Engineers TV

Ponti Design Studio has revealed a concept design of an electric double-decker driverless tram to hit the roads of post-Covid Hong Kong. Dubbed Island, the giant vehicle features large circular benches inside where passengers sit facing outwards, while the exteriors reach back to Hong Kong buildings. 

The vehicle’s curved windows and see-through top let the sunshine in during the day, allowing passengers to enjoy the city view at night. According to the website, the interiors are sleek and comfortable, with charcoal gray walls, cushioned seats, wooden floors, and trims with a natural finish. Island won the 2020 GIDA Design Award. 

The concept aims to have people use public transportation more instead of their private cars and other means of transportation, which people have been avoiding since the pandemic first hit almost three years ago, according to dezeen.

'Social distancing hard to achieve'

"This is especially important in the densely populated city of Hong Kong, where social distancing is hard to achieve," said Italian-born designer Andrea Ponti.

Along with Island, Ponti has also designed tram stops where passengers can get off from both sides and provides better airflow. Each tram incorporates a retractable connection point that allows fast charging at stops. 

According to the concept, the payments for the trip are to be made contactless through Hong Kong's Octopus card system before getting on the vehicle.

"Island represents the forward-thinking spirit of Hong Kong and introduces a new concept of public transport that overcomes the practice of social distancing," said Ponti.

Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) lecturer Cian Farrell has been awarded the Institution of Structural Engineers Excellence in Structural Engineering Education Award 2022 for his innovative teaching strategies adopted during the recent remote learning period.

With universities forced to host lectures online, Farrell devised an innovative hybrid educational tool in which he visited an industry setting to deliver an interactive online lecture for students.

Not interacting with him or their peers during lectures

Learning moved swiftly online when Covid-19 forced universities to close their doors in March 2020. However, as remote learning continued into 2021, Farrell, a lecturer in structural engineering at TU Dublin, noticed that some students were not interacting with him or their peers during lectures.

In response, he developed an innovative hybrid educational tool, virtual industry visits, where students followed him online as he met with industry professionals working in various structural engineering areas, such as modular design, cement design and manufacturing and timber manufacturing and harvesting.

'Thrill of Engineering' introduced

Farrell said that the visits were developed to help break the student's accumulated barrier of both fear and comfort for not interacting in class: "To enact this change, the transition had to be done with pace and power – thus, the 'Thrill of Engineering' was introduced.

"Whether it be loud roaring machines, high towers swaying in the wind, explosions from the mining of quarries or the tensioning of prestressed concrete beds, the excitement and thrill that the virtual industry visits brought to student groups gained the full and utmost attention from all students."

Following the introduction of this pioneering hybrid, Farrell has recorded increases in student performance ranging from 13.8% to 18% for one student group, while student engagement also rose with almost 100% participating in open Q&A sessions with industry professionals.

And although students returned to the classroom during the 2021/2022 academic year, many virtual industry visits have been held for student groups across a wide range of modules in the field of engineering education.

He said: "For engineering topics that consist of content ranging from theoretical derivations to practical applications, the educational approach has proven extremely useful.

"Of course, practical demonstrations and laboratory experiments have always been key in teaching such content to enable students to interpret the concept better.

"However, through the virtual industry visits as part of a hybrid teaching solution, that bridge between classroom textbooks and industry intelligence has enabled students to visualise and interpret how the concept applies in industry reality."

Read more about Civil & Structural Engineering courses at TU Dublin.

Microbiologists Susan De Long and Carol Wilusz met and became wastewater aficionados in April 2020 when a grassroots group of wastewater treatment plant operators asked them to develop and deploy a test to detect SARS-CoV-2 in samples from the sewers of Colorado.

De Long is an environmental engineer who studies useful bacteria. Wilusz’s expertise is in RNA biology. Here they describe how wastewater surveillance works and what it could do in a post-pandemic future. 

How is wastewater monitored for SARS-CoV-2?

Wastewater surveillance takes advantage of the fact that many human pathogens and products of human drug metabolism end up in urine, faeces or both. The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 shows up in surprisingly large quantities in faeces of infected people, even though this is not a major route of disease transmission.

