Foresight Presents: “GENOGEN: Regenerating Skin for Life“
Dr. Nancy Mize
Date/Time: Thursday, May 31, 2012, 6:30pm in PDT
Drinks/Dinner: 6:30pm, Talk: 7:30pm
RSVP: $40 via http://www.paypal.com/ to foresight@foresight.org
Location: Ristorante Don Giovanni
235 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA 94041

GENOGEN is developing products that activate resident skin stem cells to stimulate local areas of regeneration of skin naturally – the way children heal. GENOGEN’s first product is a re-purposed agent, currently FDA and EU approved and marketed, and used in humans for over 5 years, with significant utility in the aesthetics sector for treatment of aging skin. Localized skin delivery of the stem cell activator with a growth matrix activates local regeneration and repair in situ – with no stem cell isolation, no stem cell prep, no surgery, extraction or re-implantation – resulting in accelerated healing and young skin.

NANCY K MIZE, PhD, Scientist, Innovator, and CEO of GENOGEN Inc., has researched stem cell activators since 2000, and is the co-inventor on 11 issued patents. Dr. Mize served as the BioMarker Expert for Personalized Medicine at Pacific BioDevelopment, the Director of Protein Bioinformatics at Hyseq/Nuvelo, and Scientist, Drug Delivery Technologies at Alza Corporation. Dr. Mize holds a PhD from UCSF in Cell Biology in the department of Human Physiology, BS from UC Berkeley and has completed Postdoctoral studies at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, and Genentech.

The new double-walled silicon nanotube anode is made by a clever four-step process: Polymer nanofibers (green) are made, then heated (with, and then without, air) until they are reduced to carbon (black). Silicon (light blue) is coated over the outside of the carbon fibers. Finally, heating in air drives off the carbon and creates the tube as well as the clamping oxide layer (red). (Image courtesy Hui Wu, Stanford, and Yi Cui)

A clever new method for making hollow silicon nanostructures produces a battery anode that is not quickly destroyed by the stress of repeated charging and discharging. A hat tip to PhysOrd.com for reprinting this SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory news release written by Mike Ross “New nanostructure for batteries keeps going and going“:

For more than a decade, scientists have tried to improve lithium-based batteries by replacing the graphite in one terminal with silicon, which can store 10 times more charge. But after just a few charge/discharge cycles, the silicon structure would crack and crumble, rendering the battery useless.

Now a team led by materials scientist Yi Cui of Stanford and SLAC has found a solution: a cleverly designed double-walled nanostructure that lasts more than 6,000 cycles, far more than needed by electric vehicles or mobile electronics.

“This is a very exciting development toward our goal of creating smaller, lighter and longer-lasting batteries than are available today,” Cui said. The results were published March 25 in Nature Nanotechnology [abstract].

Lithium-ion batteries are widely used to power devices from electric vehicles to portable electronics because they can store a relatively large amount of energy in a relatively lightweight package. The battery works by controlling the flow of lithium ions through a fluid electrolyte between its two terminals, called the anode and cathode.

The promise – and peril – of using silicon as the anode in these batteries comes from the way the lithium ions bond with the anode during the charging cycle. Up to four lithium ions bind to each of the atoms in a silicon anode – compared to just one for every six carbon atoms in today’s graphite anode – which allows it to store much more charge.

However, it also swells the anode to as much as four times its initial volume. What’s more, some of the electrolyte reacts with the silicon, coating it and inhibiting further charging. When lithium flows out of the anode during discharge, the anode shrinks back to its original size and the coating cracks, exposing fresh silicon to the electrolyte.

Within just a few cycles, the strain of expansion and contraction, combined with the electrolyte attack, destroys the anode through a process called “decrepitation.”

Over the past five years, Cui’s group has progressively improved the durability of silicon anodes by making them out of nanowires and then hollow silicon nanoparticles. His latest design consists of a double-walled silicon nanotube coated with a thin layer of silicon oxide, a very tough ceramic material.

This strong outer layer keeps the outside wall of the nanotube from expanding, so it stays intact. Instead, the silicon swells harmlessly into the hollow interior, which is also too small for electrolyte molecules to enter. After the first charging cycle, it operates for more than 6,000 cycles with 85 percent capacity remaining.

Cui said future research is aimed at simplifying the process for making the double-wall silicon nanotubes. Others in his group are developing new high-performance cathodes to combine with the new anode to form a battery with five times the performance of today’s lithium-ion technology.

