New Drug Can Treat Almost Any Viral Infection By Killing the Body's Infected Cells

A new broad-spectrum treatment for viruses could be as effective as antibiotics fighting bacteria, MIT researchers report. The method uses cells’ own defense systems to induce invaded cells to commit suicide, preventing the spread of the virus. In lab tests, the new drug completely cured mice that had been infected with influenza.

Viruses work by inserting themselves into a cell and hijacking its machinery for its own use. The invaded cell then creates more copies of the virus, which involves creating long strings of double-stranded RNA — which contains the virus’ genetic material, like DNA contains ours.

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When the virus is done copying itself, its hostage cell usually dies, from the virus bursting through its walls (lysis), changes to the cell’s outer membrane, and from apoptosis, or programmed cell death.

Human cells have plenty of defenses against viral invasion, including proteins that attach to the double-stranded RNA, preventing the virus from replicating itself after successful invasion.

This new drug therapy combines those dsRNA proteins with a protein that induces apoptosis. It’s called a DRACO, Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer.

When one end of the DRACO binds to dsRNA, it signals the other end of the DRACO to induce cell suicide, an MIT News article explains. In this way, the cell is killed before the virus can take over and eventually kill it anyway. If there is no dsRNA, the healthy cells are left alone.

“In theory, it should work against all viruses,” said Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory who invented the new technology.

A handful of drugs can target specific viruses by interfering with their replication process, through addition of modified DNA building blocks or the blocking of enzymes the viruses need to stimulate the replication process. But viruses are wily bugs, and they can evolve to resist these treatments.

The DRACO therapy could be effective because it targets the host cell, not just the virus.

Rider and colleagues are testing DRACO against more viruses in mice, according to MIT. Rider hopes to license the technology for trials in larger animals and for eventual human clinical trials, too.

Electronic Skin

Someday soon, hospital patients won’t be hooked up to wires and monitors -- instead, electronic patches will be temporarily tattooed onto their bodies. Doctors will be able to monitor their vital signs without poking and prodding, and patients wearing neck patches will even be able to communicate with robots, who will translate throat muscle movements into simple speech.

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A new electronic skin patch, no more invasive than a temporary tattoo, marks a major breakthrough in human-machine interfaces. Tiny semiconductor circuits that stretch with the skin could be rubbed onto a person’s skin to monitor muscle activity, heart activity or even brain waves in real time without using bulky medical equipment.

The epidermal electronic circuit is initially mounted on a super-thin sheet of soluble plastic and laminated onto the skin with water, just like a temporary tattoo. Once it’s on, it can bend, wrinkle and stretch along with a wearer’s skin — it doesn’t pop off or snap, which is no small feat considering this is a high-performance semiconductor. When it’s no longer needed, it peels off like a layer of sunburned skin. Check out the video below to see this in action.

The devices adhere to the skin not with glue or static electricity, but close-contact atomic forces called van der Waals interactions, which are essentially invisible to the user. Adhesion lasts up to 24 hours, the researchers report.

Researchers at the University of Illinois who came up with this device made circuits with a wide array of components, to prove it could work: sensors, LEDs, transistors, radio frequency capacitors and wireless antennas, according to UI. The devices can draw power from induction or even from mini solar cells.

Inventors say they could be used for various medical applications, especially sensors that monitor heart and muscle activity, which currently require conductive gels, tape and wires. To prove it, they measured electrical activity produced by the heart, brain, and skeletal muscles, they report in this week’s issue of the journal Science.

Studying brain function in a normal environment is impossible now — to use an EEG, a patient would have to be in a lab setting or wear some type of complicated helmet — but the patch could make it possible. Or imagine a patient with a degenerative disease who cannot communicate, but could use the patches to connect with a computer.

In a throat patch experiment, the patch was precise enough for the research team to differentiate several words, according to the National Science Foundation. They were even able to control a voice-activated video game with better than 90 percent accuracy.

“The technology can connect you to the physical world and the cyberworld in a very natural way that feels very comfortable,” said UI electrical and computer engineering professor Todd Coleman, who co-led the research team.

The circuits are made possible through novel fabrication methods that allow bendable versions of semiconductors that are brittle when in bulk form. The research team, which also included engineering researchers at Northwestern University, developed a new device geometry they call “filamentary serpentine,” according to a UI news release. The circuits of the various devices are fabricated as tiny, squiggled wires, as shown in the photo above. The circuits’ wavy shape allows them to bend, twist, scrunch and stretch while maintaining functionality.

“The blurring of electronics and biology is really the key point here,” said Northwestern engineering professor Yonggang Huang. “All established forms of electronics are hard, rigid. Biology is soft, elastic. It's two different worlds. This is a way to truly integrate them.”

Anti-Wave Tech Tricks Ocean Water Into Standing Still, Making Ships Efficient and Invisible

We’ve already seen how future ships can be cloaked against sonar, and maybe someday evenspace and time. Now researchers say they can cloak the ships’ wakes, tricking water itself into acting as though nothing is there.

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A new metamaterial cloaking system can trick water into standing still as an object moves through it, by eliminating the shear force and reducing water displacement, Duke University researchers say. This in turn reduces the amount of energy required to move an object — say, a ship — through the water, theoretically saving fuel.

Yaroslav Urzhumov, assistant research professor in electrical and computer engineering at Duke, envisions covering the hull of a ship with a three-dimensional lattice of porous metallic materials that would be embedded with tiny pumps. The pumps could force flowing water through at variable rates, Urzhumov says in a news release. “The goal is make it so the water passing through the porous material leaves the cloak at the same speed as the water surrounding by the vessel,” he says.

The water surrounding the hull would appear to be still, relative to the movement of the vessel, which would reduce the amount of energy the vessel needs to get through it. When moving through a fluid, a solid object displaces a greater volume of fluid than its own total volume — think of how much effort it requires to drag a thin fishing line through water. So if these shear forces could be eliminated or mitigated, a moving vessel would displace less fluid.

We’ve seen other examples of ship-efficiency water interference tech lately, including a proposal to harness the Leidenfrost effect, wherein a liquid produces an insulating vapor layer when it comes in contact with a solid object that is hotter than its boiling point. That vapor layer could reduce drag, researchers say. But superheating hulls would likely require lots of energy input, lessening any energy savings from the drag reduction.

A lattice-pump system would conceivably be better, because the micropumps wouldn’t need that much power, Urzhumov says — certainly not as much energy as you would need to push an un-cloaked ship through the seas.