Leonid Schneider’s article starts with a summary of the stripy controversy and then moves on to the SmartFlare. Of particular interest is the quote from Luke Armstrong, formerly at EMD Millipore, which demonstrates that the company ought to be well aware that the probes detect nucleases rather than mRNAs. This begs the question of why they are still selling and advertising this product. Unfortunately, they did not provide a statement to Leonid. [Picture above is from Leonid’s post]
A large body of scientific nanotechnology literature is dedicated to the biomedical aspect of nanoparticle delivery into cells and tissues. The functionalization of the nanoparticle surface is designed to insure their specificity at targeting only a certain type of cells, such as cancers cells. Other technological approaches aim at the cargo design, in order to ensure the targeted release of various biologically active agents: small pharmacological substances, peptides or entire enzymes, or nucleotides such as regulatory small RNAs or even genes. There is however a main limitation to this approach: though cells do readily take up nanoparticles through specific membrane-bound receptor interaction (endocytosis) or randomly (pinocytosis), these nanoparticles hardly ever truly reach the inside of the cell, namely its nucleocytoplasmic space. Solid nanoparticles are namely continuously surrounded by the very same membrane barrier they first interacted with when entering the cell. These outer-cell membrane compartments mature into endosomal and then…
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