust related to Covid vaccines have also affected childhood vaccination rates, as more parents have expressed fears about long-established vaccines.Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that vaccine hesitancy could give vaccine-derived polio strains “an opportunity to cause damage” in a community that has large pockets of unvaccinated people.Polio is very contagious, the Health Department said in a news release. People can spread the disease even if they do not have symptoms, which can include fatigue, fever, headache, muscle pain and vomiting. Rarely, polio cases may result in paralysis or death.The oral vaccine is safe and effective and is still given in countries where vaccine access is more limited. However, people who receive the oral vaccine, which contains a weakened version of the virus, may shed the virus. The shedding feature was initially thought of as an advantage, Dr. Adalja said.“It mimics natural infection, and people shed the virus, the vaccine virus, and that spreads to other people, and then they get immunized that way,” he said. In very rare cases, the virus in the vaccine can mutate as it travels from person to person and lead to paralysis in someone who is not vaccinated, he said.The United States uses an injected polio vaccine that contains inactivated virus instead of live virus.Jesse McKinley

Published8 hours agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesA young adult in New York has become the first US resident in nearly a decade to contract polio, state health officials say.The unnamed patient in Rockland County is said no longer to be contagious, but has developed paralysis from the virus.Officials say the person was unvaccinated, and was probably exposed to an individual who received a vaccine that contains the weakened live virus.The last known US case of the highly contagious virus was recorded in 2013.What is polio and how can you protect yourself?Polio virus detected in London sewage samplesThe truth behind polio rumours spreading onlineOnce feared across the nation, the disease was largely eradicated by a national vaccination campaign that began in 1955.Annual cases quickly fell from fewer than 100 in the 1960s to fewer than 10 in the 1970s – and the US was declared polio-free by 1979.In the decades since, isolated cases of polio infection have been brought into the country by foreign travellers.Mostly affecting children, the virus causes muscle weakness and paralysis, and in the most serious cases permanent disability and death.Americans are typically vaccinated with a three- or four-dose regimen that begins at two months old. About 93% of toddlers have received at least three doses of the polio jab, according to vaccination data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.But whereas the US and other countries use jabs made with an inactivated version of the virus, some countries orally administer a vaccine that uses the virus in a weakened live form.That weakened virus may, in rare instances, mutate and risk a fresh outbreak.Like the patient in Rockland County, the last reported polio case in the US – a seven-month-old child who moved from India to the state of Texas in 2013 – was a vaccine-derived strain.The news has prompted local officials to schedule vaccination clinics in New York state for Friday and Monday.”We want shots in the arms of those who need it,” Rockland County health commissioner Dr Patricia Schnabel Ruppert said at a Thursday news conference.Polio is endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but has also recently been reported in other parts of the world.Health officials in the UK called on parents last month to vaccinate their children, warning that the virus had been found in London sewage samples.More on this storyWhat is polio and how can you protect yourself?23 JunePolio virus detected in London sewage samples22 JuneThe truth behind polio rumours spreading online25 June

The Apple TV+ series, based loosely on a memoir by Josh Sundquist, prioritized disability representation on both sides of the camera.Casting the right actor for a role often means finding someone who matches the character description in a script, but Josh Sundquist didn’t know if that was possible for his series “Best Foot Forward.”“It sounds silly in retrospect, but this was four years ago,” Sundquist recalled recently. “At the time, it simply didn’t occur to me it would even be possible to hire an amputee actor.”Sundquist was helping to cast a fictionalized version of his younger self, the lead role in “Best Foot Forward,” which debuts Friday on Apple TV+. Loosely based on Sundquist’s memoir, “Just Don’t Fall,” the series centers on a 12-year-old boy who is the only child at his school with a limb difference. Sundquist, who is an executive producer on the series, lost his left leg to bone cancer when he was 10.The character’s disability is at the core of “Best Foot Forward,” but Sundquist’s expectations were measured. “I just thought like, ‘Oh, of course we’re going to have to cast an able-bodied kid and have a body double,’” he said. “Because that was all I’d ever seen my whole life.”To Sundquist’s delight, the production company behind the show, Muse Entertainment, was intent on finding an actor who shared the character’s disability. After casting the newcomer Logan Marmino as the fictional Josh, Sundquist’s perspective on what was possible evolved dramatically.