April 2013
A Newsletter of The Institute for Academic Medicine at The Methodist Hospital
Nanoparticles that look and act like cells
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by David Bricker
y cloaking nanoparticles in the membranes of white blood cells, scientists at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute may have found a way to prevent the body from recognizing and destroying them before they deliver their drug payloads. The group describes its “LeukoLike Vectors”, or LLVs, in the January issue of Nature Nanotechnology. “Our goal was to make a particle that is camouflaged within our bodies and escapes the surveillance of the immune system to reach its target undiscovered,” said Department of Medicine Co-Chair Dr. Ennio Tasciotti the study’s principal investigator. Nanoparticles can deliver different types of drugs to specific cell types, for example, chemotherapy to cancer cells. But for all the benefits they offer and to get to where they need to go and deliver the needed drug, nanoparticles must somehow evade the body’s immune system that recognizes them as intruders. Systemically administered nanoparticles are captured and removed from the body within a few minutes. With this new membrane coating, they can survive for hours unharmed.
Camouflaged nanoparticles (yellow) cloaked in the membranes of white blood cells rest on the surface of an immune system cell (phagocyte, blue) without being recognized, ingested, and destroyed
This work was funded by the U.S. Army’s Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Breast Cancer Research Program. Read the full news release on our website.
International Workshop on Clinical Brain-Neural Machine Interface Systems The Methodist Hospital Research Institute and the University of Houston hosted the 2013 International Workshop on Clinical Brain Machine Interface Systems, a federally funded National Robotics Initiative Workshop. The conference focused on ways to control machines with human brain activity for clinical care- like robotic legs Click to watch demonstration highlights for paraplegic patients that allow them to walk. Watch highlights of the demonstrations from RexBionics, Parker Hannifan Corp, NASA, UH, Purdue University, and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain. View the workshop website online.
Table of Contents 2
METEOR
3
Clinical Trials Update
4
News in Brief
5
Inside the Institute
6
Education News
7
Funding
9
Awards
10 Welcome