[…] In the body, the shapes of many collagen-containing tissues, including corneas, are held in place by attractions of oppositely charged components. These tissues contain a lot of water, so applying an electric potential to them lowers the tissue’s pH, making it more acidic. By altering the pH, the rigid attractions within the tissue are loosened and make the shape malleable. When the original pH is restored, the tissue is locked into the new shape.

Previously, the researchers used EMR to reshape cartilage-rich rabbit ears, as well as alter scars and skin in pigs. But one collagen-rich tissue that they were eager to explore was the cornea.

In this work, the team constructed specialized, platinum “contact lenses” that provided a template for the corrected shape of the cornea, then placed each over a rabbit eyeball in a saline solution meant to mimic natural tears. The platinum lens acted as an electrode to generate a precise pH change when the researchers applied a small electric potential to the lens. After about a minute, the cornea’s curvature conformed to the shape of the lens — about the same amount of time LASIK takes, but with fewer steps, less expensive equipment and no incisions.

They repeated this setup on 12 separate rabbit eyeballs, 10 of which were treated as if they had myopia, or nearsightedness. In all the “myopic” eyeballs, the treatment dialed in the targeted focusing power of the eye, which would correspond to improved vision. The cells in the eyeball survived the treatment, because the researchers carefully controlled the pH gradient. Additionally, in other experiments, the team demonstrated that their technique might be able to reverse some chemical-caused cloudiness to the cornea — a condition that is currently only treatable through a complete corneal transplant.

Though this initial work is promising, the researchers emphasize that it is in its very early stages. Next up is what Wong describes as, “the long march through animal studies that are detailed and precise,” including tests on a living rabbit rather than just its eyeball. They also plan to determine the types of vision correction possible with EMR, such as near- and far-sightedness and astigmatism. Though the next steps are planned, uncertainties in the team’s scientific funding have put them on hold.

[…]

Source: Forget LASIK: Safer, cheaper vision correction could be coming soon | ScienceDaily

An experimental mRNA vaccine boosted the tumor-fighting effects of immunotherapy in a mouse-model study, bringing researchers one step closer to their goal of developing a universal vaccine to “wake up” the immune system against cancer.

Published recently in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the University of Florida study showed that like a one-two punch, pairing the test vaccine with common anticancer drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors triggered a strong antitumor response.

A surprising element, researchers said, was that they achieved the promising results not by attacking a specific target protein expressed in the tumor, but by simply revving up the immune system — spurring it to respond as if fighting a virus. They did this by stimulating the expression of a protein called PD-L1 inside of tumors, making them more receptive to treatment. The research was supported by multiple federal agencies and foundations, including the National Institutes of Health.

[…]

“This paper describes a very unexpected and exciting observation: that even a vaccine not specific to any particular tumor or virus — so long as it is an mRNA vaccine — could lead to tumor-specific effects,” said Sayour, principal investigator at the RNA Engineering Laboratory within UF’s Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy.

“This finding is a proof of concept that these vaccines potentially could be commercialized as universal cancer vaccines to sensitize the immune system against a patient’s individual tumor,” said Sayour, a McKnight Brain Institute investigator and co-leader of a program in immuno-oncology and microbiome research.

Until now, there have been two main ideas in cancer-vaccine development: To find a specific target expressed in many people with cancer, or to tailor a vaccine that is specific to targets expressed within a patient’s own cancer.

“This study suggests a third emerging paradigm,” said Duane Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., a co-author of the paper. “What we found is by using a vaccine designed not to target cancer specifically but rather to stimulate a strong immunologic response, we could elicit a very strong anticancer reaction. And so this has significant potential to be broadly used across cancer patients — even possibly leading us to an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine.”

[…]

Source: A new cancer vaccine just wiped out tumors in mice | ScienceDaily

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have built a cancer therapy that makes bacteria and viruses work as a team. In a study published recently in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the Synthetic Biological Systems Lab shows how their system hides a virus inside a tumor-seeking bacterium, smuggles it past the immune system, and unleashes it inside cancerous tumors.

