404 Media

2025-10-09 15:00:26

A New 'Nanoparticle Vaccine' Prevented Cancer In Mice, Study Says

Scientists have developed a unique nanoparticle vaccine that prevented the development of multiple forms of cancer in mice, reports a study published in Cell Reports Medicine on Thursday.

Eighty percent of mice that received the novel vaccine and were subsequently exposed to cancerous cells did not develop tumors and survived to the end of the 250-day long experiment. In contrast, all of the mice that received different vaccine formulations, or remained unvaccinated, developed tumors and none survived longer than 35 days.

It’s too early to know if this breakthrough will ever be applicable to human cancer prevention or treatment, but the successful demonstration in mice is a promising result for the team’s so-called “super-adjuvant” vaccine. This approach uses nanoparticles made of fatty molecules to deliver two distinct “adjuvants,” which are substances in vaccines that enhance an immune response.

“The results that we have are super exciting, and we're really looking forward to pushing forward to the next steps,” said Griffin Kane, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and first author on the paper, in a call with 404 Media. “But I think that the translation of these types of therapies from preclinical mouse models to the clinic is a very humbling experience for a lot of people and teams.”

“It’s these highlights that make it worth coming to work,” added Prabhani Atukorale, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and corresponding author on the paper, in the same call. “But I agree that the translation of these findings is key. We are not satisfied with simply publishing a paper. We want to get these into patients, and it is a humbling process because there are significant gaps.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Scientists have been working on nanoparticle-based drug designs for decades, and the field has experienced rapid progress in recent years alongside advances in nanotechnology and drug delivery pathways. Nanoparticles provide a stable platform for carrying vaccine components to key targets, increasing the efficiency of delivery to specific sites in the body and uptake by the immune system.

Atukorale’s team previously published a study on a similar vaccine that shrank and cleared tumors from mice. In their new study, the researchers adapted the nanoparticle design to achieve prophylactic protection from melanoma, pancreatic, and triple-negative breast cancer in mice, with support from the Institute for Applied Life Sciences at UMass Amherst, UMass Chan Medical School, and the National Institutes of Health.

Vaccines consist of two main components: antigens, which are substances that trigger an immune response, and adjuvants, which enhance the immune response. Like other cancer vaccines, the nanoparticle treatment delivers antigens that activate white blood cells in the immune system to help fight off specific types of tumors.

What’s new in this study is that the nanoparticles accommodated two distinct adjuvants that target different immune pathways known as STING (stimulator of interferon genes) and TLR4 (Toll-like receptor 4), which further boosts the immune response to introduced cancer cells.

Adjuvants often require very different drug delivery systems, but the nanoparticles, which are about 30 to 60 nanometers across, are big enough to house different adjuvants in their unique environments, while remaining small enough to enter lymph nodes where they can activate key immune cells.

“The big picture is that we need better adjuvants for our vaccines,” Atukorale said. “We think that we can build them using nanoparticles. This is an example in a tumor.”

One of the most exciting surprises from the study turned out to be the prolonged protection against the spread of cancer provided by the nanoparticle vaccine. The vaccinated mice that did not develop tumors during their first exposure to melanoma cells were then later injected with new metastatic cancer cells, and their immune systems fought those off too, preventing the development and spread of the tumors.

“There's long-term robust memory immunity,” said Kane.

Moreover, while the team focused on certain cancers in their experiment, the nanoparticle platform could deliver a range of specialized antigen-adjuvant combinations to target different types of tumors.

“We think that this is one of the true strengths of these strategies,” said Atukorale. “They will have much broader reach than many of the cancer-specific treatments out there.”

That said, Kane and Atukorale cautioned that their team’s work is still in early stages—and, of course, focused on mice and not people. They also noted that only a handful of cancer vaccines have been clinically approved out of thousands in development. While the new study represents an intriguing step forward, the dream of wide-ranging prophylactic cancer vaccines is many years away, assuming it can materialize at all.

“A lot of very elegant technologies have come out of labs and have not fully succeeded in patients,” Kane said. “We believe that we're building this technology towards something that would improve on what current cancer vaccines are able to deliver.”

Nanoparticles and microparticles for drug and vaccine delivery - PMC

Nanoparticles are polymeric particles in the nanometer size range whereas microparticles are particles in the micrometre size range. Both types of particle are used as drug carriers into which drugs or antigens may be incorporated in the form of ...

