Human & Animal Health

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.

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

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, want to even out the differences in size and composition of naturally derived extracellular vesicles, or EVs, to turn them into a scalable and reliable drug platform, not unlike industrially produced medication. 

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

Extracellular vesicles, or EVs, are nanoparticles released by every known cell and relay important messages across the human body — but how they exactly function is not well understood. Professors at the University of California, Davis, seek to change that.