May 26, 2023
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Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years. IBM made the announcement on May 22 at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan. The company will partner with the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago in a $100 million dollar initiative to push quantum computing into the realm of full-scale operation, where the technology could potentially tackle pressing problems that no standard supercomputer can solve.
Or at least it can’t solve them alone. The idea is that the 100,000 qubits will work alongside the best “classical” supercomputers to achieve new breakthroughs in drug discovery, fertilizer production, battery performance, and a host of other applications. “I call this quantum-centric supercomputing,” IBM’s VP of quantum, Jay Gambetta, told MIT Technology Review in an in-person interview in London last week.
Quantum computing holds and processes information in a way that exploits the unique properties of fundamental particles: electrons, atoms, and small molecules can exist in multiple energy states at once, a phenomenon known as superposition, and the states of particles can become linked, or entangled, with one another. This means that information can be encoded and manipulated in novel ways, opening the door to a swath of classically impossible computing tasks.
As yet, quantum computers have not achieved anything useful that standard supercomputers cannot do. That is largely because they haven’t had enough qubits and because the systems are easily disrupted by tiny perturbations in their environment that physicists call noise. Researchers have been exploring ways to make do with noisy systems, but many expect that quantum systems will have to scale up significantly to be truly useful, so that they can devote a large fraction of their qubits to correcting the errors induced by noise.
IBM is not the first to aim big. Google has said it is targeting a million qubits by the end of the decade, though error correction means only 10,000 will be available for computations. Maryland-based IonQ is aiming to have 1,024 “logical qubits,” each of which will be formed from an error-correcting circuit of 13 physical qubits, performing computations by 2028. Palo Alto–based PsiQuantum, like Google, is also aiming to build a million-qubit quantum computer, but it has not revealed its time scale or its error-correction requirements. Because of those requirements, citing the number of physical qubits is something of a red herring—the particulars of how they are built, which affect factors such as their resilience to noise and their ease of operation, are crucially important. The companies involved usually offer additional measures of performance, such as “quantum volume” and the number of “algorithmic qubits.” In the next decade advances in error correction, qubit performance, and software-led error “mitigation,” as well as the major distinctions between different types of qubits, will make this race especially tricky to follow.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
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Tags: “algorithmic qubits, battery, computations, drug, error correction, fertilizer, Google, IBM, IonQ’, logical qubits, noise, PsiQuantum, quantum bits, QUANTUM COMPUTER, quantum volume, qubit, supercomputers, University of Chicago, University of Tokyo
May 25, 2023
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Sitting in a booth in a hotel lobby in Brooklyn, I stared down the lineup of sliders, each on a separate bamboo plate. On the far left was a plant-based burger from Impossible Foods. On the right, an old-fashioned beef burger. And in the middle, the star of the show: a burger made with lab-grown meat. I’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian. I drink whole milk in my lattes, and I can’t turn down a hot dog at a summer cookout. But as a climate reporter, I’m keenly aware of the impact that eating meat has on the planet. Animal agriculture makes up nearly 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and beef is a particular offender, with more emissions per gram than basically any other meat.
We started with a plant-based burger from Impossible Foods. Founded in 2011, the company makes meat alternatives from plants. The special ingredient is heme protein, which is cranked out by genetically engineered microbes and sprinkled in for that meaty flavor. I took a small bite of the Impossible burger, and if you ask me, the taste was a pretty good approximation of the real thing, though the texture was a bit looser and softer than beef. (If you’re based in the US, you may have tried this one already yourself. In Europe, heme still hasn’t been approved by regulators, so Impossible’s products don’t include it there.)
Next on the docket was the beef burger. By the way, none of these sliders had any sort of sauces or toppings on them, and Krieger says they were seasoned identically, for a fair comparison. I truly have nothing to say about this one—it was just a plain burger. Even as I was chewing, I had my eyes on the final item on my tasting menu for the day: the lab-grown version. The burger on my plate was actually only about 20% lab-grown material, Krieger explained. The company’s plan is to blend its cells with a base of plant-based meat (she wouldn’t tell me much about this base, just that it’s not Ohayo’s recipe). Plants can help provide the structure for alternative meats, Krieger says. One other major benefit to this blending technique is financial: the lab-grown components are expensive, so mixing in plants can help keep costs down.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Impossible Foods, Lab-grown Burger, Ohayo, plant-based burger
May 24, 2023
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New technologies that can capture subtle changes in a patient’s voice may help physicians diagnose cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms begin to show, according to a UT Southwestern Medical Center researcher who led a study published in the Alzheimer’s Association publication Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.
“Prior to the development of machine learning and NLP, the detailed study of speech patterns in patients was extremely labor intensive and often not successful, because the changes in the early stages [of Alzheimer’s] are frequently undetectable to the human ear,” said lead study author Ihab Hajjar, MD, a professor of neurology at UT Southwestern’s Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, in a news release. “This novel method of testing performed well in detecting those with mild cognitive impairment and more specifically in identifying patients with evidence of Alzheimer’s disease — even when it cannot be easily detected using standard cognitive assessments.”
Dr. Hajjar and his collaborators collected data on 206 people aged 50 and older, 114 who met the criteria for mild cognitive decline and 92 who were cognitively unimpaired. Each person’s cognitive status was determined through standard testing. Study subjects were also recorded as they gave a one- to two-minute description of a colorful circus procession. Using sophisticated computer analysis of these recordings, scientists could determine and evaluate specific types of speech features, including: how fast a person talks, pitch, voicing of vowel and consonant sounds, grammatical complexity, speech motor control and idea density.
The research team also examined cerebral spinal fluid samples for amyloid beta protein. One form called amyloid beta peptide 42, for example, is especially toxic, according to the National Institute on Aging, and plays a significant role in Alzheimer’s disease. A total of 40 cognitively unimpaired and 63 impaired individuals were found.