The new platform combines the bacteria’s tendency to find and attack tumors with the virus’s natural preference for infecting and killing cancerous cells. Tal Danino, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, led the team’s effort to create the system, which is called CAPPSID (short for Coordinated Activity of Prokaryote and Picornavirus for Safe Intracellular Delivery). Charles M. Rice, an expert in virology at The Rockefeller University, collaborated with the Columbia team.

“We aimed to enhance bacterial cancer therapy by enabling the bacteria to deliver and activate a therapeutic virus directly inside tumor cells, while engineering safeguards to limit viral spread outside the tumor,” says co-lead author Jonathan Pabón, an MD/PhD candidate at Columbia.

The researchers believe that this technology — validated in mice — represents the first example of directly engineered cooperation between bacteria and cancer-targeting viruses.

The approach combines the bacteria’s instinct for homing in on tumors with a virus’s knack for infecting and killing cancer cells. “By bridging bacterial engineering with synthetic virology, our goal is to open a path toward multi-organism therapies that can accomplish far more than any single microbe could achieve alone,” says Zakary S. Singer, a co-lead author and former postdoctoral researcher in Tal Danino’s lab.

“This is probably our most technically advanced and novel platform to date,” says Danino, who is also affiliated with the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Columbia’s Data Science Institute.

Sneaking past the immune system

One of the biggest hurdles in oncolytic virus therapy is the body’s own defense system. If a patient has antibodies against the virus — from a prior infection or vaccination — those antibodies can neutralize it before it reaches a tumor. The Columbia team sidestepped that problem by tucking the virus inside tumor-seeking bacteria.

“The bacteria act as an invisibility cloak, hiding the virus from circulating antibodies, and ferrying the virus to where it is needed,” Singer says.

Pabón says this strategy is especially important for viruses that people are already exposed to in daily life.

“Our system demonstrates that bacteria can potentially be used to launch an oncolytic virus to treat solid tumors in patients who have developed immunity to these viruses,” he says.

Targeting the tumor

The system’s bacterial half is Salmonella typhimurium, a species that naturally migrates to the low-oxygen, nutrient-rich environment inside tumors. Once there, the bacteria invade cancer cells and release the virus directly into the tumor’s interior.

“We programmed the bacteria to act as a Trojan horse by shuttling the viral RNA into tumors and then lyse themselves directly inside of cancer cells to release the viral genome, which could then spread between cancer cells,” Singer says.

By exploiting the bacteria’s tumor-homing instincts and the virus’s ability to replicate inside cancer cells, the researchers created a delivery system that can penetrate the tumor and spread throughout it — a challenge that has limited both bacteria- and virus-only approaches.

Safeguarding against runaway infections

A key concern with any live virus therapy is controlling its spread beyond the tumor. The team’s system solved that problem with a molecular trick: making sure the virus couldn’t spread without a molecule it can only get from the bacteria. Since the bacteria stay put in the tumor, this vital component (called a protease) isn’t available anywhere else in the body.

“Spreadable viral particles could only form in the vicinity of bacteria, which are needed to provide special machinery essential for viral maturation in the engineered virus, providing a synthetic dependence between microbes,” Singer says. That safeguard adds a second layer of control: even if the virus escapes the tumor, it won’t spread in healthy tissue.

“It is systems like these — specifically oriented towards enhancing the safety of these living therapies — that will be essential for translating these advances into the clinic,” Singer says.

Further research and clinical applications

This publication marks a significant step toward making this type of bacteria-virus system available for future clinical applications.

“As a physician-scientist, my goal is to bring living medicines into the clinic,” Pabón says. “Efforts toward clinical translation are currently underway to translate our technology out of the lab.”

Danino, Rice, Singer, and Pabón have filed a patent application (WO2024254419A2) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office related to this work.

