News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and Harvard University have developed nanoparticles that can send gene treatment directly to various types of cells in bone marrow to correct mutations that cause sickle cell disease. The researchers used CRISPR/Cas and base gene-editing techniques in a mouse model of sickle cell disease to activate a form of hemoglobin and correct the sickle cell mutation. 

Researchers from Vanderbilt University, Yale University, Northwestern University, and AstraZeneca have developed a set of nanoparticles that stimulate the immune system in mice to fight cancer and may eventually do the same in humans. The nanoparticles delivered a nucleic acid molecule that triggers an immune response that is normally used by the body to recognize foreign viruses to help the immune system mount a defense, according to the researchers.

Engineers at Johns Hopkins University have created a new optical tool that could improve cancer imaging. Their approach uses tiny nanoprobes that light up when they attach to aggressive cancer cells, helping clinicians distinguish between localized cancers and those that are metastatic and have the potential to spread throughout the body. The team found that unlike CT or MRI scans, the nanoprobes effectively and consistently bound to metastatic prostate cancer cells and differentiated between them and non-metastatic cells.

For the first time, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Dartmouth College, Penn State, the University of California, Merced, and Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium have demonstrated an approach that combines high-throughput computation and atomic-scale fabrication to engineer high-performance quantum defects. The researchers developed state-of-the-art, high-throughput computational methods to screen and accurately predict the properties of more than 750 defects in a two-dimensional material called tungsten disulfide. Then, working at the Molecular Foundry, a user facility at Berkeley Lab, the researchers developed and applied a technique that enables the creation of vacancies in tungsten disulfide and the insertion of cobalt atoms into these vacancies.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory have developed a trilayer of semiconductors to enable the dissociation of electron-hole pairs, also called excitons – a fundamental process for the performance of photovoltaic systems. The trilayer, which consists of single-walled carbon nanotubes sandwiched between two semiconductors, enables a photo-induced charge transfer cascade, in which electrons move in one direction, while holes move in the other direction. The trilayer architecture appears to facilitate ultrafast hole transfer and exciton dissociation, resulting in a long-lived charge separation.

Researchers from the University of Rochester have outlined a process for mapping heat transfer using luminescent nanoparticles. By applying highly doped upconverting nanoparticles to the surface of a device, the researchers were able to achieve super-high-resolution thermometry at the nanoscale level from up to 10 millimeters away. According to Andrea Pickel , one of the scientists involved in the study, this method could be used by manufacturers to improve a wide array of electrical components.

Researchers from Rice University and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have developed ultrasmall, stable gas-filled protein nanostructures that could revolutionize ultrasound imaging and drug delivery. These diamond-shaped, 50-nanometer gas vesicles are believed to be the smallest stable, free-floating structures for medical imaging ever created. They can penetrate tissue and reach immune cells in lymph nodes. This discovery opens up new possibilities for imaging and delivering therapies to previously inaccessible cells. “The research has notable implications for treating cancers and infectious diseases, as lymph-node-resident cells are critical targets for immunotherapies," said George Lu, one of the researchers involved in this study.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Columbia University, and the University of California, Irvine, have discovered a new mechanism that could boost the efficiency of hydrogen production through water splitting. This process relies on hydrated ion-permeable ultrathin coatings (such as porous oxide materials), which are used to select chemical species. Using advanced simulations, the scientists revealed that water confined within nanopores smaller than 0.5 nanometers shows significantly altered reactivity and proton transfer mechanisms. "This insight could pave the way for optimizing porous oxides to improve the efficiency of hydrogen production systems by tuning the porosity and surface chemistry of the oxides," said Hyuna Kwon, one of the scientists involved in this study.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered that reducing graphene oxide membranes with ultraviolet light alters the oxygen functional groups on the graphene oxide surface. This modification results in a novel separation mechanism that is selective for charge rather than size. Exposure to ultraviolet light selectively removed hydroxyl groups from the graphene oxide planes, leading to enhanced interactions of metal cations with functional groups located at the edges of the graphene oxide. This, in turn, resulted in a lower ratio of free mobile lithium cations in solution compared to calcium cations. 

To function, quantum computers need to be kept very cold – just a few degrees above absolute zero. Now, researchers at Northeastern University, the University of California, Berkeley, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have shown that one day, it might be possible to run quantum computers at room temperature. The researchers identified novel van der Waals heterostructures (created by combining layers of atomically thin materials, including graphene) that allow control of the coherent movements of atoms out of their equilibrium positions – also called acoustic phonons – at terahertz frequencies. With current quantum computer transistors, the control of acoustic phonons is limited to the gigahertz range. So, increasing the range of these transistors into terahertz frequencies – an increase by a factor of a thousand – opens the possibility of running quantum computers at room temperature.