To figure out whether any pathogens are present, we first need to collect a representative sample of wastewater, either directly from the sewer or at the point where what engineers call 'influent' enters a treatment plant. We can also use solids that have settled out of the wastewater.

Technicians then need to remove large particles of faecal matter and concentrate any microbes or viruses. The next step is extracting their nucleic acids – the DNA or RNA that holds the pathogens’ genetic information.

The sequences contained in the DNA or RNA act as unique bar codes for the pathogens present. For instance, if we detect genes that are unique to SARS-CoV-2, we know that the coronavirus is in our sample. We use PCR-based approaches, similar to those used in clinical diagnostic tests, to detect and quantify SARS-CoV-2 sequences. 

Characterising the nucleic acid sequence in more detail can provide information about viral strains – for instance, it can identify variants like omicron BA.2.

Currently, the vast majority of wastewater surveillance efforts are focused on SARS-CoV-2, but the same techniques work with other pathogens, including poliovirus, influenza and noroviruses.

Before the pandemic, one application was monitoring for rare poliovirus outbreaks in areas where polio vaccination is ongoing. Wastewater can also be monitored for signs of various drugs to give insights into the level and type of drug use in a population.

Where does the data go?

During the pandemic, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed the National Wastewater Surveillance System specifically to track SARS-CoV-2 across the country. More than 800 sites report data to this NWSS system, but not all states and counties are currently represented. 

Many state agencies, like the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, and cities, like Tempe, Arizona, have their own dashboards for reporting data. Some companies performing wastewater analysis report data on their own dashboards, too.

In our opinion, the NWSS represents an exciting first step in monitoring population health through wastewater. Similar systems are being established in other countries, including Australia and New Zealand.

What does wastewater data really show?

SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater from large populations are an excellent indicator of the infection level in a community. The system automatically monitors everybody who lives in the sewershed, so it’s anonymous, unbiased and equitable. Importantly, it is also impossible to track the infection back to a particular person, household or neighbourhood without taking additional samples.

Wastewater surveillance doesn’t rely on the availability of clinical tests or people reporting their test results. It also picks up asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic cases of Covid-19; this is critical because people who are infected but don’t feel sick can still spread Covid-19.

In our opinion, wastewater testing is increasingly important as more Covid-19 tests are done at home. And because vaccination has also led to more mild and asymptomatic cases of Covid-19, people may be infected without getting tested at all.

These factors mean that clinical case data are less informative than earlier in the pandemic, while wastewater data remains a consistent indicator of community infection level.

So far, you can’t accurately predict the number of infected individuals in a community based on the level of virus in its wastewater. The stage of somebody’s infection, how their body responds to the virus, the viral variant, how far a person was from where the wastewater sample was taken, even the weather can all affect the amounts of SARS-CoV-2 measured in sewage.

But scientists can infer relative changes in infection rates. Watching viral levels go up and down in sewage provides a glimpse of whether cases are rising or falling in the community as a whole.

Because SARS-CoV-2 can be detected in wastewater days or even weeks before outbreaks occur, wastewater monitoring can provide an early warning that public health measures may be warranted.

And trends in the signal are important – if you know levels are rising, it may be a good time to reinstitute a mask mandate or recommend working from home.

At present, public health officials use wastewater monitoring data along with other information like test positivity rates and the number of clinical cases and hospitalisations in the community to make these kinds of decisions.

Data from sequencing can also help detect new variants and monitor their levels, allowing health responses to take into account the characteristics of the variant present.

In smaller populations, such as in college halls and nursing homes, wastewater monitoring can detect a small number of infected people. That can sound the alarm that targeted clinical testing is in order to identify infected people for isolation.

Early detection, targeted testing and quarantining are effective at preventing outbreaks. Rather than using clinical testing for routine monitoring, administrators can reserve disruptive clinical tests for times when SARS-CoV-2 is detected in the wastewater.

What will monitoring look like in the future?

Widespread and routine use of wastewater monitoring would give public health officials access to information about the levels of a range of potential infections in US communities.

This data could guide decisions about where to provide additional resources to communities, like holding testing or vaccination clinics in places where infection is on the rise. It could also help determine when interventions like masking or school closures are necessary.

