A Boost for Cancer Immunotherapy One promising strategy to treat cancer is stimulating the body’s own immune system to attack tumors. However, tumors are very good at suppressing the immune system, so these types of treatments don’t work for all patients. MIT engineers have now come up with a wa

Researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi have developed a new light-based nanotechnology that could improve how certain cancers are detected and treated, offering a more precise and potentially less harmful alternative to chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. The study advances photothermal therapy, a treatment approach that uses light to generate heat inside tumors and destroy cancer cells.

The research is published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

The NYU Abu Dhabi team designed tiny, biocompatible and biodegradable nanoparticles that carry a dye activated by near-infrared light. When exposed to this light, the particles heat up, damaging tumor tissue while minimizing harm to healthy cells. Near-infrared light was chosen specifically as it penetrates the body to greater depth than visible light, thereby enabling treatment of tumors that are not close to the surface.

Impressive leap forwards for DNA origami: an elegant staple strand proximity ligation method for tracking DNA origami pharmacokinetics in vivo! This approach even allows analysis of stability of subregions within a DNA origami nanostructure. I think DNA origami has a lot of therapeutic potential, so it is exciting to see this solution to one of its translational barriers. Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-025-02091-z Paper title: “Resolving DNA origami structural integrity and pharmacokinetics in vivo”

Using origami samples in test tubes, we sequentially performed ligation, PCR and polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE; Fig. 2a). For both ^Wrod and ^Lrod, amplification bands appeared only after ligation (Supplementary Fig. 3) and matched the sizes of single-LSP controls (Fig. 2d, g). When the origami was heat denatured before ligation, no LSP bands were detected (Fig. 2e, h), confirming that proximity ligation requires intact structures. By contrast, we showed that scaffold-targeted qPCR or origamiFISH assays^37,38 still detected DNA regardless of the structural state (Fig. 2e, h), emphasizing their inability to distinguish intact origami from degraded origami.

Previous studies have shown that the coating of DNA nanostructures with the oligolysine-PEG polymer can protect them against nucleases and denaturation in low-salt environments, potentially increasing their stability in vivo²³. Since PEGylation confers a physical barrier for the interaction of enzymes with DNA helices, we hypothesized that the ligase might also have decreased accessibility to PEGylated origamis. However, our in vitro experiments with PEGylated ^PEG-Lrod showed comparable ligation and amplification efficiencies to the bare ^Lrod (Supplementary Fig. 4). Another approach to enhance lattice-based origami stability in low-salt buffers and improved resistance to nucleases is sequence-specific covalent UV crosslinking²⁶. We tested the application of the PLASTIQ protocol to a crosslinked version of the ^Lrod (^UV-Lrod) with the same LSPs as ^Lrod. We observed a similar amplification pattern when compared to the non-crosslinked ^Lrod after PAGE electrophoresis of the pooled PCR-amplified LSPs (Extended Data Fig. 1).

Together, these results demonstrate that PLASTIQ reliably detects DNA origami integrity at the single-helix level for both wireframe and lattice designs, and that it is compatible with PEGylated or UV-crosslinked nanostructures.