A wife and husband professor team at Michigan State University are collaborating with researchers at the University of California, Riverside to create a new light-activated “smart” bomb to treat aggressive breast cancer.

Sophia Lunt, an MSU professor in biochemistry and molecular biology in the College of Natural Science, and Richard Lunt, an MSU professor and Johansen-Crosby Endowed Professor in Chemical Engineering in the College of Engineering, along with Vincent Lavallo, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Riverside, have combined their expertise to help develop new light-sensitive chemicals called cyanine-carborane salts that are used in photodynamic therapy, or PDT, to destroy metastatic breast cancer tumors in mice with minimal side effects.

Researchers from the universities in Konstanz and Vienna discover a new class of antibiotic that selectively targets Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes gonorrhoea. These substances trigger a self-destruction program, which also operates in multi-resistant variants of the pathogen. The novel findings are published in the current issue of Nature Microbiology.