“By the time we got to where we were greenlit and we were starting to look for crew, I was fully converted to the importance of authentic representation both in front of and behind the camera,” he said.What happens in front of the camera often dominates the discourse around representation in entertainment. While the news media has in recent years paid some attention to the lack of opportunity for actors with disabilities, there is still plenty of room for progress.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 26 percent of American adults have a disability, but according to a GLAAD report released earlier this year, characters with disabilities, including children, constituted only 2.8 percent of series regulars across all scripted broadcast TV shows in the 2021-22 TV season. (The report did not take a comprehensive look at disability representation on cable and streaming services.) Earlier GLAAD research, from 2021, found that the majority of TV characters with disabilities are played by non-disabled actors.Even when disabled actors are cast, it often addresses only half of the problem, Sundquist noted. In many instances, if you were to turn the camera around, he said, “you would see that disability was only represented in one direction.”“I was fully converted to the importance of authentic representation both in front of and behind the camera,” said Josh Sundquist, left, with Marmino and Peyton Jackson on the set of “Best Foot Forward.” Monty Brinton/Apple TV+In making “Best Foot Forward,” Sundquist was determined to hire disabled people across the production, but finding crew members with disabilities was more challenging than he anticipated. When it comes to actors, “agents know that sometimes you want people with disabilities and they have those people already on file,” he said. But when the producers contacted unions and guilds that represent crew positions, he said, they found that most of them didn’t track which of their members have disabilities.So Sundquist resorted to putting call-outs on social media and connecting with disability advocacy groups like RespectAbility. “We’re not a staffing agency,” said Lauren Appelbaum, who runs RespectAbility’s Entertainment Lab, a workshop for professionals with disabilities working in TV and film. “We just found ourselves in this position where studios and individual productions are reaching out to us saying ‘We want help with this.’” Seven people who worked on “Best Foot Forward” were Lab alumni, she added.“Best Foot Forward” isn’t the first show to have include people with disabilities on both sides of the camera. Several shows over the past few years, including Sundance Now’s “This Close,” about two best friends who are deaf, and Netflix’s “Special,” a comedy about a gay man with cerebral palsy, were created by and starred people with disabilities. Appelbaum said “Best Foot Forward” builds on the groundwork laid by those shows.“What makes ‘Best Foot Forward’ really unique is the intentionality behind bringing in disabled crew,” she explained. “Crew across all levels, from production assistants to directors.”One of the show’s writers, Zach Anner, wrote previously for “Speechless,” an ABC series that ran from 2016-19 and was lauded for its realistic depiction of a teen who, like Anner, has cerebral palsy. Anner said there were only a few writers with a disability for “Speechless,” “and that was very novel at the time.” On “Best Foot Forward,” he said, “it was half the writers’ room.”“No one person felt responsible for representing an entire community,” Anner added. “It also freed us up to just be funny.”Unlike on many productions, the writers and crew with disabilities on “Best Foot Forward” weren’t tasked with also educating non-disabled collaborators and advocating accessibility. That was someone’s actual job. Kiah Amara served as the production accessibility coordinator, a relatively new role in Hollywood that is generally filled by disabled professionals who consult on onscreen authenticity and how to accommodate crew members with disabilities.The first step on set, Amara said, is to survey the crew and gauge how to make the production as accessible as possible. “I’ll list things out like: ‘Check the box: Would you like access to a sensory-friendly room?’” Amara said. “‘Do you need your scripts or documents in dark mode? Do you need a dyslexia-accessible font?’” Then comes crew training that covers disability-related language and how to create an inclusive space.