Andrew Smith

The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute has been partnering with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology since 2009. Over the years, they have worked to create several citizen-science programs that bring in people over 50 who are curious about scientific research, but have never had the chance to try it. In 2023, OLLI will be partnering with different researchers across the Illinois campus to introduce a new workshop “What’s in my blood? Genomics Testing and You.”

Despite recent years’ dramatic improvements in cancer treatment, cancer remains second only to heart disease as a leading cause of death for Americans. But a new Nature Communications paper has reported exactly the kind of breakthrough that cancer patients yearn for: development of a highly sensitive new method for performing a liquid biopsy that can identify tiny numbers of individual cancer molecules.

Researchers who focus on fat know that some adipose tissue is more prone to inflammation-related comorbidities than others, but the reasons why are not well understood. Thanks to a new analytical technique, scientists are getting a clearer view of the microenvironments found within adipose tissue associated with obesity. This advance may illuminate why some adipose tissues are more prone to inflammation – leading to diseases like type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disorders – and help direct future drug therapies to treat obesity.

Whether healthy or diseased, human cells exhibit behaviors and processes that are largely dictated by growth factor molecules, which bind to receptors on the cells. For example, growth factors tell the cells to divide, move, and when to die—a process known as apoptosis.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Mayo Clinic have engineered a new type of molecular probe that can measure and count RNA in cells and tissue without organic dyes.  The probe is based on the conventional fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) technique, but it relies on compact quantum dots to illuminate molecules and diseased cells rather than fluorescent dyes.

With targeted drug and gene therapies, finding the target cells is only half the battle. Once these agents reach a cell’s surface, they still have to get inside and do their job.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers recently received a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a new assay technology that could determine the effectiveness of cancer drug treatments and aid in disease prognosis. Led by Illinois Bioengineering Assistant Professor Andrew Smith, the team is focusing on detecting nucleic acid-based biomarkers in a single drop of a cancer patient's blood.

MNTL & IGB Team Up to Develop Use-at-Home Sample Collection Assay for Cancer Patients

Courtesy of Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory.