Studies in mice with otherwise fatal blood clots have shown that targeting a clot-busting drug to regions where blood flow is blocked restores circulation and increases survival with a much lower, safer dose of the drug.

Computational insights into a fundamental organic synthesis reaction may lead to the ability to design a catalyst for any desired reaction.

The directed, artificial evolution of genes for enzymes that produce nanoparticles of silicon dioxide and titanium dioxide produced semiconductor structures not seen in nature.

Nanotechnology combines an enzyme and a DNA molecule on the surface of gold nanoparticles to destroy hepatitis C virus in human cells and in a mouse model of disease.

A new online game allows players to design RNA molecules. The most promising designs are synthesized, and the players given real-world feedback on how well their designs worked.

Nanoparticles made from specific DNA and RNA strands, homogeneous in size, composition, and surface chemistry, proved superior to other nanoparticles in silencing gene expression in tumors in mouse experiments.

A forest of long DNA strands hanging at known positions from a thin gold foil may provide a method to detect hypothetical particles of dark matter, thought to compose 26% of the universe.

The demonstration that the process of DNA replication is more flexible than thought should make it easier to incorporate unusual amino acids into designed proteins, which might make it easier to design novel protein machines.

A new nanomaterial provides a three million-fold improvement in the sensitivity of common medical tests, potentially permitting earlier detection of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

Tryptophan residues introduced at various positions in a protein chain identify folding intermediates that are too short-lived to be structurally characterized otherwise.

A variety of protein cage structures have been constructed by designing specific protein domains to self-assemble as atomically precise protein building blocks in defined geometries.

A set of 310 short single-stranded DNA tiles, plus a few additional short sequences for the edges, has been used to form more than a hundred large, complex DNA objects.

Darpa has launched a “Living Foundries” program to bring an engineering perspective to synthetic biology to greatly accelerate progress through standardization and modularization.

Nancy K Mize, PhD, Scientist, Innovator, and CEO of GENOGEN Inc., will continue Foresight’s local Bay Area community events with a lecture “GENOGEN: Regenerating Skin for Life”. GENOGEN is developing products that activate resident skin stem cells to stimulate local areas of regeneration of skin naturally – the way children heal.

Nanoparticles targeted to cancer cells by antibodies cannot achieve enough specificity to kill drug-resistant cancer cells while sparing normal cells, but can achieve enough specificity to produce nanobubbles only in cancer cells, so the drug only enters cancer cells.

Recent interview touches on new Foresight programs and issues in nanotechnology development

Gold nanostars targeted to a protein over-expressed in most cancer cells are shuttled by that protein directly to the cancer cell nucleus where illumination with a laser light releases a drug that deforms the nucleus and kills the cell.

Clinical trials in patients with advanced or metastatic tumors using targeted nanoparticles to deliver a standard chemotherapeutic drug showed tumor shrinkage, even in the case of cancers for which that drug is not normally effective.

A set of rationally engineered transcriptional regulators for yeast will make it easier to build complex molecular machine systems in yeast, some of which may become useful additions to pathway technologies for atomically precise manufacturing and productive nanosystems.

A combination of a molecular motor protein and a nanopore protein has been harnessed for rapidly sequencing single DNA molecules.