Source: https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Alzheimer's, amyloid beta protein, cerebral spinal fluid, cognitive impairment, National Institute on Aging, UT Southwestern, UT Southwestern’s Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, voice
May 23, 2023
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The Polish company Nevomo is a European deep-tech company and the developer of the next generation of high-speed rails. As a leading player in the area of innovation in the sustainable and intelligent mobility industry, the company has developed the globally unique MagRail technology, allowing significant improvements in the efficiency of existing rail transportation systems. Nevomo proposes a phased implementation of transportation systems, inspired by the hyperloop concept, by upgrading railway lines. By equipping existing infrastructure with magnetic levitation and linear motor, the company intends to take railway transport to a whole new dimension of travel with speeds of up to 550 kph (342 mph).
Nevomo introduces MagRail technology to existing rail infrastructure, allowing its cost-effective upgrade, thus enabling rail to become the preferred green, fast, efficient, and interoperable mode of transport of the 21st century. MagRail allows gradual improvements to existing networks and is a major technological breakthrough allowing railways to finally significantly increase their market share and reduce CO2 emissions in transport. MagRail provides the possibility to operate electric vehicles in non-electrified areas, such as terminals and ports.
Nevomo has just signed a major deal with The French giant SNCF to transform the large network of the railways operator.
Source: https://www.nevomo.tech/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: CO2, efficient, fast, Hyperloop, interoperable, linear motor, magnetic levitation, MagRail, Nevomo, preferred green, SNCF
May 22, 2023
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Imagine using your cell phone to control the activity of your own cells to treat injuries and diseases. It sounds like something from the imagination of an overly optimistic science fiction writer. But this may one day be a possibility through the emerging field of quantum biology. Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. And yet, the extent to which quantum effects influence living systems remains barely understood. Quantum effects are phenomena that occur between atoms and molecules that can’t be explained by classical physics. It has been known for more than a century that the rules of classical mechanics, like Newton’s laws of motion, break down at atomic scales. Instead, tiny objects behave according to a different set of laws known as quantum mechanics.
For humans, who can only perceive the macroscopic world, or what’s visible to the naked eye, quantum mechanics can seem counterintuitive and somewhat magical. Things you might not expect happen in the quantum world, like electrons “tunneling” through tiny energy barriers and appearing on the other side unscathed or being in two different places at the same time in a phenomenon called superposition.
Research in quantum mechanics is usually geared toward technology. However, and somewhat surprisingly, there is increasing evidence that nature – an engineer with billions of years of practice — has learned how to use quantum mechanics to function optimally. If this is indeed true, it means that our understanding of biology is radically incomplete. It also means that we could possibly control physiological processes by using the quantum properties of biological matter.
Researchers can manipulate quantum phenomena to build better technology. In fact, you already live in a quantum-powered world: from laser pointers to GPS, magnetic resonance imaging, and the transistors in your computer – all these technologies rely on quantum effects.
In general, quantum effects only manifest at very small length and mass scales or when temperatures approach absolute zero. This is because quantum objects like atoms and molecules lose their “quantumness” when they uncontrollably interact with each other and their environment. In other words, a macroscopic collection of quantum objects is better described by the laws of classical mechanics. Everything that starts quantum dies classical. For example, an electron can be manipulated to be in two places at the same time, but it will end up in only one place after a short while – exactly what would be expected classically.
In a complicated, noisy biological system, it is thus expected that most quantum effects will rapidly disappear, washed out in what the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called the “warm, wet environment of the cell.” To most physicists, the fact that the living world operates at elevated temperatures and in complex environments implies that biology can be adequately and fully described by classical physics: no funky barrier crossing, no being in multiple locations simultaneously.
Chemists, however, have for a long time begged to differ. Research on basic chemical reactions at room temperature unambiguously shows that processes occurring within biomolecules like proteins and genetic material are the result of quantum effects. Importantly, such nanoscopic, short-lived quantum effects are consistent with driving some macroscopic physiological processes that biologists have measured in living cells and organisms. Research suggests that quantum effects influence biological functions, including regulating enzyme activity, sensing magnetic fields, cell metabolism, and electron transport in biomolecules.
Source: https://www.inverse.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: absolute zero, biomolecules, cell metabolism, enzyme, genetic engineering, GPS, laser pointers, magnetic fields, magnetic resonance imaging, Newton, physics, protein folding, quantum biology, Quantum effects, quantum mechanics, superposition, transistors
May 19, 2023
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The future of space food could be as simple—and weird—as a protein shake made with astronaut breath or a burger made from fungus. For decades, astronauts have relied mostly on pre-packaged food, or the occasional grown lettuce, during their forays off our planet. With missions beyond Earth orbit in sight, a NASA-led competition is hoping to change all that and usher in a new era of sustainable space food.
“Currently the pre-packaged food that we use on the International Space Station has a shelf life of a year and a half,” says Ralph Fritsche, senior project manager for space crop production at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “We don’t have a food system at this point in time that can really handle a mission to Mars,” he says. Longer-duration missions to the moon would present a similar problem.
And while it may be some time before humans ever reach Mars, the moon is very much on the agenda. Next year, NASA plans to send four astronauts flying around the moon as part of its Artemis program, in the first crewed moon mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. The goal is to get humans back on the surface later this decade, at first for days at a time but eventually for weeks, months, or even longer.
To solve the problem of feeding astronauts on long-duration missions, NASA started the Deep Space Food Challenge in January 2021, asking companies to propose novel ways to develop sustainable foods for future missions. About 200 companies entered—a field that was whittled down to 11 teams in January 2023 as part of phase 2, with eight US teams each given $20,000 in funding and three additional international teams also recognized. A handful of winners to be announced in April 2024 following more detailed tests of their proposals. “Phase 2 was kind of a kitchen-level demonstration,” says Angela Herblet at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, the project manager for the challenge. “Phase 3 is going to challenge the teams to scale their technologies.”
Entrants had to show systems that could operate for three years and feed a crew of four on a prospective space mission. The proposals did not need to supply a crew’s entire diet, but they did need to create a variety of nutritious foods for the astronauts. Earlier this year, judges then visited each company to “see the food and really analyze it,” says Herblet.
One company took a particularly unusual approach to the task. Air Company, based in New York and one of the eight US-based finalists, designed a system that could use the carbon dioxide expelled by astronauts in space to produce alcohol, which could then be used to grow edible food. The company already develops alcohols from CO2 for plane fuel and perfume.
