The Science & Technology desk gathers a weekly digest of compelling scientific research publications and developments at Stanford. Read the latest in this week’s Research Roundup.

A new treatment for childhood cancer 

Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG, is one of the most devastating childhood cancers: it grows in the brainstem, cannot be surgically removed, resists chemotherapy and has a five-year survival rate below one percent. For decades, families facing a DIPG diagnosis have had almost nowhere to turn. Now, a Stanford Medicine clinical trial has offered a treatment that could change this grim prognosis. 

Led by pediatric neuro-oncology professor Michelle Monje and pediatrics professor Crystal Mackall, researchers tested a form of engineered immune-cell therapy known as Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell, or CAR-T cells. Of the 11 trial participants who received CAR-T cells, nine experienced measurable progress, including reductions in tumor volume and improvements in neurological function. For one participant, the tumor disappeared from brain scans entirely. 

“This is a universally lethal disease for which we’ve found a therapy that can cause meaningful tumor regressions and clinical improvements,” Monje told Stanford Medicine. “While there is still a long way to go to figure out how to optimize this for every patient, it’s very exciting that one patient had a complete response. I’m hopeful he has been cured.” 

The findings, published in Nature in November 2024, are being used to refine the ongoing trial, which continues to enroll participants. The FDA has also granted the immune-cell therapy a regenerative medicine advanced therapy designation — an important step toward official approval. 

A Fertilizer That Nourishes Crops and Combats Climate Change

What if a single soil additive could boost harvests, replenish depleted nutrients and pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? This is the premise behind Mafix, a soil additive startup based on research in Stanford’s Kanan Lab, led by chemistry professor Matthew Kanan. 

Mafix’s CEO and co-founder Jade Marcus is a Ph.D. candidate in the Kanan Lab, where she created Monti, the company’s product. Monti improves on a carbon removal technique called enhanced rock weathering, which involves spreading crushed silicate rock on agricultural fields to accelerate a natural geological process that draws down CO2. However, naturally occurring silicate rocks weather too slowly to make a significant dent in atmospheric carbon. 

“Even with high surface areas, weathering with the feedstocks used today is just too slow,” Kanan told Stanford’s TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. 

Mafix alters the mineral’s underlying chemistry, making it weather much faster. For example, Monti can capture an average of 2.7 tonnes of CO2 per hectare in just six months, compared to 0.03 tonnes per hectare for crushed basalt, the most common conventional material. Greenhouse studies at Louisiana State University also found a 50% increase in rice grain yields using Monti. 

“This is the next wave of products that can be both helpful from a food security standpoint, but also from a climate standpoint,” Marcus told the TomKat Center. “Within five years, our goal is to have at least a megaton of CO2 removed per year.” 

The team is currently scaling up production and conducting field trials at more than a dozen sites across the United States and Germany.

Harvesting Water from the Air 

More than half a million U.S. households lack running water, and roughly one in four people worldwide cannot access safe drinking water. A new Stanford discovery could help address both crises by harvesting moisture directly from the air.

Researchers at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability have developed a durable, solar-powered hydrogel, a material made of salt and absorbent polymer which is capable of drawing water vapor from the atmosphere and releasing it as potable liquid. The technology even works in some of the world’s driest environments, and tests in the Atacama Desert showed the gel filling with water overnight.

The technology’s critical breakthrough was durability, as previous hydrogels degraded after only about 30 use cycles, making them impractical and potentially unsafe. The Stanford team discovered that contact between the hydrogel and its metal casing caused ions to break down polymer chains. To address this, they applied an anti-corrosion coating to the metal, extending the material’s lifespan to more than 190 cycles. 

The current design can produce up to two liters of water per day from a panel roughly the size of a bath towel, enough to meet basic daily hydration needs in an emergency. 

“There are a lot of people who don’t have access to water or have to walk hundreds of hours per year to procure water,” said Carlos Diaz-Marin, a professor of energy science and engineering and co-lead author of the study. 

Diaz-Marin’s ultimate goal is to scale that output to five liters per day, with production costs potentially as low as one cent per liter.