Fantastic Voyage: Tumor-Targeting Nanoworms

Magnetic Iron Oxide Nanoworms for Tumor Targeting and Imaging
Advanced Materials
Volume 20, Issue 9, Date: May 5, 2008, Pages: 1630-1635
Ji-Ho Park, Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Lianglin Zhang, Michael P. Schwartz, Erkki Ruoslahti, Sangeeta N. Bhatia, Michael J. Sailor

UCSD Press Release:

Scientists at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT have developed nanometer-sized “nanoworms” that can cruise through the bloodstream without significant interference from the body’s immune defense system and—like tiny anti-cancer missiles—home in on tumors.

Their discovery, detailed in this week’s issue of the journal Advanced Materials, is reminiscent of the 1966 science fiction movie, the Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine is shrunken to microscopic dimensions, then injected into the bloodstream to remove a blood clot from a diplomat’s brain.

Using nanoworms, doctors should eventually be able to target and reveal the location of developing tumors that are too small to detect by conventional methods. Carrying payloads targeted to specific features on tumors, these microscopic vehicles could also one day provide the means to more effectively deliver toxic anti-cancer drugs to these tumors in high concentrations without negatively impacting other parts of the body.

Recent UCSD Articles - MAE

New articles from the UCSD Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering faculty.

Gupta, A., and X. Markenscoff. 2008. Configurational forces as dissipative mechanisms: a revisit. Comptes Rendus Mecanique 336 (1-2):126-131.

Li, T. Z., E. Al Olevsky, and M. A. Meyers. 2008. The development of residual stresses in Ti6Al4V-Al3Ti metal-intermetallic laminate (MIL) composites. Materials Science and Engineering A-Structural Materials Properties Microstructure and Processing 473 (1-2):49-57.

Nichols, J. A., H. Saito, M. Hoefer, and P. R. Bandaru. 2008. Tailoring the electrochemical behavior of multiwalled carbon nanotubes through argon and hydrogen ion irradiation. Electrochemical and Solid State Letters 11 (4):K35-K39.

Shimada, M., G. R. Tynan, and R. Cattolica. 2008. Neutral depletion in inductively coupled plasmas using hybrid-type direct simulation Monte Carlo. Journal of Applied Physics 103 (3).

Treister, Y., and C. Pozrikidis. 2008. Numerical study of equilibrium shapes and deformation of single-wall carbon nanotubes. Computational Materials Science 41 (3):383-408.

Continue reading Recent UCSD Articles - MAE…

UCSD Team places 4th in IEEExtreme programming

IEEEXtreme 2008, a programming competition, was held on 8 March with 130 student teams, over 350 participants, from 31 countries. Congratulations to the UC San Diego ‘team bagpipe lubricators’ on a 4th place finish!
Jordan Rhee
Eric Levine
Rene Claus
Jordan Rhee, Proctor

During the 24 hour competition, there were 16 problems for the teams to solve: 10 problems at the start, a second set of problems after 8 hours and then at hour 16, the final set. The UCSD IEEE student chapter will receive an award of $500 for placing in the top 5 schools. Read more

RSS Awareness Day, May 1

RSS is a technology that allows you to keep up-to-date with your favorite websites without visiting those sites to check for the updates or dealing with e-mail alerts. The new stuff gets delivered to your RSS reader (web-based or desktop–your choice), and you scan the headlines at your leisure and decide what you want to read.

• What is RSS?
• Recommended RSS Feeds for Science & Engineering, including e-journals and databases - maintained by the S&E Library
• The RSS Compendium is a comprehensive resource for all things RSS, including a list of readers. Not sure which reader to select? Try Bloglines or Google Reader.

Want to more about using RSS for keeping up with science/engineering news and research? Contact the Chemistry Librarian.

Molecule Man: U-T Feature on Nicolaou

UCSD/Scripps Research Institute chemistry professor KC Nicolaou was featured in the April 24th San Diego Union-Tribune. In the article, Dr. Nicolaou discusses his just-published book, Molecules That Changed the World, about the history, synthesis and impact of aspirin, penicillin, taxol and other important chemical compounds.

Molecules That Changed the World (publisher website) The Nicolaou Group at Scripps Research Institute

Link to Google Books in Melvyl

You will now see links to Google Books in Melvyl search results. Depending on the book’s copyright status you’ll see:

• More About this Book, which includes a brief description of the book, reviews, references to the book on other websites, and links to Amazon and other sites to buy or borrow the book.
• Preview This Book Online! With these books, you can search the text of the book and view a limited number of pages.
• Read This Book Online! This is the “full view” of the book, and you can view every page. You may also be able to download a PDF copy of the book. To see an example, go to Melvyl and search for Einstein’s theories of relativity and gravitation.