“It’s making food out of air,” says Stafford Sheehan, cofounder and chief technology officer of Air Company. “It sounds like magic, but when you see it actually operating, it’s much more simple. We’re taking CO2, combining it with water and electricity, and making proteins.”
The process produces alcohol that can then be fed to yeast, producing “something that’s edible,” says Sheehan. For the competition they created essentially a protein shake, described as being similar to one made from seitan, a vegan meat substitute. “It actually tastes pretty good,” says Sheehan. For astronauts in space, the system would ferment continuously to supply food. “Whenever you feel like you want a space protein shake, you make one from this yeast that’s growing,” says Sheehan.
Interstellar Lab in Florida, another of the US-based phase 2 finalists, had a different approach. Its system, called NUCLEUS, is a modular set of small toaster-size capsules. Each is self-contained, with its own humidity, temperature, and watering system. That would allow different vegetables—or even insects such as black soldier flies, often cited as a promising protein source—to be cultivated so that astronauts can easily grow their own food in space.
Source: https://www.aircompany.com/
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https://www.technologyreview.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Air Company, alcohols, Artemis, astronaut, black soldier flies, breath, carbon dioxide, CO2, Deep Space Food Challenge, edible food, fungus, grown lettuce, Interstellar Lab, Mars, Moon, NASA, NUCLEUS, protein, protein shake, seitan, space food, vegan meat substitute
May 18, 2023
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Athletes are getting in shape for the Paris Olympic Games in 2024, and so is the world’s first electric air taxi network.
“We are going to make it happen,” Solène Le Bris of Paris airports operator Groupe ADP told an industry audience at Amsterdam Drone Week. “We are trying to launch the first e-VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] pre-commercial service in the world: that’s our ambition.”
In a packed talk, the first outlines were revealed of what has been dubbed the “Tesla of the skies”. Senior civil engineer Le Bris explained that there will be five vertiports where passengers can board the vehicles, the first of which at Cergy-Pontoise opened in November and is functioning as a test centre.
Using the existing helicopter route network, the vehicles – known as VoloCity air taxis – will fly with one passenger and one pilot along two routes, taking short rides from Charles de Gaulle airport to Le Bourget then to a new landing pad at Austerlitz Paris, and another route from Paris to Sans-Cyr. Thierry Allain, head of innovation at the Direction General de l’Aviation Civile (DGAC) regulator, said a safety-first approach using existing networks was key. “For the regulation issues, the challenges we have are not that big,” he said.
Source: https://www.volocopter.com/
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https://www.theguardian.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: 2024, Austerlitz Paris, Charles de Gaulle airport, DGAC, Groupe ADP, landing pad, Le Bourget, Paris Olympic Games, safety, vertiports, VoloCity air taxis
May 17, 2023
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Lab-grown meat, which can also be referred to as cultivated or cultured meat, is real meat that’s grown directly from animal cells. According to Eric Schuzle, the vice-president of product and regulation at UPSIDE Foods, these products are “real meat, made without the need to raise and slaughter animals.”
Cultivated meat may sound like a thing of the future, but it’s closer to reaching supermarket shelves than you might think. In fact, the first piece of lab-grown meat hit the world stage in 2013 when a team at the University of Maastricht presented the first hamburger produced by bovine stem cells. At the time, this original burger cost more than $300,000 to create. But researchers found that two years later, they were able to reduce the cost to $11.36. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the world population will surpass 9.1 billion by 2050, at which point agricultural systems will not be able to supply enough food to feed everyone. But could lab-grown meat help fill this void? Here’s what we know so far. According to researchers in the Journal of Integrative Agriculture, lab-grown meat is made by using the more-than-100-year-old technique of in vitro muscle tissue growth.
“The process of making cultivated meat is similar to brewing beer, in that this is an industrial cell culture process based upon well-hewn fermentation technology,” says Schuzle. “However, instead of growing yeast or bacteria, we grow animal cells. We start by taking a small amount of cells from high-quality livestock animals, like a cow or chicken, and then figure out which of those cells have the ability to multiply and form delicious meat food products. “From there, we put the cells in a clean-and-controlled environment and provide them with the essential nutrients they need to naturally replicate and mature. In essence, we can recreate the conditions that naturally exist inside an animal’s body so that the cells can continue growing. Once the meat is ready, we harvest it, process it like conventional meat products, and then package, cook or otherwise prepare it for consumption.”
Schuzle adds: “We’re excited about this as a new way to produce meat because our cells can continue growing many times over as compared to those in the animal. In effect, we can grow many animals from the cells of just one animal for many years to come.”
Source: https://www.livescience.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: bovine stem cells, cells, cultivated meat, cultured meat, hamburger, Lab-grown Meat, meat, muscle tissue, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, University of Maastricht, Upside Foods
May 16, 2023
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A newly discovered genetic variant protects against a particularly devastating form of early Alzheimer’s disease, raising scientists’ hopes of finding treatments that can prevent or slow the progression of this and other forms of the disease. The discovery is only the second gene variant reported to protect against autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s disease (ADAD), a form of Alzheimer’s caused by an inherited genetic mutation. People with ADAD begin to show signs of dementia in their mid-40s and rarely survive past the age of 60, study co-author Dr. Joseph Arboleda-Velasquez, a biomedical researcher at Harvard University, told Live Science.
The patient at the heart of the new study was a male member of a Colombian family that researchers have been following for a long time because they’re known carriers of the genetic mutation that causes ADAD. This man carried that gene, but instead of succumbing to early dementia, he remained healthy into his late sixties and developed only mild Alzheimer’s disease by age 72. He died at 73 years old of non-dementia-related causes.
“It was just really remarkable that he made it that far, despite the odds,” Arboleda-Velasquez said.
To find out how, Arboleda-Velasquez and his colleagues sequenced the man’s genes and came up with a list of genetic variants, or specific versions of genes, that might have been protective. One gene, RELN, popped out as intriguing because the protein it codes for binds to the same cellular receptors as the protein made by a well-known gene called APOE. One variant of the APOE gene raises the risk of Alzheimer’s by partially driving the formation of amyloid plaques, clusters of misfolded proteins considered to be a hallmark of Alzheimer’s.
