A new collaborative study from the Wyss Institute leveraged a “breathing” human lung alveolus chip model of influenza A infection developed in the group of Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., drug delivery platforms advanced by Natalie Artzi, Ph.D. and her group, as well as state-of-the-art CRISPR technology. The team designed CRISPR machinery targeting a strongly conserved sequence in IAV’s genome, packaging it up in tiny nanoparticles with affinity to lung epithelial cells, and delivering the loaded particles to lung epithelial cells lining a microfluidic channel in the Lung Chip that were infected with a pandemic IAV. They demonstrated that this system better mimics human IAV infection than other preclinical models and enables assessing the efficacy and safety of CRISPR RNA therapies in a more clinically relevant way than earlier approaches.

The dairy industry has been plagued by a persistent global problem for decades – bacterial infection of cow udders that significantly reduces milk production. Antibiotics have been used to treat the infection, called bovine mastitis, but there is rising antibiotic resistance and concerns around milk contamination from antibiotic residues. Now, a team of international researchers has developed alternatives to antibiotics that prevent infection through a novel mechanism they discovered. These alternatives have attracted interest from several agricultural companies in Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and New Zealand seeking substitutes that are safer and more environmentally friendly than existing compounds in preventing bovine mastitis. The scientists were led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), in collaboration with the Antimicrobial Resistance Interdisciplinary Research Group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) research enterprise in Singapore.