July Research News Roundup
The Future of Health: From every possible angle, researchers across the College of Letters & Science are focused on critical topics that will change the way the world looks at medicine, health policy and personal wellness
Learn more here.
Space Science Engineering Center Ice Drilling Program Gets Some Credit in Scientific American Article
Read the story, “What Greenland’s Ancient Past Reveals about Its Fragile Future: The collapse of the world’s second-largest ice sheet would drown cities worldwide. Is that ice more vulnerable than we know?,” here.
The Ice Drilling Program is funded through National Science Foundation grants.
UW oncologist studies how viruses cause cancer — and how we can better prevent them
UW researchers develop personalized cancer vaccines that slow tumor recurrence in mice
Using a newly discovered byproduct of dying cancer cells, UW–Madison researchers are developing personalized vaccines that could help keep aggressive tumors from recurring.
Led by Quanyin Hu, professor in the UW–Madison School of Pharmacy, the research team has already found success slowing the recurrence of tumors in mouse models of triple negative breast cancer and melanoma. Currently, the long-term prognosis for human patients with these cancers is relatively poor. That’s in part because the diseases have a tendency to recur after the initial treatments to remove the tumors.
The personalized vaccine approach is an extension of the team’s recent discovery of pyroptotic vesicles, which are tiny sacs filled with the remnants of cancer cells when they undergo programmed cell death.
Crucially, the remnants in these microscopic sacs include antigens specific to the tumor, along with other molecular bits that can help direct immune cells to find and suppress cancer cells that might remain after a tumor is surgically removed.
In their study, recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, Hu and his colleagues engineered these sacs to carry an immune stimulating drug.
Read the full story here.
UW–Madison scientists are pushing the boundaries of mass spectrometry and molecular imaging
Lingjun Li, a professor in the School of Pharmacy and Department of Chemistry, has spent decades developing powerful new ways to measure and map the molecular machinery of life. Recently, Li and her collaborators at UW–Madison and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute introduced a new imaging technology that has the power to reveal biomolecular detail in tissues like cancer tumors in their native environments and at unprecedented resolution. That technology, recently reported in Nature Methods, has been described as a potential game-changer for biomedical researchers.
Read the full story here.
Meet the ‘weird’ sea spider that’s mapping the evolution of eight-legged creatures
Prashant Sharma, professor of integrative biology, studies the evolution of chelicerates, digging deep into their genes to understand better how their varied, intricate bodies have developed.
Read the story here.
Artificial Intelligence in Marketing Symposium Highlights Latest Advances, Leading Research
The recent national symposium drew scholars from research institutions including Yale, Stanford, and Wharton, as well as AI industry leaders. The event included presentations on Deep Learning and Unstructured Data Analysis, Generative AI in Marketing, Human-AI collaboration, Algorithmic Bias and Fairness, AI & Marketing Theory, Probabilistic Machine Learning and Computational Methods for Marketing.
Read the story here.