Looking ahead, the team is testing the approach in a wider range of cancers, using different tumor types, mouse models, viruses, and payloads, with an eye to developing a “toolkit” of viral therapies that can sense and respond to specific conditions inside a cell. They are also evaluating how this system can be combined with strains of bacteria that have already demonstrated safety in clinical trials.

---

Story Source:

Materials provided by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

---

Journal Reference:

1. Zakary S. Singer, Jonathan Pabón, Hsinyen Huang, William Sun, Hongsheng Luo, Kailyn Rhyah Grant, Ijeoma Obi, Courtney Coker, Charles M. Rice, Tal Danino. Engineered bacteria launch and control an oncolytic virus. Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41551-025-01476-8

Source: Trojan horse bacteria sneak cancer-killing viruses into tumors | ScienceDaily

Nearly a quarter of people over the age of 40 experience painful osteoarthritis, making it a leading cause of disability in adults. Osteoarthritis degrades joint-cushioning cartilage, and there is currently no way of reversing this damage: the only option is to manage pain with medication, and eventually, joint replacement.

Researchers from the University of Utah, New York University and Stanford University are now demonstrating the potential for another option: gait retraining.

By making a small adjustment to the angle of their foot while walking, participants in a year-long randomized control trial experienced pain relief equivalent to medication. Critically, those participants also showed less knee cartilage degradation over that period as compared to a group that received a placebo treatment.

[…]

With support from the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies, the researchers were specifically looking at patients with mild-to-moderate osteoarthritis in the medial compartment of the knee — on the inside of the leg — which tends to bear more weight than the lateral, outside, compartment. This form of osteoarthritis is the most common, but the ideal foot angle for reducing load in the medial side of the knee differs from person to person depending on their natural gait and how it changes when they adopt the new walking pattern.

[…]

In their first two visits, participants received a baseline MRI and practiced walking on a pressure-sensitive treadmill while motion-capture cameras recorded the mechanics of their gait. This allowed the researchers to determine whether turning the patient’s toe inward or outward would reduce load more, and whether a 5° or 10° adjustment would be ideal.

This personalized analysis also screened out potential participants who could not benefit from the intervention, as none of the foot angle changes could decrease loading in their knees

[…]

Participants from both groups returned to the lab for six weekly training sessions, where they received biofeedback — vibrations from a device worn on the shin — that helped them maintain the prescribed foot angle while walking on the lab’s treadmill. After the six-week training period, participants were encouraged to practice their new gait for at least 20 minutes a day, to the point where it became natural. Periodic check-in visits showed that participants were adhering to their prescribed foot angle within a degree on average.

After a year, all participants self-reported their experience of knee pain and had a second MRI to quantitatively assess the damage to their knee cartilage.

“The reported decrease in pain over the placebo group was somewhere between what you’d expect from an over-the-counter medication, like ibuprofen, and a narcotic, like oxycontin,” Uhlrich said. “With the MRIs, we also saw slower degradation of a marker of cartilage health in the intervention group, which was quite exciting.”

Beyond the quantitative measures of effectiveness, participants in the study expressed enthusiasm for both the approach and the results. One participant said: “I don’t have to take a drug or wear a device…it’s just a part of my body now that will be with me for the rest of my days, so that I’m thrilled with.”

Participants’ ability to adhere to the intervention over long periods of time is one of its potential advantages.

[…]

Before this intervention can be clinically deployed, the gait retraining process will need to be streamlined. The motion-capture technique used to make the original foot angle prescription is expensive and time-consuming; the researchers envision this intervention to eventually be prescribed in a physical therapy clinic and retraining can happen while people go for a walk around their neighborhood.

“We and others have developed technology that could be used to both personalize and deliver this intervention in a clinical setting using mobile sensors, like smartphone video and a ‘smart shoe’,” Uhlrich said. Future studies of this approach are needed before the intervention can be made widely available to the public.

