Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: chemistry – Page 36

A team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania introduced a novel wet chemical etching process that modifies the surface of conventional metal powders used in 3D printing.

In a significant advancement for metal additive manufacturing, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and their academic partners have developed a groundbreaking technique that enhances the optical absorptivity of metal powders used in 3D printing.

The innovative approach, which involves creating nanoscale surface features on metal powders, promises to improve the efficiency and quality of printed metal parts, particularly for challenging materials like copper and tungsten, according to researchers.

Additive manufacturing (AM) — more commonly known as 3D printing — has transformed the way products are designed and produced, allowing for the creation of complex geometries and customized components that traditional manufacturing methods struggle to achieve. However, one of the persistent challenges in laser powder-bed fusion (LPBF) metal 3D printing is the high reflectivity of certain metals, which can lead to inefficient energy absorption during the printing process and can even damage some printing machines. This inefficiency often results in inadequate print quality and increased energy consumption, according to researchers.

Continue reading “New technique enhances absorptivity of powders for metal 3D printing” | >

Despite its almost perfect anti-aging profile, rapamycin exerts one significant limitation – inappropriate physicochemical properties. Therefore, we have decided to utilize virtual high-throughput screening and fragment-based design in search of novel mTOR inhibiting scaffolds with suitable physicochemical parameters. Seven lead compounds were selected from the list of obtained hits that were commercially available (4, 5, and 7) or their synthesis was feasible (1, 2, 3, and 6) and evaluated in vitro and subsequently in vivo. Of all these substances, only compound 3 demonstrated a significant cytotoxic, senolytic, and senomorphic effect on normal and cancerous cells. Further, it has been confirmed that compound 3 is a direct mTORC1 inhibitor. Last but not least, compound 3 was found to exhibit anti-SASP activity concurrently being relatively safe within the test of in vivo tolerability. All these outstanding results highlight compound 3 as a scaffold worthy of further investigation.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

Read more | >

Next Generation Biomanufacturing Technologies — Dr. Leonard Tender, Ph.D. — Biological Technologies Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — DARPA

Dr. Leonard Tender, Ph.D. is a Program Manager in the Biological Technologies Office at DARPA (https://www.darpa.mil/staff/dr-leonar…) where his research interests include developing new methods for user-defined control of biological processes, and climate and supply chain resilience.

Prior to coming to DARPA, Dr. Tender was a principal investigator and led the Laboratory for Molecular Interfaces in the Center for Bio/Molecular Science and Engineering at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. There, among other accomplishments, he facilitated numerous international collaborations with key external stakeholders in academia, industry, and government and his highly interdisciplinary research team, comprised of electrochemists, microbiologists, and engineers, is widely recognized for its many contributions to the field of microbial electrochemistry.

Continue reading “Dr. Leonard Tender, Ph.D. — Biological Technologies Office, DARPA — Next Generation Biomanufacturing” | >

Fortunately, the past decade has experienced a boom, with over 200 startups bringing novel cancer therapies—primarily antibodies, viruses, or cells—into clinical trials aiming to find alternatives to toxic chemotherapy. Despite these innovations, chemotherapy remains an essential yet toxic part of cancer care. In Pittsburgh, a small team of scientist-entrepreneurs and oncologists started meeting every Friday morning before work, collaborating to search for a new chemistry, one that could replace toxic chemotherapies. Their search soon focused on compelling research about novel ultra-small nanomedicine chemistry that carried potent drugs deep into solid tumors while sparing healthy organs.

This new nanomedicine chemistry fascinated Dr. Sam Rothstein, a scientist-entrepreneur with 20+ years of nanomedicine research experience spanning academia and industry. “We could make a real positive impact on patients,” says Rothstein. “We know that nanomedicines, which keep potent therapies out of healthy organs, improve quality of life. But this novel ultrasmall chemistry could go even further, saving lives by reaching remote cancer cells that current therapies can’t touch.”

Dr. Rothstein set to work building a new company, calling on connections made over a 10+-year career as a life science startup CEO and CSO, where he founded and grew two nanomedicine startups from academic discoveries. After months of market, regulatory, and business research, Duo Oncology was born.

Read more | >

Dr. Jim Burch: “With these precise measurements, the composition of the gases will reveal the story of the interior and whether the conditions for life exist beneath the icy surface of Europa.”

Will we find the building blocks of life, and potentially signs of life, on Jupiter’s moon, Europa? This is what the nine instruments onboard the recently launched NASA Europa Clipper mission hopes to address, with two being developed by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the MAss Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration (MASPEX) and Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS). These two instruments hold the potential to help researchers determine the habitability of Europa and whether the small moon could support life as we know it.

The goal of MASPEX is to investigate the molecules that leave Europa’s surface, which occur either from Jupiter’s intense radiation interacting with the surface or emanating from Europa’s subsurface ocean that lies beneath its icy crust. MASPEX will accomplish this by collecting gases and stripping the ions to determine the types and sizes of the molecules present in the gases. Through this, MASPEX will help scientists better understand the chemical composition of Europa’s atmosphere, icy surface, and subsurface ocean.

Read more | >

Programmable quantum computers have the potential to efficiently simulate increasingly complex molecular structures, electronic structures, chemical reactions, and quantum mechanical states in chemistry that classical computers cannot. As the molecule’s size and complexity increase, so do the computational resources required to model it.

Read more | >

All proteins are composed of chains of amino acids, which generally fold up into compact globules with specific shapes. The folding process is governed by interactions between the different amino acids—for example, some of them carry electrical charges—so the sequence determines the structure. Because the structure in turn defines a protein’s function, deducing a protein’s structure is vital for understanding many processes in molecular biology, as well as for identifying drug molecules that might bind to and alter a protein’s activity.

Protein structures have traditionally been determined by experimental methods such as x-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. But researchers have long wished to be able to predict a structure purely from its sequence—in other words, to understand and predict the process of protein folding.

For many years, computational methods such as molecular dynamics simulations struggled with the complexity of that problem. But AlphaFold bypassed the need to simulate the folding process. Instead, the algorithm could be trained to recognize correlations between sequence and structure in known protein structures and then to generalize those relationships to predict unknown structures.

Read more | >

A Ludwig Cancer Research study has punctured a longstanding assumption about the source of the most common type of DNA mutation seen in the genome—one that contributes to many genetic diseases, including cancer.

Led by Ludwig Oxford Leadership Fellow Marketa Tomkova, postdoc Michael McClellan, Assistant Member Benjamin Schuster-Böckler and Associate Investigator Skirmantas Kriaucionis, the study has implications not only for basic cancer biology but also for such things as assessments of carcinogenic risk associated with environmental factors and our understanding of the emergence of drug resistance during . Its findings are reported in the current issue of Nature Genetics.

The mutation in question—in which cytosine ©, one of the four bases of DNA that spell out our genes, is erroneously switched to thymine (T)—was thought to be primarily the result of a spontaneous chemical reaction with water. This reaction, deamination, is about twice as likely to happen when a cytosine is chemically tagged by the addition of a molecule known as a to create 5-methylcytosine, which occurs in DNA at so-called “CpG” positions, where C is followed by the base guanine (G).

Read more | >