The researchers studied the effects of the RELN gene in cells in lab dishes and in mice and discovered that the variant the man carried actually made the protein that RELN codes for bind more tightly to its receptor. This effect seems to help the RELN protein stabilize the protein tau, which can form tangles in the brain that serve as another tell-tale sign of Alzheimer’s.
The patient had reduced tau tangles in many parts of his brain compared to other Alzheimer’s patients, but some portions still showed tau pathology. Delving deeper into the gene variant and how it protects against early-onset Alzheimer’s is the crucial next step, said Dr. Kenneth Kosik, a neurologist at UC Santa Barbara who studies ADAD but who was not involved in the current research.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: ADAD, Alzheimer's, amyloid plaques, autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease, brain, dementia, early dementia, gene, genetic variant, Harvard Unversity, protein Tau, RELN, tau tangles, UC Santa Barbara
May 15, 2023
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Heart attack symptoms are sometimes similar to non-heart-related conditions, making diagnosis tricky. UK researchers have turned to machine learning to provide doctors with a fast and accurate way of diagnosing heart attacks that has the potential to shorten the time needed to make a diagnosis and provide more efficient and effective treatment to patients.
Currently, the gold-star method for diagnosing a heart attack is to measure levels of the protein troponin in the blood. Troponin is released when the heart muscle is damaged; levels usually increase sharply within three to 12 hours after a heart attack, peaking after about 24 hours. Many hospitals worldwide have adopted diagnostic pathways that include assessing troponin levels when someone is admitted with a suspected heart attack. But they have some limitations: they require the fixed-time collection of blood samples which can be a challenge in the emergency department setting; they only categorize patients as being a low, intermediate or high risk of a heart attack without considering other important information such as when the symptoms began or electrocardiogram (ECG) findings; and, they don’t take into account the influence of sex, age and comorbidities.
Now UK researchers have developed an AI-based machine learning algorithm that is fast and accurate. Named the Collaboration for the Diagnosis and Evaluation of Acute Coronary Syndrome (CoDE-ACS), the algorithm was designed to calculate the probability of a heart attack for an individual patient. The researchers used data from 10,286 patients who presented with possible heart attacks across six countries worldwide. The machine learning algorithm was “taught” using the patient’s sex, age, ECG findings and medical history, in addition to troponin levels, to identify the probability that a heart attack had occurred. Compared to existing methods, the researchers found that CoDE-ACS could rule out a heart attack in more than double the number of patients, with an accuracy of 99.6%.
The researchers say that their CoDE-ACS algorithm could prevent unnecessary hospital admissions in patients unlikely to have had a heart attack or those at low risk of suffering heart muscle damage or death following a heart attack. They say this would make emergency treatment more efficient and effective, identifying which patients are safe to go home and which need to stay for further tests.
“For patients with acute chest pain due to a heart attack, early diagnosis and treatment saves lives,” said Nicholas Mills, corresponding author of the study. “Unfortunately, many conditions cause these common symptoms, and the diagnosis is not always straightforward. Harnessing data and artificial intelligence to support clinical decisions has enormous potential to improve care for patients and efficiency in our busy Emergency Departments.”
Source: https://newatlas.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, algorithm, Artificial Intelligence, blood, CoDE-ACS, ECG, electrocardiogram, heart attack, machine-learning, symptoms, troponin
May 12, 2023
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Researchers have unveiled the structure of a unique amyloid beta protein associated with Alzheimer’s (AD) progression. This protein forms small aggregates that disrupt brain function. Importantly, the study found that lecanemab, a recently FDA-approved Alzheimer’s treatment, can neutralize these disruptive aggregates, hinting at its potential to slow down the disease’s cognitive decline.
Researchers have detailed the structure of a distinct type of amyloid beta plaque protein that plays a role in Alzheimer’s disease progression. These proteins form small, diffusible aggregates that can disrupt neuronal function across various regions of the brain. Lecanemab, an antibody therapy recently approved by the FDA for Alzheimer’s treatment, has been found to neutralize these small, diffusible amyloid beta protein aggregates. This suggests it may play a significant role in slowing cognitive decline in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease. The study also provided a clearer definition of the ‘protofibril’ or ‘oligomer’ structures that lecanemab binds to, potentially offering valuable insights into the drug’s mechanism of action against Alzheimer’s disease.
For the first time, researchers described the structure of a special type of amyloid beta plaque protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression.
In a report published May 10 in the journal Neuron, scientists showed the small aggregates of the amyloid beta protein could float through the brain tissue fluid, reaching many brain regions and disrupting local neuron functioning. The research also provided evidence that a newly approved AD treatment could neutralize these small, diffusible aggregates. As a cause of dementia, AD affects more than 50 million people worldwide. Previous research has discovered that AD patients have abnormal build-up of a naturally occurring substance—amyloid beta protein—in the brain that can disrupt neurotransmission.
Currently, there is no cure for the disease. But in recent years, scientists have developed new treatments that can reduce AD symptoms such as memory loss.
Source: https://www.eurekalert.org/
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https://neurosciencenews.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AD, Alzheimer's, amyloid beta plaque protein, antibody therapy, brain, cognitive decline, dementia, FDA, lecanemab, oligomer, protein, protofibril
May 11, 2023
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Integrated Biosciences, a biotechnology company combining synthetic biology and machine learning to target aging, in collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, today announced results demonstrating the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to discover novel senolytic compounds, a class of small molecules under intense study for their ability to suppress age-related processes such as fibrosis, inflammation and cancer. A new publication authored by company founders in Nature Aging, “Discovering small-molecule senolytics with deep neural networks,” describes the AI-guided screening of more than 800,000 compounds to reveal three drug candidates with comparable efficacy and superior medicinal chemistry properties than those of senolytics currently under investigation.
