Research news

Many drugs are hindered in their therapeutic potential by issues such as too-fast clearance by the kidneys, undesirable properties, lack of selectivity, and poor internalization in the cell. Nanotechnology has the potential to alter the landscape of medicine by providing targeted solutions for the delivery of small-molecule drugs and biopharmaceuticals.

Now, new IBEC junior group leader Lorenzo Albertazzi and his former colleagues at the Eindhoven University of Technology, working together with industry partner Novartis, have made a leap in drug delivery vectors by developing a new type of carrier with some groundbreaking improvements.

Researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Stuttgart have revealed in an article in Nature Communications today that micromotors can be guided using tiny topographical patterns on the surfaces over which they swim.

Samuel Sánchez and Mykola Tasinkevych’s ‘microswimmers’ are usually guided through fluids using specially engineered magnetic multilayer coatings, which combined with external magnetic fields, helps to control their trajectory.

A collaboration between IBEC’s Biomedical Signal Processing and Interpretation group and two local hospitals has resulted in a new non-invasive method of evaluating the efficiency of the respiratory muscles in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Respiratory muscle dysfunction is a common problem in patients with COPD, mostly related to pulmonary hyperinflation. Diaphragm shortening and deleterious changes in the muscle force-length relationship cause a reduction in the muscles’ capacity to generate pressure, placing them at a mechanical disadvantage.

A team of scientists including IBEC researchers have developed a brand new technique that miniaturizes the way we study biomolecular interactions, allowing multiple analyses inside living cells for the first time.

Published in Advanced Materials, the study describes a new technology, Suspended Planar-Array chips, whose extraordinary degree of miniaturization permits their use at the microscale. The new technique uses a single suspended chip to identify, quantify and determine of biochemical and physiological changes in small volumes, a reduction so dramatic that it even permits analysis inside living cells.

Researchers at IBEC and their collaborators from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, The University of Manchester and the company Keysight Technologies have now achieved an elusive goal: to measure the electromagnetic properties of biological materials at the level of a single bacterial cell and at very high frequencies (gigahertz).

Scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) have revealed that, counter to previous understanding, the living cells in our bodies behave like solids rather than the liquids they are made of.

IBEC group leader and ICREA research professor Xavier Trepat, who led the research, describes the discovery as ‘truly counter-intuitive’. “It means we need brand new laws of physics to understand what ingredients a fluid needs to behave as a solid,” he says.

An IBEC researcher and his collaborators have taken the next step in their quest to achieve safe micromotors for medical drug and cargo delivery by developing a version that is powered by bacteria.

Samuel Sánchez, who recently published some work about similar micro-sized drug carriers that are powered by enzymes that consume biological fuels, such as glucose, worked with the part of his group at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems on this latest finding, highlighted on the inside cover of Advanced Materials Interfaces, which elaborates an even more promising ‘microswimmer’ that is powered by Escherichia coli.

In a paper published in Nature Cell Biology, IBEC junior group leader Pere Roca Cusachs and his collaborators at Columbia University and Singapore’s Mechanobiology Institute reveal the potential of a protein found in cell cytoskeletons as a repressor of cancer.

The ability of cells to sense the rigidity of the extracellular matrix – a collection of molecules that provides structural and biochemical support – affects the regulation of their activity in development, wound healing and other essential processes.

In some research conducted with his colleagues at the University of California San Diego, IBEC senior researcher Jordi Fonollosa has shed some light on the mechanisms behind how we memorize sequences – as well as how failures in these mechanisms can provide insight into neurological disorders.

Previous behavioral experiments suggest that humans and some animals learn and recall sequences in smaller segments.

Having measured the electric polarizability of DNA – a fundamental property that directly influences its biological functions – for the first time ever last year, IBEC´s Nanoscale Bioelectrical Characterization group has made a further breakthrough in the understanding of the dielectric properties of cell constituents by measuring the electric polarizability of the main components of the cell membrane – namely lipids, sterols and proteins – with a spatial resolution down to 50nm.

The cell membrane plays an essential role in fundamental bioelectric phenomena. Found in places such as neurons or cardiac cells, it regulates the exchange of ions between the cell and the environment, as well as enabling the formation of electric potentials that can propagate over long distances.