University of Porto

A new light-driven cancer therapy uses LEDs and tin nanoflakes to kill tumors safely and affordably. Developed by teams in Texas and Portugal, it eliminates up to 92% of skin cancer cells without harming healthy ones. Scientists have developed a promising cancer therapy that uses LED light and ultra-thin flakes of tin to eliminate cancer cells while protecting healthy tissue. Unlike traditional chemotherapy and other invasive treatments, this new method avoids the painful side effects patients often endure. The breakthrough comes from a partnership between The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Porto in Portugal, made possible through the UT Austin Portugal Program. The collaboration aims to make light-based cancer therapies more accessible and affordable. Current versions of these treatments rely on expensive materials, specialized lab setups, and powerful lasers that can sometimes damage surrounding tissue. By switching to LEDs and introducing tin-based "SnOx nanoflakes" ("Sn" is the chemical symbol for tin), the researchers have created a safer and potentially low-cost alternative. LED Light and Nanoflakes Team Up Against Cancer "Our goal was to create a treatment that is not only effective but also safe and accessible," said Jean Anne Incorvia, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the leaders on the project. "With the combination of LED light and SnOx nanoflakes, we've developed a method to precisely target cancer cells while leaving healthy cells untouched." In a recent study published in ACS Nano, the approach proved highly effective against both colorectal and skin cancer cells. After only 30 minutes of exposure, the LED-driven treatment destroyed up to 92% of skin cancer cells and 50% of colorectal cancer cells, while leaving healthy human skin cells unharmed. The results highlight the therapy's precision and safety. A Safer Alternative to Conventional Cancer Treatments Cancer remains the second-leading cause of death worldwide, and many existing treatments come with severe side effects. Scientists across the globe are exploring new methods to make therapies safer and more targeted. One of the most promising is near-infrared photothermal therapy, which uses light to heat and destroy cancer cells without the need for surgery or toxic drugs. This principle forms the foundation of the UT Austin-Portugal team's research. Having shown strong early results, the researchers are now focused on understanding how light and heat interact in the process and on testing other materials that might enhance the treatment. They also plan to design practical medical devices that can deliver the therapy directly to patients. Bringing Light-Based Cancer Care to Patients "Our ultimate goal is to make this technology available to patients everywhere, especially places where access to specialized equipment is limited, with fewer side effects and lower cost," said Artur Pinto, a researcher at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and lead researcher of the project in Portugal. "For skin cancers in particular, we envision that one day, treatment could move from the hospital to the patient's home. A portable device could be placed on the skin after surgery to irradiate and destroy any remaining cancer cells, reducing the risk of recurrence." Incorvia and Pinto first teamed up through the UT Austin Portugal Program in 2021. Since then, they have exchanged visits between Texas and Portugal and combined their expertise to explore how two-dimensional materials can be used to advance cancer therapies. Expanding the Research Frontier Building on their success, the team recently received additional funding through the UT Austin Portugal Program to create an implant for breast cancer patients using the same LED and nanoflake technology. Their continued collaboration could pave the way for more personalized, affordable, and pain-free cancer treatments in the near future. Other co-authors of the article are: Ph.D. student Hui-Ping Chang (led development of the nanoflakes) and undergraduate student Eva Nance of The University of Texas at Austin; Filipa A.L.S. Silva (performed biological characterization), Susana G. Santos (supervised the work) and professor Fernão Magalhães (contributed to securing funding) of Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto; and José R. Fernandes of the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, who developed the LED systems. The UT Austin Portugal Program is a long-standing science and technology partnership between UT and the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT). Portugal has similar partnerships with two other U.S. universities -- the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University -- and its 17-year collaboration with UT was recently renewed for another five years.