Senolytics are an emerging class of investigational drug compounds that selectively kill aging-associated senescent cells (left, with red stain) without affecting other cells (right). Using artificial intelligence, researchers from Integrated Biosciences have, for the first time, identified three senolytics with comparable efficacy and superior drug-like properties relative to leading investigational compounds.
“This research result is a significant milestone for both longevity research and the application of artificial intelligence to drug discovery,” said Felix Wong, Ph.D., co-founder of Integrated Biosciences and first author of the publication. “These data demonstrate that we can explore chemical space in silico and emerge with multiple candidate anti-aging compounds that are more likely to succeed in the clinic, compared to even the most promising examples of their kind being studied today.”
Senolytics are compounds that selectively induce apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in senescent cells that are no longer dividing. A hallmark of aging, senescent cells have been implicated in a broad spectrum of age-related diseases and conditions including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. Despite promising clinical results, most senolytic compounds identified to date have been hampered by poor bioavailability and adverse side effects. Integrated Biosciences was founded in 2022 to overcome these obstacles, target other neglected hallmarks of aging, and advance anti-aging drug development more generally using artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and other next-generation tools.
“One of the most promising routes to treat age-related diseases is to identify therapeutic interventions that selectively remove these cells from the body similarly to how antibiotics kill bacteria without harming host cells. The compounds we discovered display high selectivity, as well as the favorable medicinal chemistry properties needed to yield a successful drug,” said Satotaka Omori, Ph.D., Head of Aging Biology at Integrated Biosciences and joint first author of the publication. “We believe that the compounds discovered using our platform will have improved prospects in clinical trials and will eventually help restore health to aging individuals.”
Source: https://www.businesswire.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Alzheimer's, anti-aging drug, apoptosis, artificial intelligenc, cancer, cardiovascular disease, cells, diabetes, fibrosis, inflammation, Integrated Biosciences, machine-learning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, senescent cells, senolytics, synthetic biology
May 10, 2023
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CAR-T cells are remarkably effective against blood cancers, but their effect can be transient as the cells become exhausted. Stanford researchers found a way to keep the cells effective. A new approach to programming cancer-fighting immune cells called CAR-T cells can prolong their activity and increase their effectiveness against human cancer cells grown in the laboratory and in mice, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The ability to circumvent the exhaustion that the genetically engineered cells often experience after their initial burst of activity could lead to the development of a new generation of CAR-T cells that may be effective even against solid cancers — a goal that has until now eluded researchers.
The studies were conducted in mice harboring human leukemia and bone cancer cells. The researchers hope to begin clinical trials in people with leukemia within the next 18 months and to eventually extend the trials to include solid cancers.
“We know that T cells are powerful enough to eradicate cancer,” said Crystal Mackall, MD, professor of pediatrics and of medicine at Stanford and the Ernest and Amelia Gallo Family Professor. “But these same T cells have evolved to have natural brakes that tamp down the potency of their response after a period of prolonged activity. We’ve developed a way to mitigate this exhaustion response and improve the activity of CAR-T cells against blood and solid cancers.”
Mackall, who is also the director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy and of the Stanford research center of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, treats children with blood cancers at the Bass Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Diseases at Stanford Children’s Health. Mackall is the senior author of the study, which was published in Nature. Former postdoctoral scholar Rachel Lynn, PhD, is the lead author.
Source: https://med.stanford.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: blood cancers, cancer, CAR-T cells, cells, exhaustion, genetically engineered cells, immune cells, Stanford University School of Medicine
May 9, 2023
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Scientists have developed a new gene therapy that can reverse vision loss in primates, potentially laying the groundwork for treatments in humans as well. Last month, a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School and biotech company Life Biosciences announced preclinical data showing that a new approach was able to reprogram genetic markers to restore visual function in primates that had their eyes damaged with lasers.
In essence, the team injected their eyes with special chemicals that can partially reprogram cells to have them return to a more youthful state — a decidedly “Blade Runner” approach to vision restoration, if it’s born out by future research. The study involved ten primates, six of which were treated with the new gene therapy, while four had a control solution injected into their eyes. The eyes of the primates that received the treatment over five weeks ended up responding much better to light stimulation. The health of their eyes’ nerve fibers improved significantly as well, signs that are consistent with the restoration of vision. The overall goal was to address a specific eye disorder called non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), which is essentially the equivalent of a stroke but for the eye, and which results in a sudden loss of vision.
“NAION is the most common cause of acute optic neuropathy in people over 50, but currently has no effective treatment,” said Bruce Ksander, study co-lead and associate professor of ophthalmology at Harvard, in a press release, adding that the new therapy “can lead to significant recovery in affected visual function in a [primate] model of NAION.” “That potential unlocks new opportunities for cellular rejuvenation, not just in NAION but in other ophthalmic diseases that occur as a result of retinal ganglion cell dysfunction as we age,” he added.
While we’re still a long way from establishing whether a similar technique can be effective in humans — besides, the researchers’ results have yet to be published and peer-reviewed — it’s a hopeful first step.
Source: https://www.lifebiosciences.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: cells, eyes, gene therapy, genetic markers, Harvard Medical School, Life Biosciences, NAION, non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, vision, vision loss
May 8, 2023
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Hearing loss affects about 48 million Americans and 430 million people worldwide, with those numbers expected to grow as populations age. More than 90 percent of individuals affected have sensorineural hearing loss, caused by damage to the inner ear and the destruction of the hair cells responsible for relaying sounds to the brain. Hair cells cannot be regenerated in mammals, including humans, because unlike other cells in the body, any remaining hair cells in the inner ear cannot divide and other inner ear cells cannot convert themselves into new hair cells. Species like fish, birds, and reptiles, however, possess this ability.
For this reason, effective hearing loss treatments for humans have eluded medicine, and the loss of hair cells, which can be caused by aging, noise exposure, and other factors, renders an individual’s hearing loss permanent. Now, Harvard Medical School (HMS) scientists at Mass Eye and Ear are hopeful they’ve developed a solution to address this longstanding limitation. A research team led by Zheng-Yi Chen, an HMS associate professor of otolaryngology and associate scientist in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at Mass Eye and Ear, reported creating a drug-like cocktail of different molecules that successfully regenerated hair cells in a mouse model by reprogramming a series of genetic pathways within the inner ear. The researchers hope their novel findings, published April 17 in PNAS, could one day pave the way for clinical trials for a gene therapy that can be administered to people with hearing loss.
