Discovery of peptides for ligand-mediated delivery of mRNA lipid nanoparticles to cystic fibrosis lung epithelia.

For cystic fibrosis patients, a lung-targeted gene therapy would significantly alleviate pulmonary complications associated with morbidity and mortality. However, mucus in the airways and cell entry pose huge delivery barriers for local gene therapy. Here, we used phage display technology to select for and identify mucus- and cell-penetrating peptides against primary human bronchial epithelial cells from cystic fibrosis patients cultured at the air-liquid interface.

Challenges to School Success Among Children in U.S. Military Families.

Introduction: More than 90% of children in military families attend civilian schools that may lack understanding of the unique experiences and stressors of military life. School success in children of military families has important implications on future academic achievement, health outcomes, and military groups; yet there has not been an examination of challenges of school success among children of military families in the United States using nationally representative data.

Materials And Methods: Data captured in the 2021-2022 National Survey of Children's Health, limited to children aged 6 to 17 years, were used to examine the association between child's caregiver military status and challenges of school success: lack of school engagement measured through caring about school and completing schoolwork, school absenteeism, and grade repetition (n = 60,599).

Optimization of ionizable lipids for aerosolizable mRNA lipid nanoparticles.

Although mRNA lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are highly effective as vaccines, their efficacy for pulmonary delivery has not yet fully been established. A major barrier to this therapeutic goal is their instability during aerosolization for local delivery. This imparts a shear force that degrades the mRNA cargo and therefore reduces cell transfection.

Passivated Impedimetric Sensors for Immobilization-Free Pathogen Detection by Isothermal Amplification and Melt Curve Analysis.

The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic demonstrates that the capacity of centralized clinical diagnosis laboratories represents a significant limiting factor in the global fight against the newly emerged virus. Scaling up these capacities also requires simple and robust methods for virus diagnosis to be easily driven by untrained personnel in a point-of-care (POC) environment. The use of impedance sensors reduces the complexity and costs of diagnostic instruments and increases automation of diagnosis processes.

Manufacturing Stable Bacteriophage Powders by Including Buffer System in Formulations and Using Thin Film Freeze-drying Technology.

Purpose: Bacteriophage (phage) therapy has re-gained attention lately given the ever-increasing prevalence of multi-drug resistance 'super-bugs'. To develop therapeutic phage into clinically usable drug products, the strategy of solidifying phage formulations has been implemented to diversify the dosage forms and to overcome the storage condition limitations for liquid phage formulations.

Method: In our work, we hypothesize and tested that an advanced technology, thin film freeze-drying (TFFD), can be used to produce phage containing dry powders without significantly losing phage viability.

Aerosolizable Lipid Nanoparticles for Pulmonary Delivery of mRNA through Design of Experiments.

Messenger RNA is a class of promising nucleic acid therapeutics to treat a variety of diseases, including genetic diseases. The development of a stable and efficacious mRNA pulmonary delivery system would enable high therapeutic concentrations locally in the lungs to improve efficacy and limit potential toxicities. In this study, we employed a Design of Experiments (DOE) strategy to screen a library of lipid nanoparticle compositions to identify formulations possessing high potency both before and after aerosolization.

Quantitative PCR of T7 Bacteriophage from Biopanning.

This protocol describes the use of quantitative PCR (qPCR) to enumerate T7 phages from phage selection experiments (i.e., "biopanning").