^{pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov}

404 Media

2025-08-06 15:01:07

Million-Year-Old Evidence of Epic Journey Near ‘Hobbit’ Island Discovered by Scientists

Scientists have discovered million-year-old artifacts made by a mysterious group of early humans on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, according to a breakthrough study published on Wednesday in Nature.

The extraordinary find pushes the archaeological record of Sulawesi back by about 800,000 years, and confirms that hominins, the broader family to which humans belong, crossed treacherous ocean passages to reach the island, where they crafted simple tools.

The tool-makers may have been related to a group of archaic humans—nicknamed “hobbits” for their short stature—that lived on nearby Flores Island. But while the hobbits left behind skeletal remains, no fossils from the Sulawesi group have been unearthed. The tools, found at a site called Calio in South Sulawesi, are the only record of their existence for now.

“The discovery of these ancient stone tools at Calio is another important piece of the puzzle in our understanding of the movements of early hominins from the edge of the Asian landmass into the isolated zone of islands known as Wallacea,” said Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University and a co-author of the new study, in an email.

“A major question remaining is the identity of the archaic humans of Sulawesi,” he added, noting that they might be Homo erectus, or descendents of this influential early human species that migrated from Africa to Asia. ”But until we have their fossils, who they were will remain a mystery.”
Stone tools dated to over 1.04 million-years-old, scale bars are 10mm. Image: M W Moore
The discovery was made by Budianto “Budi” Hakim, an Indonesian archaeologist who has spent decades searching for traces of archaic humans in Sulawesi. Hakim spotted one of the artifacts while scouring the region’s sandstone outcrops, prompting an excavation that unearthed a total of seven flaked tools crafted from chert rock. The remains of extinct elephants and pigs were also found in the sedimentary layers at the site, hinting at an ancient origin.

The team used two independent methods to date the tools, both of which placed their age at a minimum of 1.04 million years old, making the artifacts the earliest evidence for hominin occupation of Sulawesi by far.

“Budi has been searching for this evidence for much of his life, so it is very exciting indeed,” said Brumm. “But it is not so surprising that we now have evidence for hominins on Sulawesi by one million years ago; we have long suspected that there had been a very deep history of human occupation of this island based on the discovery (in 2010) of stone tools on Flores to the south that date to at least a million years ago. Sulawesi was probably where the first hominins to set foot on Flores actually came from, so it made sense to us that the human presence on Sulawesi would go back at least as far as a million years, if not considerably earlier.”

“And personally, it did not surprise me that Budi unearthed this new find,” he continued. “He is a renowned figure in Indonesian archaeology and undoubtedly has the ‘golden touch.’”

The tools are sharp-edged flakes that were probably cut from larger rocks obtained from a nearby river channel. Like many tools made by hominins across time and regions, they would have been useful for cutting and scraping materials, though their exact purpose is unknown.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
The tools “can’t tell us very much about the behaviour or cognitive capacities of these early humans, other than that they were tool-makers who clearly understood how to choose stones with suitable properties and to fracture them in a controlled way to produce a supply of usable tools,” explained Brumm. “Over the past 2.5 million years, many different hominin species (including our own, Homo sapiens) have made stone tools that are essentially indistinguishable from the Sulawesi tools.”

In addition to their mysterious identity, it is unclear how these early humans crossed ocean waters to reach these island shores, given that the shortest distance between the Asian mainland and Sulawesi would have been 30 miles, at minimum.

“This is too far to swim (in any case the ocean currents are too strong),” Brumm explained. “It is also very unlikely these archaic hominins had the cognitive ability to develop watercraft that were capable of making sea voyages, or indeed of the advanced planning required to gather resources and set sail over the horizon to an unseen land.”

“Most likely, they crossed to Sulawesi from the Asian mainland in the same way rodents and monkeys are suspected to have done; that is, by accident, perhaps as castaways on natural ‘rafts’ of floating vegetation,” he concluded.

It’s incredible to imagine these early humans getting caught up in tides or currents, perhaps stranded at sea for days, only to serendipitously wash up on a vast island that would become home to untold generations. Hakim, Brumm, and their colleagues hope to find more evidence of this long-lost population in the coming years, but for now, the stone tools offer a rare window into the lives of these accidental seafarers and their descendants.

Hominins on Sulawesi during the Early Pleistocene - Nature

Early Pleistocene artefacts at Calio suggest that Sulawesi was populated by hominins at around the same time as Flores, if not earlier.

^Nature