“These findings are extremely exciting because throughout the history of the hearing loss field, the ability to regenerate hair cells in an inner ear has been the holy grail,” said Chen. “We now have a drug-like cocktail that shows the feasibility of an approach that we can explore for future clinical applications.”
Previously, Chen’s research team studied zebrafish and chickens to uncover which pathways were responsible for inducing the cell division required to regenerate new hair cells. They discovered that two molecular signaling pathways, , were crucial to this process. In a study published in 2019, the team showed for the first time that when these pathways were activated in adult transgenic mice, remaining inner ear cells could divide and develop characteristics of hair cells. The new cells contained transduction channels that relay sound signals and the ability to form connections with auditory neurons — processes essential to hearing.
Source: https://hms.harvard.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: aging, auditory neurons, brain, chickens, gene therapy, Hair cells, Harvard Medical School, hearing loss, nner ear, noise, otolaryngology, sensorineural hearing loss, SOUNDS, zebrafish
May 5, 2023
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Silicon, the standard semiconducting material used in a host of applications—computer central processing units (CPUs), semiconductor chips, detectors, and solar cells—is an abundant, naturally occurring material. However, it is expensive to mine and to purify. Perovskites—a family of materials nicknamed for their crystalline structure—have shown extraordinary promise in recent years as a far less expensive, equally efficient replacement for silicon in solar cells and detectors. Now, a study led by Chunlei Guo, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester, suggests perovskites may become far more efficient. Researchers typically synthesize perovskites in a wet lab, and then apply the material as a film on a glass substrate and explore various applications. Guo instead proposes a novel, physics-based approach. By using a substrate of either a layer of metal or alternating layers of metal and dielectric material—rather than glass—he and his coauthors found they could increase the perovskite’s light conversion efficiency by 250 percent.
“No one else has come to this observation in perovskites,” Guo says. “All of a sudden, we can put a metal platform under a perovskite, utterly changing the interaction of the electrons within the perovskite. Thus, we use a physical method to engineer that interaction.”
Metals are probably the simplest materials in nature, but they can be made to acquire complex functions. The Guo Lab has extensive experience in this direction. The lab has pioneered a range of technologies transforming simple metals to pitch black, superhydrophilic (water-attracting), or superhydrophobic (water-repellent). The enhanced metals have been used for solar energy absorption and water purification in their recent studies. In this new paper, instead of presenting a way to enhance the metal itself, the Guo Lab demonstrates how to use the metal to enhance the efficiency of pervoskites. “A piece of metal can do just as much work as complex chemical engineering in a wet lab,” says Guo, adding that the new research may be particularly useful for future solar energy harvesting.
In a solar cell, photons from sunlight need to interact with and excite electrons, causing the electrons to leave their atomic cores and generating an electrical current, Guo explains. Ideally, the solar cell would use materials that weaken the ability of the electrons to recombine with the atomic cores. Guo’s lab demonstrated that such recombination could be substantially prevented by combining a perovskite material with either a layer of metal or a metamaterial substrate consisting of alternating layers of silver, a noble metal, and aluminum oxide, a dielectric. The result was a significant reduction of electron recombination through “a lot of surprising physics,” Guo says. In effect, the metal layer serves as a mirror, which creates reversed images of electron-hole pairs, weakening the ability of the electrons to recombine with the holes. The lab was able to use a simple detector to observe the resulting 250 percent increase in efficiency of light conversion.
Their findings are reported in Nature Photonics.
Source: https://www.rochester.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: aluminum oxide, computer central processing units, CPU, detectors, dielectric, olar energy, perovskite, photons, semiconductor chips, silicon, silver, solar cell, solar cella, sunlight, University of Rochester
May 4, 2023
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There has been widespread speculation about how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like ChatGPT could be used in medicine. A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine led by John W. Ayers, Ph.D., from the Qualcomm Institute at University of California San Diego provides an early glimpse into the role that AI assistants could play in medicine. The study compared written responses from physicians and those from ChatGPT to real-world health questions. A panel of licensed healthcare professionals preferred ChatGPT’s responses 79% of the time and rated ChatGPT’s responses as higher quality and more empathetic.
“The opportunities for improving healthcare with AI are massive,” said Ayers, who is also vice chief of innovation in the UC San Diego School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Disease and Global Public Health. “AI-augmented care is the future of medicine.”
In the new study, the research team set out to answer the question: Can ChatGPT respond accurately to questions patients send to their doctors? If yes, AI models could be integrated into health systems to improve physician responses to questions sent by patients and ease the ever-increasing burden on physicians.
“ChatGPT might be able to pass a medical licensing exam,” said study co-author Davey Smith, M.D., M.A.S., a physician-scientist, co-director of the UC San Diego Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute and professor at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, “but directly answering patient questions accurately and empathetically is a different ballgame.”
“The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated virtual healthcare adoption,” added study co-author Eric Leas, Ph.D., M.P.H., a Qualcomm Institute affiliate and assistant professor in the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science. “While this made accessing care easier for patients, physicians are burdened by a barrage of electronic patient messages seeking medical advice that have contributed to record-breaking levels of physician burnout.”
Source: https://today.ucsd.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, physicians, Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego School of Medicine, University of California San Diego
May 3, 2023
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A permanent cure for HIV infection remains elusive due to the virus’s ability to hide away in latent reservoirs. But now, in new research published in the journal Molecular Therapy, scientists at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine (LKSOM) at Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh show that they can excise HIV DNA from the genomes of living animals to eliminate further infection. They are the first to perform the feat in three different animal models, including a “humanized” model in which mice were transplanted with human immune cells and infected with the virus. The team is the first to demonstrate that HIV-1 replication can be completely shut down and the virus eliminated from infected cells in animals with a powerful gene editing technology known as CRISPR/Cas9. The new work builds on a previous proof-of-concept study that the team published in 2016
“Our new study is more comprehensive,” Dr. Hu said. “We confirmed the data from our previous work and have improved the efficiency of our gene editing strategy. We also show that the strategy is effective in two additional mouse models, one representing acute infection in mouse cells and the other representing chronic, or latent, infection in human cells.”