In the best case, wastewater monitoring might catch a new virus when it first arrives in a new area; an early shutdown in the very localised area could potentially prevent a future pandemic.

Interestingly, researchers have detected SARS-CoV-2 in archived wastewater samples collected before anybody had been diagnosed with Covid-19. If wastewater monitoring had been part of the established public health infrastructure back in late 2019, it could have provided an earlier warning that SARS-CoV-2 was becoming a global threat.

For now, though, establishing and operating a national wastewater surveillance system, particularly one that includes building-level monitoring at key locations, is still too costly and labour-intensive.

Ongoing research and development efforts are trying to simplify and automate wastewater sampling. On the analysis side, adaptation of PCR and sequencing technologies to detect other pathogens, including novel ones, will be vital to take full advantage of such a system.

Ultimately, wastewater surveillance could help support a future in which pandemics are far less deadly and have less social and economic impact. 

This article first appeared in The Conversation and was written by Susan De Long, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, Colorado State University; and Carol Wilusz, professor of microbiology, immunology and pathology, Colorado State University.

When you hear the word 'nanomedicine', it might call to mind scenarios like those in the 1966 movie 'Fantastic Voyage'. The film portrays a medical team shrunken down to ride a microscopic robotic ship through a man’s body to clear a blood clot in his brain.

Nanomedicine has not reached that level of sophistication yet. Although scientists can generate nanomaterials smaller than several nanometers – the 'nano' indicating one-billionth of a metre – today’s nanotechnology has not been able to generate functional electronic robotics tiny enough to inject safely into the bloodstream.

But since the concept of nanotechnology was first introduced in the 1970s, it has made its mark in many everyday products, including electronics, fabrics, food, water, and air treatment processes, cosmetics, and drugs. Given these successes across different fields, many medical researchers were eager to use nanotechnology to diagnose and treat diseases.

I am a pharmaceutical scientist who was inspired by the promise of nanomedicine. My lab has worked on developing cancer treatments using nanomaterials over the past 20 years.

While nanomedicine has seen many successes, some researchers like me have been disappointed by its underwhelming overall performance in cancer. To better translate success in the lab to treatments in the clinic, we proposed a new way to design cancer drugs using nanomaterials. Using this strategy, we developed a treatment that was able to achieve full remission in mice with metastatic breast cancer. 

 

What is nanomedicine?

Nanomedicine refers to the use of materials at the nanoscale to diagnose and treat disease. Some researchers define nanomedicine as encompassing any medical products using nanomaterials smaller than 1,000 nanometres. Others more narrowly use the term to refer to injectable drugs using nanoparticles smaller than 200 nanometres. Anything larger may not be safe to inject into the bloodstream.

Several nanomaterials have been successfully used in vaccines. The most well-known examples today are the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 mRNA vaccines. These vaccines used a nanoparticle made of lipids, or fatty acids, that helps carry the mRNA to where it needs to go in the body to trigger an immune response.

Researchers have also successfully used nanomaterials in diagnostics and medical imaging. Rapid Covid-19 tests and pregnancy tests use gold nanoparticles to form the coloured band that designates a positive result. Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, often uses nanoparticles as contrast agents that help make an image more visible. 

 

Several nanoparticle-based drugs have been approved for cancer treatment. Doxil (doxorubicin) and Abraxane (paclitaxel) are chemotherapy drugs that use nanomaterials as a delivery mechanism to improve treatment efficacy and reduce side effects.

Cancer and nanomedicine

The potential of nanomedicine to improve a drug’s effectiveness and reduce its toxicity is attractive for cancer researchers working with anti-cancer drugs that often have strong side effects. Indeed, 65% of clinical trials using nanoparticles are focused on cancer.

The idea is that nanoparticle cancer drugs could act like biological missiles that destroy tumours while minimising damage to healthy organs. Because tumours have leaky blood vessels, researchers believe this would allow nanoparticles to accumulate in tumours.

Conversely, because nanoparticles can circulate in the bloodstream longer than traditional cancer treatments, they could accumulate less in healthy organs and reduce toxicity.

Although these design strategies have been successful in mouse models, most nanoparticle cancer drugs have not been shown to be more effective than other cancer drugs.