Source: One small walking adjustment could delay knee surgery for years | ScienceDaily

[…]

on the cutting edge of this field, neuroscientists have more recently developed brain implants that can turn neural signals directly into whole words. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) largely require users to physically attempt to speak, however—and that can be a slow and tiring process. But now a new development in neural prosthetics changes that, allowing users to communicate by simply thinking what they want to say.

The new system relies on much of the same technology as the more common “attempted speech” devices. Both use sensors implanted in a part of the brain called the motor cortex, which sends motion commands to the vocal tract. The brain activation detected by these sensors is then fed into a machine-learning model to interpret which brain signals correspond to which sounds for an individual user. It then uses those data to predict which word the user is attempting to say.

But the motor cortex doesn’t only light up when we attempt to speak; it’s also involved, to a lesser extent, in imagined speech. The researchers took advantage of this to develop their “inner speech” decoding device and published the results on Thursday in Cell. The team studied three people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and one with a brain stem stroke, all of whom had previously had the sensors implanted. Using this new “inner speech” system, the participants needed only to think a sentence they wanted to say and it would appear on a screen in real time. While previous inner speech decoders were limited to only a handful of words, the new device allowed participants to draw from a dictionary of 125,000 words.

[…]

“Largely, [there was] a lot of excitement about potentially being able to communicate fast again,” she says—adding that one participant was particularly thrilled by his newfound potential to interrupt a conversation—something he couldn’t do with the slower pace of an attempted speech device.

To ensure private thoughts remained private, the researchers implemented a code phrase: “chitty chitty bang bang.” When internally spoken by participants, this would prompt the BCI to start or stop transcribing.

[…]

Source: New Brain Device Is First to Read Out Inner Speech | Scientific American

Keratin-based films guide biomimetic enamel remineralization by promoting organized hydroxyapatite growth under physiological conditions. Advanced biophysical characterization confirms keratin’s structural adaptability and mineral ions-binding affinity, supporting mineral nucleation and hierarchical crystal assembly. This study establishes keratin as a promising, sustainable platform for functional enamel regeneration, offering a clinically translatable approach for repairing demineralized dental enamel lesions and restoring enamel architecture.

[…]

This study establishes a pre-clinical framework for using water-based keratin platforms to repair enamel demineralization lesions, demonstrating keratin’s potential as a cheap, abundant, and biocompatible biomaterial for functional enamel regeneration. Keratin films self-assembled into β-sheet-rich spherulitic architectures, forming organized nucleation sites that directed the growth of enamel-like mineral layers with aligned apatite nanocrystals and fluoride incorporation. The transition from β-sheets to α-helix and β-turn structures upon mineralization underscores keratin’s dynamic role in orchestrating hierarchical mineralization, mimicking natural enamel formation. These newly formed crystals exhibited significant recovery in hardness and elastic modulus, restoring both surface and subsurface mechanical integrity beyond that achievable with resin infiltration, while preserving crystalline architecture. Importantly, keratin facilitated controlled mineral phase development, transitioning ACP to organized apatite, confirming its capacity to mediate biomineralization efficiently.

Collectively, these findings establish keratin as a clinically viable, sustainable biomaterial for enamel repair, enabling functional regeneration of enamel architecture with a simple, solvent-free fabrication process. Future studies should focus on optimizing keratin’s structural tuning and functionalizing it with additional acidic domains to enhance mineral binding affinity, while conducting systematic in vitro and in vivo cellular studies to evaluate cytocompatibility, bioactivity, and integration within hard tissue environments, thereby supporting its broader application in dental tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Beyond enamel repair, keratin-based matrices hold promise for addressing bony defects, dentine hypersensitivity, and erosive tooth wear, with broad implications for dental and biomedical fields. The simplicity, scalability, and affordability of this system position keratin as a resourceful platform for advancing sustainable, clinically feasible regenerative strategies in tissue engineering and structural biomimetics.

Source: Biomimetic Mineralization of Keratin Scaffolds for Enamel Regeneration – Gamea – Advanced Healthcare Materials – Wiley Online Library