In the new study, the team genetically inactivated HIV-1 in transgenic mice, reducing the RNA expression of viral genes by roughly 60 to 95 percent, confirming their earlier findings. They then tested their system in mice acutely infected with EcoHIV, the mouse equivalent of human HIV-1.
“During acute infection, HIV actively replicates,” Dr. Khalili explained. “With EcoHIV mice, we were able to investigate the ability of the CRISPR/Cas9 strategy to block viral replication and potentially prevent systemic infection.” The excision efficiency of their strategy reached 96 percent in EcoHIV mice, providing the first evidence for HIV-1 eradication by prophylactic treatment with a CRISPR/Cas9 system.
The work was led by Wenhui Hu, MD, PhD, currently Associate Professor in the Center for Metabolic Disease Research at LKSOM; Kamel Khalili, PhD, Laura H. Carnell Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience, Director of the Center for Neurovirology, and Won-Bin Young, PhD. Dr. Young was Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine at the time of the research. Dr. Young recently joined LKSOM.
Source: https://medicine.temple.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: cells, CRISPR-Cas9, DNA, Gene-editing, genomes, HIV, LKSOM, Temple University, University of Pittsburgh
May 2, 2023
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Human lifespan is related to the aging of our individual cells. Three years ago a group of University of California San Diego researchers deciphered essential mechanisms behind the aging process. After identifying two distinct directions that cells follow during aging, the researchers genetically manipulated these processes to extend the lifespan of cells.
As described April 28, 2023 in Science, they have now extended this research using synthetic biology to engineer a solution that keeps cells from reaching their normal levels of deterioration associated with aging. Cells, including those of yeast, plants, animals and humans, all contain gene regulatory circuits that are responsible for many physiological functions, including aging.
“These gene circuits can operate like our home electric circuits that control devices like appliances and automobiles,” said Professor Nan Hao of the School of Biological Sciences’ Department of Molecular Biology, the senior author of the study and co-director of UC San Diego’s Synthetic Biology Institute.
However, the UC San Diego group uncovered that, under the control of a central gene regulatory circuit, cells don’t necessarily age the same way. Imagine a car that ages either as the engine deteriorates or as the transmission wears out, but not both at the same time. The UC San Diego team envisioned a “smart aging process” that extends cellular longevity by cycling deterioration from one aging mechanism to another.
In the new study, the researchers genetically rewired the circuit that controls cell aging. From its normal role functioning like a toggle switch, they engineered a negative feedback loop to stall the aging process. The rewired circuit operates as a clock-like device, called a gene oscillator, that drives the cell to periodically switch between two detrimental “aged” states, avoiding prolonged commitment to either, and thereby slowing the cell’s degeneration. These advances resulted in a dramatically extended cellular lifespan, setting a new record for life extension through genetic and chemical interventions.
The new synthetic biology achievement has the potential to reconfigure scientific approaches to age delay. Distinct from numerous chemical and genetic attempts to force cells into artificial states of “youth,” the new research provides evidence that slowing the ticks of the aging clock is possible by actively preventing cells from committing to a pre-destined path of decline and death, and the clock-like gene oscillators could be a universal system to achieve that.
Source: https://today.ucsd.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: aging, aging process, cells, gene oscillator, gene regulatory circuits, Human lifespan, synthetic biology, UC San Diego’s Synthetic Biology Institute, University of California San Diego
May 1, 2023
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Using a new 3D cell culture system, researchers at Academia Sinica, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University Hospital, and National Taiwan University, have shown how blocking the activity of fibroblasts can help to treat lung cancer. The team’s studies found that efficacy of the anticancer drug cisplatin was increased when treatment was combined with the antifibrotic drug nintedanib. Addition of nintedanib improved cisplatin’s effects on suppressing the growth of cancer-cell spheroids and the invasion of cancer cells. Analyses indicated that nintedanib therapy was linked to altered expression of fibroblast genes associated with cell adhesion, invasion, and ECM degradation.
“Our results suggest that the combination of nintedanib and cisplatin could be an effective treatment strategy for lung cancer by targeting both cancer cells and cancer-associated fibroblast activation surrounding the tumor,” said research lead Chau-Hwang Lee, PhD. at Academia Sinica, and National Yang Ming Chaio Tung University. The authors reported on their findings in APL Bioengineering, in a paper titled “A 3D culture system for evaluating the combined effects of cisplatin and anti-fibrotic drugs on the growth and invasion of lung cancer cells co-cultured with fibroblasts.”
Lee added, “Nearly 90% of late-stage lung cancer patient deaths are caused by the spread of tumors to other organs, rather than the primary tumor. Therefore, it is crucial to find ways to inhibit lung cancer metastasis to prolong the lives of lung cancer patients.”
Source: https://www.genengnews.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: 3D cell culture, Academia Sinica, cancer cells, cancer-cell spheroids, cisplatin, drug, fibroblast, fibroblast genes, lung cancer, National Taiwan University, National Taiwan University Hospital, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, nintedanib
April 28, 2023
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It is believed that long before Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases present more obvious symptoms, the disorders may be noticeable in subtle changes to a person’s sleep patterns. A new project aims to see if such telltale changes could be detected by a small earbud-like device, allowing action to be taken much sooner. The four-year PANDA (Progression Assessment in Neurodegenerative Disorders of Aging) project is a collaboration between Denmark’s Aarhus University, Rigshospitalet University, and health tech company T&W Engineering. It’s centered around an experimental device known as the ear-EEG (electroencephalogram). Although the Aarhus-designed wearable looks much like a standard earbud, it actually monitors electrical activity in the brain by measuring minuscule voltage changes on the surface of the skin within the ear canal. It’s also equipped with an oximeter for measuring blood oxygen levels, a thermometer for measuring body temperature, and a microphone for monitoring heart rate and respiration.
