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The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is one of the body's most selective gatekeepers, a dense wall of blood vessel cells, astrocytes, and pericytes that keeps most molecules, pathogens, and particles out of the brain. That's great news for brain health, but a big problem for trying to deliver drugs, and a growing concern for environmental scientists who report finding nanoplastics inside human brain tissue. Somehow, certain nanoparticles are getting through. The question is: which ones, and how?

Every commute, every idling engine, every worn brake pad sheds a cloud of ultrafine particles into the air. These are tens to hundreds of nanometers across, too small to see, too small for the lungs to filter, and small enough to cross into the bloodstream and eventually the brain.

Extracellular vesicles (EV) shuttle signals between cells, carry tumor biomarkers through the bloodstream, and are increasingly attractive as drug-delivery vehicles. But there's a pretty big catch: natural EVs are a heterogenous mess. Even a "pure" preparation from a single cell line contains dozens of subpopulations and hundreds of overlapping surface proteins, making it nearly impossible to say which protein does what. For a field trying to turn EVs into precision therapeutics, this is a huge problem.

This article was originally published here.

The University of California, Davis College of Engineering has selected Rachel Mizenko, who earned her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering in 2024, to receive the Zuhair A. Munir Award for best doctoral dissertation for her groundbreaking research with extracellular vesicles.

Prof. Carney, Rachel Mizenko, and Hannah O'Toole attended the excellent ISEV 2025 conference in Vienna, Austria. 

Rachel presented her work on examining liposome/EV fusion with a suite of single particle techniques, while Hannah shared her efforts towards engineering probiotic bacterial EVs with therapeutic lipids. Randy presented on the lab's recent efforts towards single EV lipidomic analysis, as well as on EV heterogeneity for the Education Day event. 

Elizabeth Hale has received a prestigious T32 Pre-Doctoral Research Training Program Scholar Award from the UC Davis NIEHS training program "Advanced Training in Environmental Health Sciences" to study the health effects of airborne nanoplastics.

Link to the original article published by Matt Marcure can be found here.

Biomedical engineering alum Anna Kolesov, who graduated with a bachelor's in June, has received the 2024 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research from the University of California, Davis.

Rachel Mizenko successfully defended her thesis titled, "EV heterogeneity: an essential feature for intercellular communication in health and disease and an underutilized resource in the clinic."