More information about UC’s mass digitization projects, including the one with Google.

On Exhibit in S&E

Stop by the S&E Library and take a look at these new and continuing exhibits–

Balsa Wood Tower
A team of six undergraduates in Structural Engineering won first place in the Fifth Annual Seismic Design Competition, held in New Orleans in February. The winning structure, a balsa wood tower, was constructed to withstand simulations of three significant 20th-century earthquakes. More information. The tower is on permanent display at the entrance to the S&E Library, along with the team’s poster. Congratulations to team captain Ruben Soto and his fellow team members: Palak Shah, Carolina Margarito, Jennifer Heredia, Michelle Yokota and Jorge Ortiz.

MAE 156A Robot
The winning robot in Dr. Nate Delson’s Fall 2007 MAE 156A class is also featured in S&E. Built by team members Anson Brune, Chau Nguyen, Geoff Rosenberg, and Bryan Urquhart, the robot senses the heights of a row of blocks and plots them on a grid. Sounds simple, but take a look! Through Spring Quarter.

Calculate Your Carbon Footprint
Your carbon footprint is a measurement of the relative impact of your individual actions on global climate change. The average American’s carbon footprint is the equivalent of 27 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Compare that to the worldwide average of 5.5 per person. Come to the Science & Engineering Library as we celebrate Earth Week and see which lifestyle factors influence your carbon footprint. Our Earth Week display also includes information about Green Engineering, (a web-based carbon footprint calculator), and a listing of Earth Week events at UCSD. A selection of S&E books on climate change is also on display. Through May 2.

Mathematics Awareness Month
April is Math Awareness Month and this year’s theme is “Mathematics and Voting.” Learn about the role math plays in voting methods, and how the outcome of elections can vary drastically depending upon which method is used. How will your vote be counted this November? More info.. Also on display is a series of 13 “Mathematical Moments” – how math affects our everyday lives and the technology around us, e.g. solving Sudoku, eliminating spam, searching the web, predicting storm surge, and more. Math majors will also be interested in an accompanying display on careers in mathematics. Through May 2.

Engineering Expo Posters
Graduate student posters from the Jacobs School of Engineering Expo are on display, including the two winners of the “Best Use of the Literature” awards. Through Spring Quarter.

New Books, March to mid-April

The New Books listings have just been updated for March through mid-April.

• Engineering
• Math, General and Computer Science
• Physical Sciences
• E-Books, including new titles from Knovel, Safari, Synthesis, the CRC NetBase collections, SPIE and various Springer series

Browsing Books - Recent Additions

Here are the new additions to the S&E Browsing Collection. Follow the link to see if the book’s available, or use the Request feature in Roger and we’ll hold the book for you when it’s returned.

• Chemistry in the garden
• Endless universe : beyond the Big Bang
• The open laboratory: the best science writing on blogs 2007
• Astrophysics is easy! : a introduction for the amateur astronomers
• Why there’s antifreeze in your toothpaste : the chemistry of household ingredients
• Winning our energy independence : an energy insider shows how
• The big switch : rewiring the world, from Edison to Google
• Censoring science : inside the political attack on Dr. James Hansen and the truth of global warming
• Cosmological enigmas : pulsars, quasars, & other deep-space questions
• Blip, ping & buzz : making sense of radar and sonar
• The joy of physics
• The physics of NASCAR : how to make steel + gas + rubber = speed
• Robots in space : technology, evolution, and interplanetary travel
• The mystery of the missing antimatter

New UCSD Bioengineering Articles

Recently published articles from the Department of Bioengineering Faculty:

Barbee, K. D., and X. H. Huang. 2008. Magnetic assembly of high-density DNA arrays for genomic analyses. Analytical Chemistry 80 (6):2149-2154.

Cabrales, P., A. G. Tsai, and M. Intaglietta. 2008. Modulation of perfusion and oxygenation by red blood cell oxygen affinity during acute anemia. American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology 38 (3):354-361.

Chang, S. F., C. A. Chang, D. Y. Lee, P. L. Leet, Y. M. Yeh, C. R. Yeh, C. K. Cheng, S. Chien, and J. J. Chiu. 2008. Tumor cell cycle arrest induced by shear stress: Roles of integrins and Smad. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105 (10):3927-3932.

Chien, S. 2008. Effects of disturbed flow on endothelial cells. Annals of Biomedical Engineering 36 (4):554-562.

Feala, J. D., L. Coquin, G. Paternostro, and A. D. McCulloch. 2008. Integrating metabolomics and phenomics with systems models of cardiac hypoxia. Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology 96 (1-3):209-225.

Continue reading New UCSD Bioengineering Articles…