Smart medicine最新文献

Engineered biohybrids have recently emerged as innovative biomimetic platforms for cancer therapeutic applications. Particularly, engineered photoresponsive biohybrids hold tremendous potential against tumors due to their intriguing biomimetic properties, photoresponsive ability, and enhanced biotherapeutic functions. In this review, the design principles of engineered photoresponsive biohybrids and their latest progresses for tumor therapy are summarized. Representative engineered photoresponsive biohybrids are highlighted including biomolecules-associated, cell membrane-based, eukaryotic cell-based, bacteria-based, and algae-based photoresponsive biohybrids. Representative tumor therapeutic modalities of the engineered photoresponsive biohybrids are presented, including photothermal therapy, photodynamic therapy, synergistic therapy, and tumor therapy combined with tissue regeneration. Moreover, the challenges and future perspectives of these photoresponsive biohybrids for clinical practice are discussed.

Current biomedical models fail to replicate the complexity of human biology. Consequently, almost 90% of drug candidates fail during clinical trials after decades of research and billions of investments in drug development. Despite their physiological similarities, animal models often misrepresent human responses, and instead, trigger ethical and societal debates regarding their use. The overall aim across regulatory entities worldwide is to replace, reduce, and refine the use of animal experimentation, a concept known as the Three Rs principle. In response, researchers develop experimental alternatives to improve the biological relevance of in vitro models through interdisciplinary approaches. This article highlights the emerging organ-on-a-chip technologies, also known as microphysiological systems, with a focus on models of the vasculature. The cardiovascular system transports all necessary substances, including drugs, throughout the body while in charge of thermal regulation and communication between other organ systems. In addition, we discuss the benefits, limitations, and challenges in the widespread use of new biomedical models. Coupled with patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells, organ-on-a-chip technologies are the future of drug discovery, development, and personalized medicine.

The lung is the respiratory organ of the human body, and the alveoli are the most basic functional units of the lung. Herein, a photo-responsive stretchable Janus membrane was proposed for the reconstruction of the alveolar-capillary barrier in vitro. This Janus membrane was fabricated by photocrosslinking methylacrylamide gelatin (Gelma) hydrogel and N-isoacrylamide (NIPAM) hydrogel mixed with graphene oxide (GO). The Gelma hydrogel containing large amounts of collagen provides a natural extracellular matrix environment for cell growth, while the temperature-sensitive NIPAM hydrogel combined with GO gives the membrane a light-controlled stretching property. Based on this Janus membrane, an open polydimethylsiloxane chip was established to coculture alveolar epithelial cells and vascular endothelial cells at the air-liquid interface. It was demonstrated that the alveolar epithelial cells cultured on the upper side of the Janus membrane could express epithelial cell marker protein E-cadherin and secrete alveolar surfactant. In addition, VE-cadherin, an endothelium-specific protein located at the junction between endothelial cells, was also detected in vascular endothelial cells cultured on the underside of Janus membrane. The constructed lung tissue model with the dynamically stretchable Janus membrane is well-suited for COVID-19 infection studies and drug testing.

Wound infections continuously impose a huge economic and social burden on public healthcare. Despite the effective treatment of bacteria-infected wounds after using traditional antibiotics, the misuse of antibiotics usually causes the spread of bacterial resistance and decreases therapeutic outcomes. Therefore, the development of efficient antibacterial agents is urgently needed. Nanozymes, as a new generation of artificial enzymes, combine the intrinsic abilities of nanomaterials and natural enzymes. Recently, nanozymes has been widely developed to kill bacteria and treat wound infections by catalyzing the generation of various reactive oxygen species. Thus, this new concept of "antibacterial nanozymes" will promote the further advances of connecting nanozymes and bacterial elimination. To highlight these achievements, we summarize different types of antibacterial nanozymes for wound healing. It is believed that such a promising therapeutic strategy of developing antibacterial nanozymes will make a great contribution in the field of skin regeneration. We expect that antibacterial nanozymes will play the significant roles in both basic research and clinical applications.

Stimuli-responsive "smart" hydrogel biomaterials have attracted great attention in the biomedical field, especially in designing novel on-demand drug delivery systems. As a handful natural biomaterial approved by US Food and Drug Administration, silk fibroin (SF) has unique high temperature resistance as well as tunable structural composition. These properties make it one of the most ideal candidates for on-demand drug delivery. Meanwhile, recent advances in polymer modification and nanomaterials have fostered the development of various stimuli-responsive delivery systems. Here, we first review the recent advance in designing responsive SF-based delivery systems in different stimulus sources. These systems are able to release mediators in a desired manner in response to specific stimuli in active or passive manners. We then describe applications of these specially designed responsive delivery systems in wound healing, tumor therapy, as well as immunomodulation. We also discuss the future challenges and prospects of stimuli-responsive SF-based delivery systems.

