Volume 16 Issue 4, April 2021

When developing nanotechnology solutions for global health it is important to be mindful of the ethical, environmental, socio-economical, cultural and legal aspects associated with their deployment.

The nanotechnology-enabled mRNA-based vaccine platform recently approved against COVID-19 bears hope for improved vaccine development and trialling capacities in low- and middle-income countries as part of a broader global public health agenda.

Targeting of the peptide hormone relaxin to injured mouse liver, via a nanoparticle/gene therapy approach, switches pro-fibrotic hepatic macrophages to a restorative phenotype that orchestrates tissue repair.

The careful optimization of all components of a quantum emitter single photon source yields over 50% end-to-end efficiency, a benchmark for optical quantum technologies.

This Review outlines the potential applications of nanotechnology-based treatments for infectious diseases, with a specific focus on the progress and challenges in developing nanomedicines against HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.

Several globally significant infectious diseases are not yet treatable with vaccination; nanomaterials are being investigated to provide new strategies for vaccine development.

High efficiency, coherence and indistinguishability are key requirements for the application of single-photon sources for quantum technologies, but hard to achieve concurrently. A gated quantum dot in an open, tunable microcavity now can create single photons on-demand with an end-to-end efficiency of 57%, preserving coherence over microsecond-long trains of single photons.

Typically, quasiparticles are injected into superconductors at energies comparable to the pairing energy in order to gain insights into quasiparticle dynamics. Tunnelling spectroscopy of a mesoscopic superconductor under high electric field now provides insights into a regime where electrons impinge with 10⁶ times the pairing energy.

Increasing the fatigue life of shape memory alloys often compromises other mechanical properties such as yield strength and plastic deformation behaviour. Introducing a mixed nanostructure of crystalline and amorphous phases can enable superelasticity in NiTi micropillars with recoverable strain of 4.3%, yield strength of 2.3 GPa and 10⁸ reversible-phase transition cycles under a stress of 1.8 GPa.

Stochastic orbital dynamics of individually coupled Co atoms on black phosphorus enables the realization of a Boltzmann machine capable of self-adaption.

Broken inversion symmetry in a type-II Weyl semimetal TaIrTe₄ enables observation of the room-temperature nonlinear Hall effect as well as wireless radiofrequency rectification.

A measurement protocol allows the conductance and the thermocurrent of a single molecule to be determined simultaneously.

During a liquid-to-solid phase transition, a Bi–Ga alloy forms ordered nanostructured patterns on its surface.

A thin-film optical coating exhibits Fano resonance showing promising applications in structural colouring of transparent objects and hybrid thermal and photovoltaic power generation.

Self-assembled nanoribbons with extensive and collective intermolecular interactions exhibit robust mechanical properties, enabling their translation to macroscopic solid-state threads.

Tackling obesity from different angles might result in better therapeutic outcomes. Here the authors present a virus-like particle targeted to adipose tissues that combines photodynamic therapy and adipose browning induction to induce weight loss in animal models, and use photoacoustic imaging to monitor the treatment progress.

The hormone peptide relaxin attenuates liver fibrosis by inducing quiescence of activated hepatic stellar cells. In this paper the authors show that hepatic macrophages play a key role in mediating the antifibrotic effects of relaxin in animal models and propose a nanotechnology-based approach to alleviate liver fibrosis.