In 2008, Cui founded a company, Amprius, which licensed rights to Stanford’s patents for his silicon nanowire anode technology. Its near-term goal is to produce a battery with double the energy density of today’s lithium-ion batteries.

With a clever new method to produce novel nanostructures, a material like silicon, which has been very well studied for half a century as the basis for an important technology, can fill unexpected new roles. A few decades from now, when atomically precise manufacturing provides a general method for making arbitrarily complex nanostructures, we can expect many more surprising developments.
—James Lewis, PhD

Dmitri Lapotko. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

In yet another wrinkle in the rapidly developing area of using nanotechnology to enhance cancer chemotherapy, targeted nanoparticles were used to produce “nanobubbles” inside cancer cells instead of to deliver a chemotherapy drug to the cancer cells. In laboratory tests, the nanobubbles proved to be much more efficient in specifically killing cancer cells while sparing neighboring healthy cells. A hat tip to ScienceDaily for reprinting this Rice University news release with its embedded video “‘Nanobubbles’ plus chemotherapy equals single-cell cancer targeting“:

Using light-harvesting nanoparticles to convert laser energy into “plasmonic nanobubbles,” researchers at Rice University, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) are developing new methods to inject drugs and genetic payloads directly into cancer cells. In tests on drug-resistant cancer cells, the researchers found that delivering chemotherapy drugs with nanobubbles was up to 30 times more deadly to cancer cells than traditional drug treatment and required less than one-tenth the clinical dose.

“We are delivering cancer drugs or other genetic cargo at the single-cell level,” said Rice’s Dmitri Lapotko, a biologist and physicist whose plasmonic nanobubble technique is the subject of four new peer-reviewed studies, including one due later this month in the journal Biomaterials and another published April 3 in the journal PLoS ONE [Open Access research article]. “By avoiding healthy cells and delivering the drugs directly inside cancer cells, we can simultaneously increase drug efficacy while lowering the dosage,” he said. …

Rice’s nanobubbles are not nanoparticles; rather, they are short-lived events. The nanobubbles are tiny pockets of air and water vapor that are created when laser light strikes a cluster of nanoparticles and is converted instantly into heat. The bubbles form just below the surface of cancer cells. As the bubbles expand and burst, they briefly open small holes in the surface of the cells and allow cancer drugs to rush inside. The same technique can be used to deliver gene therapies and other therapeutic payloads directly into cells.

This method, which has yet to be tested in animals, will require more research before it might be ready for human testing, said Lapotko, faculty fellow in biochemistry and cell biology and in physics and astronomy at Rice. …

To form the nanobubbles, the researchers must first get the gold nanoclusters inside the cancer cells. The scientists do this by tagging individual gold nanoparticles with an antibody that binds to the surface of the cancer cell. Cells ingest the gold nanoparticles and sequester them together in tiny pockets just below their surfaces.

While a few gold nanoparticles are taken up by healthy cells, the cancer cells take up far more, and the selectivity of the procedure owes to the fact that the minimum threshold of laser energy needed to form a nanobubble in a cancer cell is too low to form a nanobubble in a healthy cell

A given molecular targeting strategy can only achieve a certain ratio of entering cancer cells to entering healthy cells. As the cancer evolves to become more resistant to the drug, that ratio becomes inadequate to kill cancer cells while sparing healthy cells. But because the laser pulse can be precisely controlled, the ratio of gold nanoparticles in cancer cells to the amount in healthy cells is sufficient to ensure that nanobubbles only form in cancer cells, so the drug can only enter the cancer cells. If this approach works as well in an animal model as it does in laboratory cell cultures, it might develop into an effective therapy to kill drug-resistant tumor cells.
—James Lewis, PhD

foresight’s Director of Development and Outreach Desiree D. Dudley was featured recently on Singularity Hub talking about Foresight and nanotechnology. Topics addressed include Foresight’s series of dinner lectures, its upcoming technical conference, a new youth outreach program, Foresight’s relationship with the general futurist community, and the balance of emphasis on near-term nanotechnology and advanced molecular manufacturing. The interview led to a discussion of the role of synthetic biology in the development of nanotechnology, and the interfaces between the materials science and the biotechnology aspects of nanotechnology. The video is available on YouTube.
—James Lewis, PhD

Rice University graduate student Daniel Hashim burns oil out of a sponge-like material made of carbon nanotubes and a dash of boron. The sponge can soak up oil, which can then be burned off and the sponge reused. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

A new technique that dopes carbon nanotubes with boron atoms provides new evidence of the enormous practical utility of improving methods to control the structure of matter at the nanometer scale, even if the control is not yet atomically precise. A hat tip to ScienceDaily for reprinting this Rice University news release written by Mike Williams “Nanosponges soak up oil again and again” (includes video):

Researchers at Rice University and Penn State University have discovered that adding a dash of boron to carbon while creating nanotubes turns them into solid, spongy, reusable blocks that have an astounding ability to absorb oil spilled in water.

