Researchers from Brian Cunningham’s lab, in collaboration with researchers at Washington University, have demonstrated a new capability to detect and count individual biomolecules at low concentrations.

Children are encouraged to follow their interests and think about what they want to be when they grow up. But the scope of the careers they imagine might be limited if they don’t have exposure different possibilities, especially for those less represented in certain fields. In an effort to expose young girls to different career opportunities, Campus Middle School for Girls has been running an event called “Forum Week” since the school’s establishment in 1994.

The pivotal role of microRNA in diagnosing and monitoring cancer is well known by today’s researchers. “There have been a lot of studies in recent years linking the presence and concentration of specific microRNA sequences to clinical outcomes for people with advanced prostate cancer,” said Brian Cunningham (CGD leader/MMG), a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a program leader at the Cancer Center at Illinois.

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.

The detection and quantification of cancer-associated molecular biomarkers in body fluids, or liquid biopsies, prove minimally invasive in early cancer diagnostics. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed an approach that accelerates the detection of cancer biomarkers in samples taken at the time and place of patient care.

As health and research institutions continue to rapidly develop new methodologies for detecting SARS-CoV-2, researchers have found themselves at both forefronts of discovery and featured on the cover of the Journal of the American Chemical Society with their paper "Label-free Digital Detection of Intact Virions by Enhanced Scattering Microscopy."

Current medical diagnostics involve sending samples to laboratory facilities, which can be difficult and expensive. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have designed a desk-sized instrument that can make the same measurements at the location where the samples are collected.

A fast, low-cost technique to see and count viruses or proteins from a sample in real time, without any chemicals or dyes, could underpin a new class of devices for rapid diagnostics and viral load monitoring, including HIV and the virus that causes COVID-19.

Researchers at Illinois described the technique, called Photonic Resonator Interferometric Scattering Microscopy, or PRISM, in the journal Nature Communications.

As the numbers of those infected with COVID-19 has continued to climb, the desperate need for a vaccine was apparent. Even now with the invention and administration of several COVID-19 vaccinations, the question remains: How effective are these vaccines?