“It’s not the disabled folks who need to learn anything,” Amara said. “It’s all the non-disabled folks who need to continue to be in this space of, like, ‘Here’s how to not be frightened of thinking that you’re going to mess up.’”Kiah Amara, right, with Marmino, served as the production’s accessibility coordinator. Apple TV+Amara found, when consulting on past productions, that the reluctance to hire disabled crew often stems from an assumption that doing so will cost excessive time and money. This pervasive belief can lead some crew members to hide their disabilities. “They may choose not to disclose it to anybody — it’s still very unsafe in the industry to be disabled,” Amara said.That was something Sundquist was conscious of when trying to recruit crew members with disabilities. “We were able to call and be like: ‘Hey, I heard you had some bad experiences on set. Sorry about that. We’re going to try to do better on our set. Can we persuade you to come on board?’”In doing so, the production frequently attracted “people whose résumés did not yet reflect their level of talent,” Sundquist said, who were then able to bring those things more in line by virtue of their credit on “Best Foot Forward.” He mentioned as an example Ashley Eakin, a limb-different director whose previous work had been limited mostly to short films. Eakin directed two episodes of “Best Foot Forward.”“By her coming into the show, then she gets into the Directors Guild, which makes it so much easier to find future directorial work,” Sundquist said.The production crew also included evidence of the untapped skills that can lie within people that others might overlook. One example was Marissa Erickson, a production assistant who was tasked with corralling and transporting the child actors from school to set. “In my hometown, Alameda, I usually work in a kindergarten as a teacher’s aide,” said Erickson, who added that she was excited to combine her previous production experience and her experience working with children.Several of the people who worked on “Best Foot Forward” previously trained at RespectAbility’s film and TV workshop, including, from left: Sam Zapiain, Marissa Erickson, Amara, Ashley Eakin and Tyler Hoog.Alex LeonErickson, who has Down syndrome, was one of the crew members recommended by Appelbaum at RespectAbility, having participated in the organization’s 2019 Entertainment Lab. Appelbaum recalled a workshop in which Erickson participated alongside executives from a major studio: “Marissa stood up and started talking about some of the work that she has done, and I saw an exec, like, their mouth just drop.” Appelbaum said Erickson’s work ethic and experience upended the executive’s expectations of someone with Down syndrome.“I think, in their mind, they were thinking, ‘Yeah of course we could hire someone who uses a wheelchair,’ but they weren’t thinking that they could hire someone with an intellectual or developmental disability,” Appelbaum said. “Marissa clearly proves that wrong.” Recently, Erickson was offered three production assistant jobs simultaneously. (She accepted a position on a Disney+ short film anthology series called “Launchpad.”)Appelbaum and others said that in order to increase disability representation on film and television sets, it was crucial for guilds and unions to survey their members for disabilities as well as for demographic information like race and gender. The Writers Guild of America does, and the Director’s Guild of America began soliciting information about disability status in member surveys in 2021. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (I.A.T.S.E.), the union that represents crew members like grips, cinematographers, costumers and makeup artists, voted last year to begin holding an annual census in an effort to boost diversity within its membership. But it is unclear whether it will include information about disabilities. (The I.A.T.S.E. did not respond to a request for comment.)“Without the data, it’s hard to get things to change,” Appelbaum said. “When you have the hard numbers, people are much more likely to want to change something.”Until then, Anner, the writer, is hopeful that “Best Foot Forward” might serve as an important step forward for hiring practices in Hollywood.“For me, it sort of put an end to that argument that you hear sometimes of people saying, ‘Oh, we looked for someone with a disability, we looked for a person of color, and we couldn’t find anyone,’” he said. “We can point to this and say, ‘No, there are plenty.’”

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis, remains the leading cause of infectious disease worldwide, affecting approximately a quarter of the globe’s population. Treatment of infections is problematic due to the emergence of drug-resistant strains; however, University of Oklahoma professor Helen Zgurskaya, an expert in antibiotic resistance, is leading research on new potential therapeutic treatments for the disease.
Zgurskaya, a George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, is the corresponding author of the article “Proton transfer activity of the reconstituted MmpL3 is modulated by substrate mimics and inhibitors,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This is one of the scariest infectious diseases affecting billions of people worldwide,” said Zgurskaya. “Like many other bacterial infections, it is becoming more resistant to antibiotics. Currently, the treatment requires a combination of antibiotics taken by patients for six months, but now imagine that the disease does not respond to the treatment. We are out of therapeutic options for this infection, and we need new drugs. The paper we published is focused on understanding how recently discovered new inhibitors kill the pathogen.”
