Medicine  

Medical researchers have discovered how the immune system kills healthy cells while attacking infections. Their findings could one day lead to more targeted treatments for cancer and viral infections.

Medical scientists at the University of Alberta have discovered how the immune system kills healthy cells while attacking infections. Their findings could one day lead to better treatments for cancer and viral infections.

Colin Anderson, a researcher with the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, recently published his team’s findings in the peer-reviewed Journal of Immunology. His team included colleagues from the United States and the Netherlands, and graduate students from the U of A.

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Previous research has shown that when the immune system launches an aggressive attack on infected cells, healthy tissues and cells can be killed or damaged in the process. Anderson and his team discovered the mechanisms in the immune system that cause this “overkill” response.

“This opens the opportunity that one might be able to manipulate the immune-system response to block collateral damage without blocking the killing of infected cells,” Anderson explained.

“In the future, this might be important in the development of clinical treatments in cases where the immune system response needs to be harnessed. For example, in treating various viral infections, the collateral damage caused during the immune-system attack is a large part of the illness.

“In other cases, such as cancer or tumour treatments, one may want to increase the immune system’s ability to kill collateral cells, in hopes of killing tumour cells that would otherwise escape during treatment and spread elsewhere in the body. Our research suggests there are other mechanisms that could improve cancer therapy and make it more efficacious. This finding could also help us understand why certain cancer treatments are more successful than others.”

Anderson’s team discovered that “the weaponry the immune system uses to try to kill an infected or cancerous cell is not exactly the same as the weaponry that causes collateral damage to innocent bystander cells that aren’t infected.” For years, it was assumed the weaponry to kill infected cells versus healthy cells was exactly the same.

The research group is continuing work in this area to see whether they can alter the level of collateral damage to healthy cells without altering the attack on infected cells.

Anderson is a researcher in the Department of Surgery and the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology. He is also a member of the Alberta Diabetes Institute and the Alberta Transplant Institute.



SOURCE  University of Alberta

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 Solar Power  

A discovery by researchers at the University of Alberta could make solar power cheaper, more accessible by using nanoparticle-based 'ink' to make printable or spray-on solar cells.

University of Alberta researchers have found that abundant materials in the Earth’s crust can be used to make inexpensive and easily manufactured nanoparticle-based solar cells.

The research, which was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, is published in the latest issue of ACS Nano.

The discovery, several years in the making, is an important step forward in making solar power more accessible to parts of the world that are off the traditional electricity grid or face high power costs, such as the Canadian North, said researcher Jillian Buriak, a chemistry professor and senior research officer of the National Institute for Nanotechnology based on the U of A campus.

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Buriak and her team have designed nanoparticles that absorb light and conduct electricity from two very common elements: phosphorus and zinc. Both materials are more plentiful than scarce materials such as cadmium and are free from manufacturing restrictions imposed on lead-based nanoparticles.

“Half the world already lives off the grid, and with demand for electrical power expected to double by the year 2050, it is important that renewable energy sources like solar power are made more affordable by lowering the costs of manufacturing,” Buriak said.

“My goal is that a store like Ikea could sell rolls of these things with simple instructions and baggies of screws and do-dads and you could install them yourself,” said Buriak
Her team’s research supports a promising approach of making solar cells cheaply using mass manufacturing methods like roll-to-roll printing (as with newspaper presses) or spray-coating (similar to automotive painting). “Nanoparticle-based ‘inks’ could be used to literally paint or print solar cells or precise compositions,” Buriak said.

Buriak collaborated with U of A post-doctoral fellows Erik Luber of the U of A Faculty of Engineering and Hosnay Mobarok of the Faculty of Science to create the nanoparticles. The team was able to develop a synthetic method to make zinc phosphide nanoparticles, and demonstrated that the particles can be dissolved to form an ink and processed to make thin films that are responsive to light.

Buriak and her team are now experimenting with the nanoparticles, spray-coating them onto large solar cells to test their efficiency. The team has applied for a provisional patent and has secured funding to enable the next step to scale up for manufacturing.



SOURCE  University of Alberta, Top Image: Ed Kaiser, Edmonton Journal

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