Needles in Eyes

Sticking needles in your eyes might not be as bad as it seems. Any loss or damage to the inner layer of the cornea – the clear surface of the eye – can be permanent and lead to progressive sight loss. Corneal transplantation is the only available solution, and is invasive and limited, so researchers have developed a spiky new approach to restoring lost or damaged cells. They created a sheet of nanoneedles (green in the human cornea sample pictured) that can embed within the inner layer of cornea cells (red and blue), nestling down to the perfect depth. These needles can then directly deliver small strands of genetic material that interfere with a particular gene involved in keeping growth in check. With that silenced, cell growth increased. The nanoneedles can be integrated in contact lenses for long term drug delivery, restoring sight without sore eyes.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by Eleonora Maurizi and colleagues

Dentistry Centre Lab, University of Parma, Parma, Italy and Centre for Craniofacial and Regenerative Biology, King's College London, London, UK

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Advanced Science, October 2022

Kamu seperti mimpi, yang belum sempat aku peluk di dalam tidurku, mimpi itu jauh terbang tak terlihat lagi.

Seperti rindu yang terus membekas

Luka ini pula tak beranjak lekas

Masih menggores pada hati yang cemas

Teringat senyum hanya sekedar bias

Sementara bahagia tanpa nyata adalah kias

.

Aku dimatamu seumpama kertas

Tipis, dan mudah kau remas

Serat halus tersusun lapis demi lapis

Membentuk lembaran yang menulis kisah

Bagimu hanya semacam ampas

.

Aku ingin bergegas

Lari dari hatimu yang kian bercadas

Keras, namun mudah pecah laksana gelas

Beri aku ruang ikhlas

Setitik lega untuk melepas

Biar aku lekas menjadi bekas

I might have a weird tendency (or it might just be serendipity – or inability to manage my life options – or crypto-masochistic urges) to move against the direction of well-reasoned human resource exodus. I returned to Greece in 2009, right at the onset of the Greek financial crisis. It didn’t turn out well for me. Now, I find myself traveling to London, just as Brexit is set to kick in. The hard way, too, evidently. But it’s a very cool city and I want to see the entrepreneurship/startup culture closeup. That would bring so much added value to the team we are building up, which already has a very strong London presence. Maybe there will be a match with the right accelerator! A match that will catalyze our effort to translate 17 years of basic research into new therapies for aggressive brain tumors (for starters).

just made Sirna from the comic book “SOLITER”

Welcome Interference

With an excited puppy, being able to calm it down is essential to keeping things under control. In the same way, hyperactive genes – the molecular starting points for all the material in our body – sometimes need subduing. One of the body’s tools for this is RNA interference – a trick that uses strands of RNA (genetic material similar to DNA) to quell gene expression. Researchers looking to replicate that technique use ‘small interfering RNA’ (siRNA), but have so far been limited to certain areas of the body. Now a new approach has modified their structure to make them linger longer when introduced to the brain (shown here in red within the blue-stained hippocampus cells of a non-human primate). Injected siRNAs blocked the activity of huntingtin in mice, the gene that causes Huntington’s disease, raising hopes that this approach to genetic tinkering will lead to new treatments for neurological disorders.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by Alterman, Godhino, Hassler and Ferguson, and colleagues

RNA Therapeutics Institute, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA

Image provided by and copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Nature Biotechnology, August 2019