The team of researchers, which included Casey Stevens, Ph.D., postdoctoral research associate Svitlana Babii and research assistant professor Jitender Mehla, studied MmpL3 transporter and its analogs that are important for the physiology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and antimycobacterial drug discovery. These transporters are critical for assembling the bacterial outer membrane that is needed for bacterial growth and resistance to antibiotics. In this study, researchers successfully purified and reconstituted MmpL3 and its analogs into artificial membranes. They also generated a series of substrate mimics and inhibitors specific to these transporters and analyzed their activities and properties.
Researchers found all reconstituted proteins facilitate proton translocation across membranes but studied MmpL3 analogs differ dramatically in their responses to pH and interactions with substrate mimics and indole-2-carboxamide inhibitors. Their results further suggest that some inhibitors abolish the transport activity of MmpL3 and its analogs by inhibition of proton translocation.
The study provides a biochemical foundation for understanding the mechanism of these transporters and their inhibition by small molecule compounds that will facilitate the development of novel effective antibiotics.
Zgurskaya expects the next step would be to use the methods and techniques the team developed to analyze other inhibitors to identify those that are most effective, which will hopefully then go into clinical trials.
For this research, the OU team collaborated with scientists from Colorado State University, Creighton University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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As the BA.5 omicron variant continues to spread, health experts are increasingly preparing for a future in which such COVID-19 variants emerge, surge and recede similar to seasonal flu. An important part of staying on top of these changes will be the ability to quickly monitor the virus at a “population scale,” an effort that will require accurate and ultra-fast testing.
To help meet this challenge, researchers from the School of Science at IUPUI are developing a new biosensor with the potential to achieve the speed and efficiency required for the future of COVID-19 testing.
The work was recently reported in Applied Material Interfaces, a journal of the American Chemical Society. It is led by Rajesh Sardar, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the School of Science, and Adrianna Masterson, a graduate student in Sardar’s lab at the time of the study.
“Everyone is chasing high-throughput testing; this type of high-speed analysis is essential to the future of the fight against COVID-19,” Sardar said. “There are many advantages to our technology in particular: It’s fast, efficient, accurate and unprecedentedly sensitive.”
In terms of speed, the COVID-19 test from Sardar’s lab can currently analyze samples from 96 individuals in under three hours, he said. In terms of efficiently, the system requires only 10 microliters of blood.
By comparison, a typical blood panel order by a primary-care physician collects 10 milliliters of blood — more than 1,000 times more.

A set of genes that promote sweet taste sensation is also crucial for protein management during fly development, according to a new study by Eugenia Piddini of the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, and colleagues, publishing July 21stin the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The finding expands the understanding of a key process in successful development, and suggests a connection between taste-related genes and disorders of protein aggregation.
Protein homeostasis, or proteostasis, is the set of processes that maintain cellular proteins in a functional state, and eliminate damaged proteins that cannot be repaired. Ribosomes are multi-protein molecular machines that synthesize proteins, and mutations in genes that encode ribosomal proteins not only impair protein synthesis but also disrupt proteostasis, leading to chronic proteotoxic stress. That stress, in turn, has a host of cellular consequences and results in delayed development and other irregularities.
To better understand the disorders caused by such disruption of proteostasis, the authors compared gene expression in normal versus ribosomal protein mutant flies during the pupal stage of development. Unexpectedly, they found that a group of genes encoding six gustatory (taste) receptors, called Gr64 genes, were upregulated in the mutant cells.
This finding was unexpected because the Gr64 receptors had previously been known to be present in adult fly neurons, where they help the animal taste sugars, fatty acids, and glycerol. In ribosomal protein mutant flies with just one (rather than two) working copies of the Gr64 genes, there was an increase in cell death via a process called apoptosis. Complete elimination of the Gr64 genes induced multiple morphological defects in the ribosomal mutants, but had little to no effect in cells with normal ribosomal proteins.
Cells bearing ribosomal protein mutants are at a disadvantage compared to normal cells, and are often eliminated in developing tissue where both occur. Mutants carrying only one set of Gr64 genes were even worse off, the authors found, losing out to normal cells at an even greater rate. When the level of Gr64 proteins was variably and quantitatively reduced, the team showed that the most direct effect of reduction was on the function of the proteasome and autophagosome, two different routes by which damaged proteins are removed and recycled.
