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Undergraduate lab integrates COVID vaccine development

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Category: academics Video duration: Undergraduate lab integrates COVID vaccine development
College of Sciences' Chixia Tian has developed a lab course that integrates cutting-edge research and COVID vaccine development into undergraduate teaching. Specifically, it involves undergraduate nanomedicine majors learning how to fabricate liposomes and load DNAs into the liposomes.
Screaming. Sometimes this is cotton then no, 43, 54 advanced and nanomedicine lab. This is an upper level undergraduate horse, is a combination of biology, chemistry, and material science, physics. And that's why this program is wasting the Academy of integrated science. We're trying to bring state of the art research into our teaching. And that we're always really doing our modules every year so that students are taking up with the research, with the efficacious that is currently on the market or even the front of the research here is Europe. Today the students are learning about how to do it has faction. So mainly Putin being a plasmid into mammalian cells using different reagents to bring the DNA plasmid into the mammalian cells. Lower money in research lab and people use comes from hot pack them is that that's a commercialize lipid reagents. And we used to do that for students in the past last a year because of COVID and the vendors, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine developed. Students are interested in learning what are the components in those liposomes. So we designed this module where the students have actually fabricates the IEP nanoparticles. So the DNA plasmid is inside of the IEP then a particle was. So today we're using two different plasmid. So we have two ways to confirm. Actually nose pads may enter into the cell and then they can be transfected into the protein they wanted. Even without the vaccine in the past to limestone, already painted nanoparticles, what we are using today is used a lot for cancer treatments. So people food, chemotherapy drug into deeply the nanoparticles. So and enter into the cells. And then they can deliver the drug inside the lipid nanoparticles into specific part of the body. So for example, if a person is doing chemotherapy, sometimes they have hair loss or other side effects. That's because of the high dose of chemotherapy for us. They're using those lipid nanoparticles. You're encapsulating the chemotherapy drug inside there. And then because of specific targeting agents, you put on a surface that can direct those nanoparticles go to specific art. For example, the diseased area in your body. So that's another application of this. And that's where nanomedicine becomes very important and a unit.