Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) remains a major global health threat, causing nearly 1.5 million deaths annually, making it the 13th leading cause of death. While TB is preventable and treatable, multidrug-resistant TB worsens the global health crisis, making diagnosis and treatment more complex. An even greater challenge is heteroresistance, where...

The Caribbean region is considered a coral disease hotspot, with over 20 documented diseases and syndromes affecting over 20 species of corals. One motile marine pathogen family, Vibrionaceae, which is responsible for 50% of coral diseases, is strongly thermodependent, thus warming sea-surface temperatures, driven by pollution and global climate change,...

DNA and RNA nanostructures, e.g., DNA Origami, have great potential in biological applications, including extracellular matrix scaffolds and delivery vehicles for drugs and gene therapies. While folding DNA origami under physiological conditions is plausible, significant challenges and limitations remain. For example, isothermal annealing of DNA origami...

Pain is estimated to affect about 30% of the world’s population and treatment is challenging because of issues with addiction and withdrawal which accompany many current analgesics. Human TRPV1 is a widely expressed nociceptor and is a desirable target to modulate diverse human pathophysiologies, including pain, obesity, and diabetes, among others....

Oncolytic viruses (OVs) are able to selectively infect and kill cancer cells without damaging normal cells. They can be used as a monotherapy, or they can be combined with existing cancer therapeutics for increased potency. While much progress has been made around OVs, one of their biggest limitations is their inability to successfully replicate, spread,...

The rise of artificial intelligence is changing the shape of many different fields, and ophthalmic medicine is no exception. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable results in the assisted diagnosis of ophthalmic diseases. However, they face challenges such as limited labeling and small dataset sizes. In recent years, self-supervised...

Nanoarray-based assays offer advantages over standard microarray assays such as minimal sample consumption, high efficiency, and enhanced multiplexing capacity. However, despite their potential, they face challenges such as the complexity and high cost of spotting and fabrication, as well as a lack of effective detection schemes. This impedes many practical...

As coastal or nearshore environments experience rising sea levels, warming and acidification in addition to pollution from upland watersheds, coastal cities, and industrial development, ecosystems are significantly impacted. While this is happening on a global scale, monitoring as well as solutions and mitigations need to be enacted at the local level....

Intra-abdominal adhesions, also known as postoperative peritoneal adhesions (PPA) remain a challenging issue in the US healthcare system. It is estimated that over 90% of gastrointestinal (GI) surgical procedures result in PPA formation, regardless of the location or surgical technique used. PPAs can also develop in response to tissue damage caused...

Antigen-specific immune suppression or tolerance is a highly attractive strategy to prevent inflammation-induced tissue damage in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Although there is insufficient knowledge about autoantigens in human RA, generating and expanding synovium-specific regulatory T cells, and suppressing synovium-specific follicular T-helper cells,...