That’s one of a range of potential innovations for the material created in a single step. The team found for the first time that boron puts kinks and elbows into the nanotubes as they grow and promotes the formation of covalent bonds, which give the sponges their robust qualities.

The researchers, who collaborated with peers in labs around the nation and in Spain, Belgium and Japan, revealed their discovery in Nature’s online open-access journal Scientific Reports ["Covalently bonded three-dimensional carbon nanotube solids via boron induced nanojunctions"].

Lead author Daniel Hashim, a graduate student in the Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan, said the blocks are both superhydrophobic (they hate water, so they float really well) and oleophilic (they love oil). The nanosponges, which are more than 99 percent air, also conduct electricity and can easily be manipulated with magnets.

To demonstrate, Hashim dropped the sponge into a dish of water with used motor oil floating on top. The sponge soaked it up. He then put a match to the material, burned off the oil and returned the sponge to the water to absorb more. The robust sponge can be used repeatedly and stands up to abuse; he said a sample remained elastic after about 10,000 compressions in the lab. The sponge can also store the oil for later retrieval, he said.

“These samples can be made pretty large and can be easily scaled up,” said Hashim, holding a half-inch square block of billions of nanotubes. “They’re super-low density, so the available volume is large. That’s why the uptake of oil can be so high.” He said the sponges described in the paper can absorb more than a hundred times their weight in oil.

Ajayan, Rice’s Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry, said multiwalled carbon nanotubes grown on a substrate via chemical vapor deposition usually stand up straight without any real connections to their neighbors. But the boron-introduced defects induced the nanotubes to bond at the atomic level, which tangled them into a complex network. Nanotube sponges with oil-absorbing potential have been made before, but this is the first time the covalent junctions between nanotubes in such solids have been convincingly demonstrated, he said.

“The interactions happen as they grow, and the material comes out of the furnace as a solid,” Ajayan said. “People have made nanotube solids via post-growth processing but without proper covalent connections. The advantage here is that the material is directly created during growth and comes out as a cross-linked porous network.

“It’s easy for us to make nano building blocks, but getting to the macroscale has been tough,” he said. “The nanotubes have to connect either through some clever way of creating topological defects, or they have to be welded together.” …

In this case, a scaleable method to introduce a few boron atoms while growing carbon nanotubes produces a novel molecular architecture with amazing and useful properties. Whether or not this specific technique adds to the toolkit that will eventually produce atomically precise manufacturing, it contributes a product that increases incentives for developing ever more precise methods of controlling the structure of matter at the nanometer scale.
—James Lewis, PhD

This illustration shows lithium atoms (red) adhered to a graphene lattice that will produce electricity when bent, squeezed or twisted. Conversely, the graphene will deform when an electric field is applied, opening new possibilities in nanotechnology. Illustration: Mitchell Ong, Stanford School of Engineering

Bulk piezoelectric materials are already used for atomically precise nanopositioning to position the tips of scanning probe microscopes. Would there be any advantages to engineered control of piezoelectrical properties in a two-dimensional material? Currently piezoelectric properties of materials cannot be engineered—it is a property only available in certain 3D crystals. Now calculations have demonstrated that graphene can be made piezoelectric by adsorbing atoms on one surface. A hat tip to Physorg.com for reprinting this Stanford University news release written by Andrew Myers “Straintronics: Engineers create piezoelectric graphene“:

Graphene is a wonder material. It is a one-hundred-times-better conductor of electricity than silicon. It is stronger than diamond. And, at just one atom thick, it is so thin as to be essentially a two-dimensional material. Such promising physics have made graphene the most studied substance of the last decade, particularly in nanotechnology. In 2010, the researchers who first isolated it shared the Nobel Prize.

