Theragnostic Functional Nanoparticles for the Central Nervous System
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in using functional inorganic nanomaterials as theragnostic agents to diagnose and treat diseases of the central nervous system (CNS). Functional nanomaterials provide a plethora of physical and chemical stimuli capable of facilitating targeted delivery, promoting cellular proliferation and differentiation, and delivering quantifiable signals that can be leveraged to efficiently and accurately diagnose patients. Compared to their organic counterparts, inorganic nanomaterials possess intrinsic properties that arise from their chemical composition and crystalline structure, which can be easily tuned to impart magnetic, optical, and various other modalities to a material platform. Although there is increasing amount of research effort in this area, there is not yet a thorough study covering the application of theragnostic inorganic nanoparticles in the CNS.
Systematically understanding the interactions between stem cell fate control and nanotopographies can significantly facilitate the discovery of the molecular mechanisms behind cell behavior in neurological disorders and accelerate the development of stem cell-based therapies. However, high-throughput investigation of the cell-type-specific biophysical cues associated with stem cell-derived neural interfaces continues to be a significant obstacle to overcome. To accomplish this goal, Prof. Ki-Bum Lee and his research team (
similar molecular size, shape and physical properties (e.g., nearly the same boiling points). The distillation method is extremely energy intensive, while the adsorption method using conventional adsorbent (e.g. zeolites) suffers from low selectivity and often requires high temperature. Developing highly efficient adsorbents with excellent adsorption capacity and selectivity is crucial for the implementation of simulated moving bed (SMB) technology for the industrial separation and purification of the xylene isomers. In a very recent work published in Science, the research teams of Prof. Jing Li (Rutgers University, 
In the past decade, scientists in fields of biology, material science, and bioengineering have witnessed a surge of interest in extracellular vesicle-based diagnostic and therapeutic applications. There has also been a strong push for translating extracellular vesicles into clinical treatment of diseases recently, as evidenced by many clinical trials. To facilitate the isolation, capturing, analysis, delivery, monitoring, and imaging of extracellular vesicles for biomedical applications, magnetic nanomaterials have already played significant roles, with over 300 published articles on this topic. Despite a continuous surge of research activity in this field, a comprehensive review covering magnetic nanomaterial-based detection, delivery, and engineering of extracellular vesicles for biomedical applications is lacking.
In biomedical applications, sensitive and selective detection of nucleic acids and their mutation variants is critical. Although various nucleic acid biosensors have been developed, they frequently require pre-treatment activities such as target amplification and nucleic acid tagging. Furthermore, present biosensors are often incapable of detecting sequence-specific alterations in the nucleic acids under study. As a result, there is an urgent need to develop a nucleic acid detection approach that does not rely on typical target amplification and tagging processes, all of which can allow us to identify virus alterations quickly and easily.
Cell therapy holds great potential for treating various incurable diseases and disorders, including spinal cord injury (SCI). However, cell death and a lack of control of cell fate limit the clinical application of cell therapies, especially stem cell therapies. Therefore, there is a critical need to develop novel methods to promote cell survival and control of cell fate after transplantation of cells.
Viral diseases have received immense attention in the medical and healthcare fields because of the high transmission rates and difficulty in curing, including the recent COVID-19 issue. Nucleic acids are one of the attractive biomarkers to diagnose various viral-associated diseases precisely. Recently, the target nucleic acid-dependent trans-activating phenomenon of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas has shown huge potential for developing sensitive and selective biosensors to detect targeted nucleic acids. However, the nucleic acid amplification steps are conventionally required for sensitive and selective monitoring of the target nucleic acid, requiring multistep reactions, expensive reagents, well-trained personnel, and sophisticated instrumentation.
Stem cell functions and fates are dynamically orchestrated by various biomolecular as well as physical signals in a spatially and temporally controlled manner. Achieving precise control of stem cell fates and functions is of great significance for studying physiological mechanisms, identifying pathogenic pathways, and developing enhanced treatments of devastating diseases. To better investigate and further regulate these complex biological processes, photo-responsive nanomaterials have gained increasing research interests for achieving cell behavior control due to their exceptional photo-physical properties. Lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) have gained extensive attention as near-infrared (NIR)-responsive nanomaterials owing to excellent photostability, minimal tissue scattering, and especially anti-stokes ultraviolet (UV) as well as visible emissions, showing great potential in various applications.
Scientists can turn proteins into never-ending patterns that look like flowers, trees or snowflakes, a technique that could help engineer a filter for tainted water and human tissues.
Stem cells have attracted increasing research interest in the field of regenerative medicine because of their unique ability to differentiate into multiple cell lineages. However, controlling stem cell differentiation efficiently and improving the current destructive characterization methods for monitoring stem cell differentiation are the critical issues.
Chemoresistance is a major challenge facing the effective treatment of cancers. To overcome resistance to chemotherapy, microRNA (miRNA), which are short (20−22 nucleotides) noncoding RNA molecules, has shown to be an attractive strategy. A growing body of evidence shows that modulation of miRNA levels in cancer can mitigate the development and progression of cancer. 
Seeking a better way to capture radioactive iodides in spent nuclear reactor fuel, Rutgers–New Brunswick scientists have developed an extremely efficient “molecular trap” that can be recycled and reused.
The construction of stimulus-responsive supramolecular complexes of metabolic pathway enzymes, inspired by natural multi-enzyme assemblies (metabolons), provides an attractive avenue for efficient and spatio-temporally controllable one-pot biotransformations.
