Wearable sensors that use microneedles to painlessly take samples at skin level could help personalize health care and enable precision drug dosing in real time, but many have been limited by weak signals and damage caused by friction in tissue.

A UCLA-led team developed a microneedle platform that operated continuously for six days in rats while improving signal quality and resistance to abrasion.

In preclinical studies, the technology not only tracked drug levels but also revealed impaired kidney and liver function based on how quickly drugs cleared from the animals’ systems — including identifying early kidney injury before conventional blood tests indicated a problem.

In patients developing end-stage liver disease, the damage has become too severe for the liver’s normally extraordinary regenerative capacity to repair or compensate for it. Once this “point of no return” has been reached, the only option is an organ transplant. To help bridge the time a transplant becomes available, a Wyss-Boston University-MIT team has innovated BOOST, a novel strategy that combines tissue engineering and synthetic biology to allow on-demand healthy liver growth of genetically engineered tissue constructs upon their implantation. This advanced is published in Science Advances.

Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have developed a system that can simultaneously capture and convert CO₂. The approach, they reported in Nature Energy, offers a more efficient and potentially lower-cost approach than carrying out each step separately.  

By swapping the water usually used in carbon capture and conversion systems for a different solvent, the team was able to capture CO₂ more efficiently and convert it into carbon monoxide, an industrially relevant building block for the chemical industry used to make a wide range of fuels and chemicals today. They also turned to zinc, rather than the usual silver, to catalyze the conversion reaction, bringing costs for the process down further.