The connection between promotion of proteostasis and the sense of taste is likely through the molecular mechanism of the Gr64 proteins, which regulate calcium flow; changes in calcium levels are used as a signal transducer in sensory cells, and also regulate multiple proteostatic processes, including both proteosome function and autophagy. Intriguingly, dysregulated and out-of-place gustatory and olfactory receptors have been detected in the affected brain tissue in several human diseases characterized by loss of protein homeostasis, including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
“Our work suggests that gustatory receptors play a previously unrecognized role in maintaining protein homeostasis during development in the fly,” Piddini said, “and points more generally toward the connection between calcium-modulating proteins and disorders of protein aggregation and proteotoxic stress.”
Piddini adds, “What I find truly fascinating about our findings is that they underscore the little we understand about how cells adapt to cope with proteotoxic stress. Our experimental strategy could be used further as a way to search and discover additional new proteostasis genes.”
Coauthor Michael Baumgartner concludes, “These findings emphasize an important theme in cell biology: context is everything. It’s easy to see the name ‘gustatory receptor’ and think that’s the end of the story, but evolution can and will repurpose almost anything if it ends up being advantageous. This highlights the possibility that the seemingly hyper-specialized gustatory receptors might be more flexible than previously appreciated.”
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Using nanoparticles to deliver cancer drugs offers a way to hit tumors with large doses of drugs while avoiding the harmful side effects that often come with chemotherapy. However, so far, only a handful of nanoparticle-based cancer drugs have been FDA-approved.
A new study from MIT and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard researchers may help to overcome some of the obstacles to the development of nanoparticle-based drugs. The team’s analysis of the interactions between 35 different types of nanoparticles and nearly 500 types of cancer cells revealed thousands of biological traits that influence whether those cells take up different types of nanoparticles.
The findings could help researchers better tailor their drug-delivery particles to specific types of cancer, or design new particles that take advantage of the biological features of particular types of cancer cells.
“We are excited by our findings because it is really just the beginning — we can use this approach to map out what types of nanoparticles are best to target certain cell types, from cancer to immune cells and other kinds of healthy and diseased organ cells. We are learning how surface chemistry and other material properties play a role in targeting,” says Paula Hammond, an MIT Institute Professor, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
Hammond is the senior author of the new study, which appears in Science. The paper’s lead authors are Natalie Boehnke, an MIT postdoc who will soon join the faculty at the University of Minnesota, and Joelle Straehla, the Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Clinical Investigator at the Koch Institute, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, and a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Cell-particle interactions
Hammond’s lab has previously developed many types of nanoparticles that can be used to deliver drugs to cells. Studies in her lab and others have shown that different types of cancer cells often respond differently to the same nanoparticles. Boehnke, who was studying ovarian cancer when she joined Hammond’s lab, and Straehla, who was studying brain cancer, also noticed this phenomenon in their studies.

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues elsewhere, describe a different way to build a COVID-19 vaccine, one that would, in theory, remain effective against new and emerging variants and could be taken as a pill, by inhalation or other delivery methods.
Their findings publish in the July 21, 2022 online issue of PLOS Pathogens.
The research involved building plasmids genetically altered to contain bits of genetic material specifically intended to target a vulnerability in the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s spike protein, a portion of the virus critical to binding and infecting cells. Plasmids are small, circular DNA molecules from bacteria that are physically separate from chromosomal DNA and can replicate independently. They can be used by scientists to transfer genetic material from one cell to another, after which the introduced genetic material can replicate in the receiving cell.
The approach, said senior author Maurizio Zanetti, MD, professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine and head of the Laboratory of Immunology at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, points to the possibility of a more durable, and more broadly effective, COVID-19 vaccine.
“The details are complicated, but the fundamentals are simple,” said Zanetti. “They are based on well-known and proven principles and methods.”
COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, such as those by Pfizer and Moderna, are the result of decades of previous research and development. The pandemic added new urgency, focus and resources. These vaccines promised a faster way to people, though not without significant challenges, such as the need of an ultralow temperature cold chain.