Furthermore, while some nanoparticle-based drugs can reduce toxicity to certain organs, they may increase toxicity in others. For example, while the nanoparticle-based Doxil decreases damage to the heart compared with other chemotherapy options, it can increase the risk of developing the hand-foot syndrome. 

 

Improving nanoparticle-based cancer drugs

To investigate ways to improve how nanoparticle-based cancer drugs are designed, my research team and I examined how well five approved nanoparticle-based cancer drugs accumulate in tumours and avoid healthy cells compared with the same cancer drugs without nanoparticles.

Based on the findings of our lab study, we proposed that designing nanoparticles to be more specific to their intended target could improve their translation from animal models to people. This includes creating nanoparticles that address the shortcomings of a particular drug – such as common side effects – and home in on the types of cells they should be targeting in each particular cancer type.

Using these criteria, we designed a nanoparticle-based immunotherapy for metastatic breast cancer. We first identified that breast cancer has a type of immune cell that suppresses the immune response, helping cancer become resistant to treatments that stimulate the immune system to attack tumours.

We hypothesised that while drugs could overcome this resistance, they are unable to sufficiently accumulate in these cells to succeed. So we designed nanoparticles made of a common protein called albumin that could deliver cancer drugs directly to where these immune-suppressing cells are located.

When we tested our nanoparticle-based treatment on mice genetically modified to have breast cancer, we were able to eliminate the tumour and achieve complete remission. All of the mice were still alive 200 days after birth. We’re hopeful it will eventually translate from animal models to cancer patients.

Nanomedicine’s bright but realistic future

The success of some drugs that use nanoparticles, such as the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, has prompted excitement among researchers and the public about their potential use in treating various other diseases, including talks about a future cancer vaccine.

However, a vaccine for an infectious disease is not the same as a vaccine for cancer. Cancer vaccines may require different strategies to overcome treatment resistance. Injecting a nanoparticle-based vaccine into the bloodstream also has different design challenges than injecting it into muscle.

While the field of nanomedicine has made good progress in getting drugs or diagnostics out of the lab and into the clinic, it still has a long road ahead. Learning from past successes and failures can help researchers develop breakthroughs that allow nanomedicine to live up to its promise. 

This article first appeared in The Conversation, and was written by Duxin Sun, professor of pharmaceutical sciences, University of Michigan

He is the senior author of the research article, which has just been published in the Journal, Viruses. He said: “Over time, humans have evolved to fight viral infections by producing molecules called Interferons.

"When a virus is encountered Interferons are produced, which, in turn, activates an antiviral pathway in our cells that is at the heart of our immediate immune response. The pathway produces specific proteins that switch hundreds of our antiviral genes on. These genes then produce lots of different antiviral proteins that attack – and in most cases – kill the virus. In doing so, Interferons ‘interfere’ with a virus’s life cycle.

“However, viruses have also evolved over time to suppress and avoid our immune system responses. And our research aims to understand how viruses suppress the response to Interferons. Our current research has discovered that Sars and Mers prevent key proteins from being activated and entering the nucleus in our cells. The nucleus is where our DNA is stored and where genes are switched on, to generate a proper immune response.

“The hope is that if we can design new drugs to inhibit the ability of coronaviruses to suppress the Interferon pathway, we should be able to treat people far more effectively. And given the similarity in coronaviruses and their modes of action, such a drug would likely prove effective against all the deadly coronaviruses.

'Stimulate a response'

“Therapeutic Interferon is a drug used to fight certain infections, but it has never proved very effective against coronaviruses. Now we think we know why – if the Interferon pathway is essentially disabled, it can’t stimulate a response.

“If we could restore the natural ability of our immune systems to fight viral infection and prevent viral replication, we could treat infected people with much greater success. In addition, if we could develop a therapeutic that stop viruses from destroying the Interferon pathway, it would in theory open the door to directly attacking the virus.”

First author on the research article is Yamei Zhang, who previously spent research time with Dr Stevenson’s collaborators in Hong Kong University. She and Dr Stevenson were working on this research before Sars-CoV-2 emerged and the Covid-19 pandemic developed.

The work was funded by Science Foundation Ireland and the China Scholarship Council. A copy of the journal article is available on request (https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/14/4/667).