Yet, while graphene is many things, it is not piezoelectric. Piezoelectricity is the property of some materials to produce electric charge when bent, squeezed or twisted. Perhaps more importantly, piezoelectricity is reversible. When an electric field is applied, piezoelectric materials change shape, yielding a remarkable level of engineering control.

Piezoelectrics have found application in countless devices from watches, radios and ultrasound to the push-button starters on propane grills, but these uses all require relatively large, three-dimensional quantities of piezoelectric materials.

Now, in a paper published in the journal ACS Nano [abstract], two materials engineers at Stanford have described how they have engineered piezoelectrics into graphene, extending for the first time such fine physical control to the nanoscale.

“The physical deformations we can create are directly proportional to the electrical field applied. This represents a fundamentally new way to control electronics at the nanoscale,” said Evan Reed, head of the Materials Computation and Theory Group at Stanford and senior author of the study.

This phenomenon brings new dimension to the concept of ‘straintronics,’ he said, because of the way the electrical field strains—or deforms—the lattice of carbon, causing it to change shape in predictable ways.

“Piezoelectric graphene could provide an unparalleled degree of electrical, optical or mechanical control for applications ranging from touchscreens to nanoscale transistors,” said Mitchell Ong, a post-doctoral scholar in Reed’s lab and first author of the paper.

Using a sophisticated modeling application running on high-performance supercomputers, the engineers simulated the deposition of atoms on one side of a graphene lattice — a process known as doping — and measured the piezoelectric effect.

They modeled graphene doped with lithium, hydrogen, potassium and fluorine, as well as combinations of hydrogen and fluorine and lithium and fluorine on either side of the lattice. Doping just one side of the graphene, or doping both sides with different atoms, is key to the process as it breaks graphene’s perfect physical symmetry, which otherwise cancels the piezoelectric effect.

The results surprised both engineers.

“We thought the piezoelectric effect would be present, but relatively small. Yet, we were able to achieve piezoelectric levels comparable to traditional three-dimensional materials,” said Reed. “It was pretty significant.”

The researchers were further able to fine tune the effect by pattern doping the graphene—selectively placing atoms in specific sections and not others.

“We call it designer piezoelectricity because it allows us to strategically control where, when and how much the graphene is deformed by an applied electrical field with promising implications for engineering,” said Ong.

While the results in creating piezoelectric graphene are encouraging, the researchers believe that their technique might further be used to engineer piezoelectricity in nanotubes and other nanomaterials with applications ranging from electronics, photonics, and energy harvesting to chemical sensing and high-frequency acoustics.

“We’re already looking at new piezoelectric devices based on other 2D and low-dimensional materials, hoping they might open new and dramatic possibilities in nanotechnology,” said Reed.

Could piezoelectric graphene be used with, for example, DNA origami scaffolding to position molecular tools to execute programmed actions? To hear the researchers discussing their work and plans, including possible application to nanomechanical systems, an ACS Nano podcast is available.
—James Lewis, PhD

One of the most promising current applications of nanotechnology to medicine is the use of nanoparticles to specifically target drug therapy to cancer cells. A variety of different types of nanoparticles using different drug delivery strategies are being investigated, including one type using biopolymers that we described here last week. Another report shows that a very different type of nanoparticle, composed of gold, works by delivering a drug directly to the nucleus of cancer cells. A hat tip to ScienceDaily for reprinting this news release from Northwestern University written by Megan Fellman “Tiny hitchhikers attack cancer cells: Gold nanostars first to deliver drug directly to cancer cell nucleus“:

Nanotechnology offers powerful new possibilities for targeted cancer therapies, but the design challenges are many. Northwestern University scientists now are the first to develop a simple but specialized nanoparticle that can deliver a drug directly to a cancer cell’s nucleus — an important feature for effective treatment.

They also are the first to directly image at nanoscale dimensions how nanoparticles interact with a cancer cell’s nucleus.

“Our drug-loaded gold nanostars are tiny hitchhikers,” said Teri W. Odom, who led the study of human cervical and ovarian cancer cells. “They are attracted to a protein on the cancer cell’s surface that conveniently shuttles the nanostars to the cell’s nucleus. Then, on the nucleus’ doorstep, the nanostars release the drug, which continues into the nucleus to do its work.” …

Using electron microscopy, Odom and her team found their drug-loaded nanoparticles dramatically change the shape of the cancer cell nucleus. What begins as a nice, smooth ellipsoid becomes an uneven shape with deep folds. They also discovered that this change in shape after drug release was connected to cells dying and the cell population becoming less viable — both positive outcomes when dealing with cancer cells.

