Two studies out of the MIT news office:
One study looks at the mechanics of the beads that form on dripping saliva:
The researchers discovered that the bead formation depends on a delicate balance of two ratios: the viscous force compared to inertial force and the relaxation time compared to the capillary time. The researchers reported their findings in the June 6 issue of Nature Physics.
“What makes this result a breakthrough is that bead formation is more complicated than a lot of people had assumed. The insight that inertia matters is a surprise. Earlier attempts to explain this phenomenon without inertia are either wrong or assume inappropriate physics,” says Yuriko Renardy, professor of mathematics at Virginia Tech University, who was not involved in the research.
Understanding how these beads arise could enable researchers to design systems that precisely control the formation of the beads, leading to improvements in various technologies, such as inkjet printing. The information also might be used to develop drug-dispensing systems for patients with certain disorders that require precise doses of medication depending on daily blood measurements.
Another lab is trying a new approach to t-cell therapy:
To avoid toxic side effects, they designed drug-carrying pouches made of fatty membranes that can be attached to sulfur-containing molecules normally found on the T-cell surface.
In the Nature Medicine study, the researchers injected T cells, each carrying about 100 pouches loaded with the interleukins IL-15 and IL-21, into mice with lung and bone marrow tumors. Once the cells reached the tumors, the pouches gradually degraded and released the drug over a weeklong period. The drug molecules attached themselves to receptors on the surface of the same cells that carried them, stimulating them to grow and divide.
Within 16 days, all of the tumors in the mice treated with T cells carrying the drugs disappeared. Those mice survived until the end of the 100-day experiment, while mice that received no treatment died within 25 days, and mice that received either T cells alone or T cells with injections of interleukins died within 75 days.