Heart diseases, especially cardiovascular diseases, have brought heavy burden on society for their high morbidity and mortality. In clinical, heart transplantation is recognized as an effective strategy to rescue the lives of patients, while it may suffer from lack of donors and possible immune responses. In view of this, tremendous efforts have been devoted to developing alternative strategies to recover the function and promote the regeneration of cardiac tissues. As an emerging field blending cell biology and material science, tissue engineering technique allows the construction of biomimetic living complexes as organ substitutes for heart repair. In this review, we will present the recent progress in cardiac tissue engineering and artificial hearts. After introducing the critical elements in cardiac tissue engineering, we will present advanced fabrication methods to achieve scaffolds with desired micro/nanostructure design as well as the applications of these bioinspired scaffolds. We will also discuss the current dilemma and possible development direction from a biomedical perspective.

High throughput biological analysis has become an important topic in modern biomedical research and clinical diagnosis. The flow encoding scheme based on the encoding microcarriers provides a feasible strategy for the multiplexed biological analysis. Different encoding characteristics invest the microcarriers with different encoding mechanisms. Biosensor analysis, drug screening, cell culture, and the construction and evaluation of bionic organ chips can be realized by decoding the microcarriers and quantifying the detection signal intensity. In this review, the encoding strategy of microcarriers was divided into the optical and non-optical encoding approaches according to their encoding elements, and the research progress of the microcarrier encoding strategy was elaborated. Finally, we summarized the biomedical applications and predicted their future prospects.

Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-based therapy has provided a promising strategy for the treatment of ischemic stroke, which is still restricted by the lack of long-term cell tracking strategy as well as the poor survival rate of stem cells in ischemic region. Herein, a dual-functional nanoprobe, cobalt protoporphyrin-induced nano-self-assembly (CPSP), has been developed through a cobalt protoporphyrin IX (CoPP) aggregation-induced self-assembly strategy, which combines CoPP and superparamagnetic iron oxide (SPION) via a simple solvent evaporation-driven method. Without any additional carrier materials, the obtained CPSP is featured with good biocompatibility and high proportions of active ingredients. The SPIONs in CPSPs form a cluster-like structure, endowing this nano-self-assembly with excellent T₂-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) imaging performance. Furthermore, the CoPP released from CPSPs could effectively protect MSCs by upregulating heme oxygenase 1 (HO-1) expression. The in vivo cell tracing capacity of CPSPs is confirmed by monitoring the migration of labeled MSCs with MR imaging in a middle cerebral artery occlusion mouse model. More importantly, the sustained release of CoPP from CPSPs improves the survival of transplanted MSCs and promotes neural repair and neurobehavioral recovery of ischemic mice. Overall, this work presents a novel dual-functional nanoagent with an ingenious design for advancing MSC-based therapy.

Prostate cancer remains the second-most common cancer diagnosed in men, despite the increasingly widespread use of serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening. The controversial clinical implications and cost benefits of PSA screening have been highlighted due to its poor specificity, resulting in a high rate of overdiagnosis and underdiagnosis. Thus, the development of novel biomarkers for prostate cancer detection remains an intriguing challenge. Urine is emerging as a source for prostate cancer biomarker discovery. Currently, new urine biomarkers already outperform serum PSA in clinical diagnosis. Meanwhile, the advances in nanotechnology have provided a suite of diagnostic tools to study prostate cancer in more detail, sparking a new era of biomarker discoveries. In this review, we envision that future prostate cancer diagnosis will probably integrate multiplex nano-diagnostic approaches to detect novel urinary biomarkers. However, challenges remain in differentiating indolent from aggressive cancers to better inform treatment decisions, and clinical translation still needs to be overcome.

Optical biosensors are platforms that translate biological information into detectable optical signals, and have extensive applications in various fields due to their characteristics of high sensitivity, high specificity, dynamic sensing, etc. The development of optical sensing materials is an important part of optical sensors. In this review, we emphasize the role of microfluidic technology in the preparation of optical sensing materials and the application of the derived optical sensors in the biomedical field. We first present some common optical sensing mechanisms and the functional responsive materials involved. Then, we describe the preparation of these sensing materials by microfluidics. Afterward, we enumerate the biomedical applications of these optical materials as biosensors in disease diagnosis, drug evaluation, and organ-on-a-chip. Finally, we discuss the challenges and prospects in this field.