The results are published in the journal ACS Nano [abstract].

Since this initial research, the researchers have gone on to study effects of the drug-loaded gold nanostars on 12 other human cancer cell lines. The effect was much the same. “All cancer cells seem to respond similarly,” Odom said. “This suggests that the shuttling capabilities of the nucleolin protein for functionalized nanoparticles could be a general strategy for nuclear-targeted drug delivery.”

The nanoparticle is simple and cleverly designed. It is made of gold and shaped much like a star, with five to 10 points. (A nanostar is approximately 25 nanometers wide.) The large surface area allows the researchers to load a high concentration of drug molecules onto the nanostar. Less drug would be needed than current therapeutic approaches using free molecules because the drug is stabilized on the surface of the nanoparticle.

The drug used in the study is a single-stranded DNA aptamer called AS1411. Approximately 1,000 of these strands are attached to each nanostar’s surface.

The DNA aptamer serves two functions: it is attracted to and binds to nucleolin, a protein overexpressed in cancer cells and found on the cell surface (as well as within the cell). And when released from the nanostar, the DNA aptamer also acts as the drug itself.

Bound to the nucleolin, the drug-loaded gold nanostars take advantage of the protein’s role as a shuttle within the cell and hitchhike their way to the cell nucleus. The researchers then direct ultrafast pulses of light — similar to that used in LASIK surgery — at the cells. The pulsed light cleaves the bond attachments between the gold surface and the thiolated DNA aptamers, which then can enter the nucleus.

In addition to allowing a large amount of drug to be loaded, the nanostar’s shape also helps concentrate the light at the points, facilitating drug release in those areas. Drug release from nanoparticles is a difficult problem, Odom said, but with the gold nanostars the release occurs easily.

That the gold nanostar can deliver the drug without needing to pass through the nuclear membrane means the nanoparticle is not required to be a certain size, offering design flexibility. Also, the nanostars are made using a biocompatible synthesis, which is unusual for nanoparticles.

Odom envisions the drug-delivery method, once optimized, could be particularly useful in cases where tumors are fairly close to the skin’s surface, such as skin and some breast cancers. (The light source would be external to the body.) Surgeons removing cancerous tumors also might find the gold nanostars useful for eradicating any stray cancer cells in surrounding tissue.

A particular advantage of these nanostars is that the plasmonic electrons produced on the surface of the nanostars by the laser solves the problem of how to efficiently discharge the drug target from the nanoparticle vehicle.
—James Lewis, PhD

When a sheet of graphene sits atop a sheet of boron nitride at an angle, a secondary hexagonal pattern emerges that determines how electrons flow across the sample. (Illustration by Brian LeRoy)

Despite its superlative properties, graphene has not been used to make electronic devices because electrons travel so well though it that they cannot be easily controlled. Now physicists have discovered that placing graphene sheets on boron nitride at the proper angle creates a superlattice that controls the movement of graphene electrons. A hat tip to ScienceDaily for reprinting this University of Arizona news release written by Daniel Stolte “Microprocessors From Pencil Lead“:

Graphite, more commonly known as pencil lead, could become the next big thing in the quest for smaller and less power-hungry electronics.

Resembling chicken wire on a nano scale, graphene – single sheets of graphite – is only one atom thick, making it the world’s thinnest material. Two million graphene sheets stacked up would not be as thick as a credit card.

The tricky part physicists have yet to figure out how to control the flow of electrons through the material, a necessary prerequisite for putting it to work in any type of electronic circuit. Graphene behaves very different than silicon, the material currently used in semiconductors.

Last year, a research team led by UA physicists cleared the first hurdle by identifying boron nitride, a structurally identical but non-conducting material, as a suitable mounting surface for single-atom sheets of graphene. The team also showed that in addition to providing mechanical support, boron nitride improves the electronic properties of graphene by smoothening out fluctuations in the electronic charges.

Now the team found that boron nitride also influences how the electrons travel through the graphene. Published in Nature Physics [abstract], the results open up new ways of controlling the electron flow through graphene.

“If you want to make a transistor for example, you need to be able to stop the flow of electrons,” said Brian LeRoy, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona’s department of physics. “But in graphene, the electrons just keep going. It’s difficult to stop them.” …

However, as LeRoy’s group has now discovered, mounting graphene on boron nitride prevents some of the electrons from passing to the other side, a first step toward a more controlled electron flow.