TUESDAY, Dec. 17, 2024 -- There’s fungus among us, and it might be making allergies and asthma worse. People with allergy sniffles and asthma have different fungal colonies in their noses than folks who don’t suffer respiratory allergies, researchers report Dec. 16 in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology . “We showed that allergic rhinitis samples displayed a significantly higher fungal diversity and a different fungal community structure compared to those of healthy controls,” said researcher Dr. Luís Delgado with the University of Porto in Portugal. For the study, researchers took nasal swabs from 214 children and young adults being treated at an immunology and asthma clinic in Porto. Researchers sequenced the fungal DNA they found, and compared it to samples taken from 125 healthy people. They detected common fungi that are known to promote allergies or disease in humans. “This suggests that the nasal cavity is a major reservoir for fungi that could be involved in allergic rhinitis and asthma,” Delgado said in a journal news release. What’s more, patients with respiratory diseases had more diverse and richer fungal colonies in their nose, particularly those with allergies and asthma combined. This could indicate that the fungi are affecting the immune environment in the nose. “However, we could not control all patient-specific variables, such as disease severity and related treatment levels, and patients were sampled at a single time,” Delgado cautioned. Follow-up studies will focus on those variables, he said. Future research could also see if lowering fungal levels in the nose might improve allergy or asthma symptoms. Whatever your topic of interest, subscribe to our newsletters to get the best of Drugs.com in your inbox.

Using ancestry decomposition techniques an international research team has revealed a deeply divergent ancestry among admixed populations from the Angolan Namib desert. This unique genetic heritage brings the researchers closer to understanding the distribution of genetic variation in the broader region of southern Africa before the spread of food production. Using ancestry decomposition techniques an international research team has revealed a deeply divergent ancestry among admixed populations from the Angolan Namib desert. This unique genetic heritage brings the researchers closer to understanding the distribution of genetic variation in the broader region of southern Africa before the spread of food production. Africa is the birthplace of modern humans and the continent with the highest level of genetic diversity. While ancient DNA studies are revealing some aspects of the genetic structure of Africa before the spread of food production, issues concerning DNA preservation have limited the insights from ancient DNA. Hoping to find clues in modern populations, researchers from a Portuguese-Angolan TwinLab ventured into the Angolan Namib desert -- a remote, multi-ethnic region where different traditions met. "We were able to locate groups which were thought to have disappeared more than 50 years ago," states Jorge Rocha, a population geneticist from Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos (CIBIO, University of Porto) who led the fieldwork, together with Angolan anthropologists Samuel and Teresa Aço from the Centro de Estudos do Deserto (CEDO). Among the communities the team encountered are the Kwepe, a pastoral group who used to speak a language known as Kwadi. "Kwadi was a click-language that shared a common ancestor with the Khoe languages spoken by foragers and herders across southern Africa," explains Anne-Maria Fehn, a linguist from CIBIO who participated in the fieldwork and was able to interview what may well be the last two speakers of Kwadi. "Khoe-Kwadi languages have been linked to a prehistoric migration of eastern African pastoralists," adds Rocha, whose research focuses on southern African population history. In addition, the team contacted Bantu-speaking groups that are part of the dominant pastoral tradition of southwest Africa, as well as marginalized groups whose origins have been associated with a foraging tradition, distinct from that of the neighboring Kalahari peoples, and whose original language was supposedly lost. Modern DNA research can complement ancient DNA studies The team's new study shows that the inhabitants of the Angolan Namib are quite divergent from other modern populations but also highly structured among themselves. "In agreement with our previous studies on the maternally-inherited DNA, most genome-wide diversity segregates according to socio-economic status. A lot of our efforts were placed in understanding how much of this local variation and global excentricity was caused by genetic drift -- a random process that disproportionally affects small populations -- and by admixture from vanished populations," says Sandra Oliveira, a researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland who worked with these populations during her PhD and post-doc studies with Rocha and Mark Stoneking at CIBIO and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany. The team demonstrated that besides the high impact of genetic drift, which contributed to differences among neighboring groups of different socio-economic status, the descendants of Kwadi speakers and the marginalized communities of the Namib Desert retain a unique Pre-Bantu ancestry that is only found in populations from the Namib desert. Mark Stoneking, who contributed to the earliest genome-wide studies on southern African foragers and participated in this study, says: "Previous studies revealed that foragers from the Kalahari desert descend from an ancestral population who was the first to split from all other extant humans. Our results consistently place the newly identified ancestry within the same ancestral lineage but suggest that the Namib-related ancestry diverged from all other southern African ancestries, followed by a split of northern and southern Kalahari ancestries." With this new information, the researchers could reconstruct the fine-scale histories of contact emerging from the migration of Khoe-Kwadi-speaking pastoralists and Bantu-speaking farmers into southern Africa. Moreover, the study demonstrates that modern DNA research targeting understudied regions of high ethnolinguistic diversity can complement ancient DNA studies in probing the deep genetic structure of the African continent.