New kidney research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine is raising concerns that long-term use of drugs commonly prescribed to treat high-blood pressure and heart failure could be contributing to kidney damage.

Patients should continue taking the medications, which include the well-known and widely used ACE inhibitors, the researchers say. But the scientists are urging studies to better understand the drugs’ long-term effects.

Our studies show that renin-producing cells are responsible for the damage. We are now focusing on understanding how these cells, which are so important to defend us from drops in blood pressure and maintain our well-being, undergo such transformation and induce kidney damage. What is needed is to identify what substances these cells make that lead to uncontrolled vessel growth.

A new work by the Nanomol Group, belonging to the CIBER-BBN network, together with a team from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, presents new nanovesicles capable of crossing biological barriers such as cell membranes, while maintaining their sensing capacity, which makes them attractive probes for intracellular detection of biomarkers.

“The development of probes capable of sensing the biological environment and signaling the presence of a specific target molecule is a challenge with relevance in a variety of biomedical applications, from drug delivery to diagnostic tools,” says Mariana Köber, ICMAB researcher and corresponding author of the study, together with Nora Ventosa, from ICMAB, and Alessandro Porchetta, from the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

This work, which has been published in Advanced Functional Materials, presents the design of fluorescent nanovesicles functionalized with biomimetic DNA capable of translating their binding to a target molecule into an optical output, through a change in Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) and fluorescent emission.