The group achieved this feat by placing graphene sheets onto boron nitride at certain angles, resulting in the hexagonal structures in both materials to overlap in such a way that secondary, larger hexagonal patterns are created. The researchers call this structure a superlattice.

If the angle is just right, they found, a point is reached where almost no electrons go through.

The news release points out that the researchers cannot yet control the angle at which the graphene and boron nitride are oriented so that only 10-20% of the samples they make show the desired effect. This process must be automated before graphene electronics become practical.
—James Lewis, PhD

An artist's rendering of BIND-014. Image credit: Digizyme, Inc.

We have often reported here that targeted nanoparticles to treat cancer have shown great promise in animal studies. An MIT news release written by Anne Trafton now informs us that “Targeted nanoparticles show success in clinical trials“:

Targeted therapeutic nanoparticles that accumulate in tumors while bypassing healthy cells have shown promising results in an ongoing clinical trial, according to a new paper.

The nanoparticles feature a homing molecule that allows them to specifically attack cancer cells, and are the first such targeted particles to enter human clinical studies. Originally developed by researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the particles are designed to carry the chemotherapy drug docetaxel, used to treat lung, prostate and breast cancers, among others.

In the study, which appears April 4 in the journal Science Translational Medicine [abstract], the researchers demonstrate the particles’ ability to target a receptor found on cancer cells and accumulate at tumor sites. The particles were also shown to be safe and effective: Many of the patients’ tumors shrank as a result of the treatment, even when they received lower doses than those usually administered.

“The initial clinical results of tumor regression even at low doses of the drug validates our preclinical findings that actively targeted nanoparticles preferentially accumulate in tumors,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a senior author of the paper. “Previous attempts to develop targeted nanoparticles have not successfully translated into human clinical studies because of the inherent difficulty of designing and scaling up a particle capable of targeting tumors, evading the immune system and releasing drugs in a controlled way.”

The Phase I clinical trial was performed by researchers at BIND Biosciences, a company cofounded by Langer and Omid Farokhzad in 2007.

“This study demonstrates for the first time that it is possible to generate medicines with both targeted and programmable properties that can concentrate the therapeutic effect directly at the site of disease, potentially revolutionizing how complex diseases such as cancer are treated,” says Farokhzad, director of the Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Biomaterials at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and a senior author of the paper. …

The news release goes on to detail several features of these nanoparticles that may be useful in evaluating other types of nanoparticles that are currently at earlier stages of development and have only been tested in animal models. First of all, nanoparticles of many different compositions have been developed, from gold to DNA. These, called AccurinsTM, use clinically validated biocompatible polymers and incorporate a “stealth” layer to avoid removal by the immune system. As explained in the news release:

One of the challenges in developing effective drug-delivery nanoparticles, Langer says, is designing them so they can perform two critical functions: evading the body’s normal immune response and reaching their intended targets.

“You need exactly the right combination of these properties, because if they don’t have the right concentration of targeting molecules, they won’t get to the cells you want, and if they don’t have the right stealth properties, they’ll get taken up by macrophages,” says Langer, also a member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

The BIND-014 nanoparticles have three components: one that carries the drug, one that targets PSMA, and one that helps evade macrophages and other immune-system cells. A few years ago, Langer and Farokhzad developed a way to manipulate these properties very precisely, creating large collections of diverse particles that could then be tested for the ideal composition.

“They systematically made a set of materials that varied in the properties they thought would matter, and developed a way to screen them. That’s not been done in this kind of setting before,” says Mark Saltzman, a professor of biomedical engineering at Yale University who was not involved in this study. “They’ve taken the concept from the lab into clinical trials, which is quite impressive.”

The systematic way in which these researchers addressed multiple variables and issues gives us some indication of what will be required to move nanoparticles and other nanotherapeutics from laboratory studies into clinical trials.
—James Lewis, PhD

Christine Peterson, Foresight Co-Founder & Past President

August 8, 2012 Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA

Exploring the frontiers of knowledge and imagination, fostering interdisciplinary networking

Foresight Institute co-founder and Past President Christine Peterson will speak at the Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous of August 2012, chaired by Piero Scaruffi. Her talk is scheduled from 8:30-8:55pm and is titled “The Nanocentury: Bringing Digital Control to the Physical World”.