SOUTH KINGSTOWN – University of Rhode Island chemical engineering assistant professor Daniel Roxbury is among a team using nanotechnology to better understand obesity-induced diseases, including the hardening of arteries, Alzheimer’s disease and certain types of cancer.
According to a New England Journal of Medicine study, more than one-third of the world’s population is classified as overweight or obese. However, it is difficult to identify diseases brought on as a result of excess fat in the body because, according to Roxbury, detecting the accumulation of fat in individual cells is difficult, especially in live organisms.
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Together with a team of researchers from across the nation, Roxbury is developing engineered materials 1/100,000th the width of a human hair, to pinpoint abnormal amounts of fat in live cells. In a Sept. 12 ACS Nano journal paper, Roxbury, with researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in New York, announced the creation of a nanosensor capable of detecting the progression of obesity-related diseases.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society, the discovery, said Roxbury in a statement, “enables us to monitor the progression of a disease as well as its reversal when we add an appropriate drug.”
Emily Gowdey-Backus is a staff writer for PBN. You can follow her on Twitter @FlashGowdey or contact her via email, gowdey-backus@pbn.com.
