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Mosquito bites kill an estimated 1-2 million people every year. It is not the mosquitoes’ fault, though—it's the pathogens they transmit that are lethal, not the bites themselves. Nets and insecticides can help, but they can also be costly, logistically difficult to distribute, and not particularly green. So alternative strategies to prevent disease transmission are needed.

Wolbachia are bacteria that reside in insect cells and have a very complicated relationship with their hosts. They can render mosquitoes resistant to certain pathogens, and they can reduce mosquitoes' lifespans, which is significant because it is often the older mosquitoes that transmit the pathogens that make us sick. Wolbachia infect up to 76 percent of the 2-5 million insect species on Earth—but not, of course, the mosquito species that carry dengue fever or malaria. That would be far too convenient.

So researchers have been trying to infect disease-carrying mosquitoes with Wolbachia in the lab and then let these infected mosquitoes out into the wild to mate with and infect disease-carrying strains in order to reduce disease transmission. This has in fact already happened in northeastern Australia, where researchers spent four years maintaining Wolbachia in mosquito cells in the lab before letting infected mosquitoes loose in January 2011 to infect wild Aedes aegypti, the mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever. The trial is going so well that it is being repeated in Vietnam.

This is your brain on drugs, placed in a brain-shaped mold, and refrigerated overnight.

skpy

Under normal circumstances, antibodies recognize things that (in molecular terms) are big, like parts of bacteria and viruses that invade our bodies. That's largely because of the way that antibodies are selected for during an immune response. But by playing a bit of a trick on the immune system, it's possible to generate antibodies that attach to smaller molecules, ones that contain only a few dozen atoms. This has been used to do things like create antibodies that act like catalysts for chemical reactions.

The ability to create antibodies that specifically bind to small molecules has raised hopes that they'll prove useful for a very challenging medical problem, namely drug addiction. Antibodies that latch on to drugs could keep them away from their sites of action in the brain, blocking any rewarding high. So far, the results haven't been as promising as the idea, but a new vaccine against heroin appears to do better specifically because it's designed to work with how the drug is processed by the body.

The immune system is able to produce many antibodies that recognize the pathogens it is currently facing for a simple reason: antibody-producing cells can sense when their antibodies are sticking to something. This process works because these cells stick a lot of antibodies on their surface. When they stick to an invader like a virus, it creates a cluster of antibodies in the same area on the cell's surface, all of them stuck to a single virus. This clustering is enough to trigger a signal that tells the cell that its antibody is working.

This is the sort of thing they're making a mold of.

Emil Alexov, Clemson University

Biology and nanotechnology are moving ever closer together. Ars recently wrote about the use of nanoparticles to aid delivery of stem cells in cardiac therapy. Now, Swiss researchers have developed nanoparticles that can detect, and one day could combat, viruses.

When viruses enter the human body, the immune system responds to their presence. This triggers a sophisticated chain of events that leads to production of antibodies specific to the virus. Depending on the swiftness and effectiveness of the response, there are usually three possibilities: viruses are eliminated before they cause damage, they are eliminated after the person suffers a bout of sickness, or, in the worst case scenario, the virus spreads uncontrolled.

One option for combating viral infections is to develop “artificial” antibodies. These antibodies can have two uses: they can be used to detect infections and, if produced at large enough scale, they can be used to combat infections.

Heart-related diseases are the leading cause of death in the industrialized world. Cardiac stem cell therapy is a promising new way of reducing those numbers, but its application has proven to be less effective than hoped. Now researchers at Stanford University have developed nanoparticles that can be used to image stem cells implanted into the heart. They claim this will help improve the efficiency of these transplants drastically.

Stem cell therapy uses cells that have the ability to transform into a wide variety of mature cell types. When implanted in the heart, for instance, they can transform into heart cells. This ability can be used to repair injured or diseased parts of the heart. Sadly, current methods of introducing stem cells rely on trial and error.

Let’s say, for instance, that a patient suffers a heart attack, which leaves some of his heart cells injured. To help the heart heal, the patient is first put into an MRI scanner to locate the areas of the heart that need repair. Once those are determined, doctors use the scan to implant new stem cells into these regions. After implantation, the patient is returned to the MRI to determine the location and number of implanted cells—if they’re not where they need to be, the patient is returned to surgery. This is exhaustively repeated.