Unlike existing sleep-monitoring systems, which typically require people to sleep a few nights in a clinic while hard-wired to numerous electrodes, the ear-EEG could be used over longer periods in people’s own homes. Additionally, because it’s much less obstructive than traditional setups, it should give a better indication of its wearer’s natural, normal sleep patterns. Plans call for the device to be tested on groups of volunteers both with and without Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, to see if consistently detectable patterns emerge in the sleep patterns of those groups. Should the study be successful, it is hoped that people who are at risk of the diseases could eventually use an ear-EEG to monitor their sleep patterns for several days or weeks on an annual basis.
“Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are diseases that creep up over many years,” said Aarhus University‘s Prof. Preben Kidmose. “Diagnosis is generally so late that the only treatment option is to treat the symptoms. In the project, we’re going to try to identify signs of the two diseases 10 to 15 years before the first problems begin to occur, and if we can, far better treatment options will be possible.”
Source: https://ingenioer.au.dk/
AND
https://newatlas.com/
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April 27, 2023
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In almost 70 years, our understanding of how Parkinson’s disease wreaks havoc on the nervous system has grown tremendously. Advances in genetic sequencing, for instance, have revealed that up to 15 percent of all cases of Parkinson’s can be attributed to inherited mutations in a person’s DNA. But large gaps in our understanding remain, including what causes the majority of cases and how to definitively test for the disease. Most astonishingly, today’s gold standard treatment for Parkinson’s—levodopa medications—was discovered 68 years ago. Levodopa is effective at reducing Parkinson’s hallmark symptoms like tremors, slowness, and stiffness. The underlying theory is that Parkinson’s patients lose cells that make dopamine, and levodopa acts as a substitute.
Crucially, however, levodopa cannot stop or slow the progression of the neurodegenerative disease—merely provide some respite to the symptoms. Many researchers hope to find a more permanent cure by targeting the source and directly fixing mistakes in patients’ genes that lead to Parkinson’s in the first place. In a new study published April 19 in the journal Science Advances, one group reports having acquired the ability to overcome a (literal) barrier holding genetic intervention back.
New ways to treat Parkinson’s disease can’t come fast enough. More than 8.5 million people worldwide have the disease, and it’s the fastest-growing neurological cause of disability and death. Not only can these new findings introduce a new generation of Parkinson’s treatments, it could fundamentally change the way we treat diseases of the brain.
“Our ultimate goal is to treat neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s, early and non-invasively,” José Obeso, a neurologist at the Abarca Campal Integral Neuroscience Center in Spain and the senior author of the new research, told Spanish newspaper El País. “If all goes well, we could start testing on patients in the summer of 2024.”
Though the roots of Parkinson’s disease remain mysterious, researchers have figured out that dopamine is central to the puzzle. You may know this chemical as a pleasure hormone, but more generally it’s a key component of neurons’ messaging system. A structure in humans’ midbrain called the substantia nigra controls movement and coordination through cells that release dopamine. But in Parkinson’s patients, 80 percent or more of these cells are killed off.
Continue Reading »
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Abarca Campal Integral Neuroscience Center, American Parkinson Disease Association, blood brain barrier, bubbles, coordination, DNA, dopamine, focused ultrasound, Gene therapies, genes, genetic sequencing, levodopa, movement, MRI, nervous system, Parkinson's, slowness, stiffness, substantia nigra, tremors, Ultrasound waves
April 26, 2023
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MIT engineers have designed a new nanoparticle sensor that could enable early diagnosis of cancer with a simple urine test. The sensors, which can detect many different cancerous proteins, could also be used to distinguish the type of a tumor or how it is responding to treatment. The new diagnostic, which is based on analysis of urine samples, could also be designed to reveal whether a tumor has metastasized. The nanoparticles are designed so that when they encounter a tumor, they shed short sequences of DNA that are excreted in the urine. Analyzing these DNA “barcodes” can reveal distinguishing features of a particular patient’s tumor. The researchers designed their test so that it can be performed using a strip of paper, similar to an at-home Covid test, which they hope could make it affordable and accessible to as many patients as possible.
“We are trying to innovate in a context of making technology available to low- and middle-resource settings. Putting this diagnostic on paper is part of our goal of democratizing diagnostics and creating inexpensive technologies that can give you a fast answer at the point of care,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, Professor of Health Sciences at MIT and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.
In tests in mice, the researchers showed that they could use the sensors to detect the activity of five different enzymes that are expressed in tumors. They also showed that their approach could be scaled up to distinguish at least 46 different DNA barcodes in a single sample, using a microfluidic device to analyze the samples.
Bhatia is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Nanotechnology. Liangliang Hao, a former MIT research scientist who is now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, is the lead author of the study.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: barcodes, Boston University, cancer, DNA, metastasis, MIT, nanoparticle sensor, nanoparticles, proteins, tests, tumor, urine
April 25, 2023
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Medication delivered by a novel gel cured 100% of mice with an aggressive brain cancer, a striking result that offers new hope for patients diagnosed with glioblastoma, one of the deadliest and most common brain tumors in humans.
“Despite recent technological advancements, there is a dire need for new treatment strategies,” said Honggang Cui, a Johns Hopkins University chemical and biomolecular engineer who led the research. “We think this hydrogel will be the future and will supplement current treatments for brain cancer.”
Cui’s team combined an anticancer drug and an antibody in a solution that self-assembles into a gel to fill the tiny grooves left after a brain tumor is surgically removed. The gel can reach areas that surgery might miss and current drugs struggle to reach to kill lingering cancer cells and suppress tumor growth.
The gel also seems to trigger an immune response that a mouse’s body struggles to activate on its own when fighting glioblastoma. When the researchers rechallenged surviving mice with a new glioblastoma tumor, their immune systems alone beat the cancer without additional medication. The gel appears to not only fend off cancer but help rewire the immune system to discourage recurrence with immunological memory, researchers said.
Still, surgery is essential for this approach, the researchers said. Applying the gel directly in the brain without surgical removal of the tumor resulted in a 50% survival rate.
“The surgery likely alleviates some of that pressure and allows more time for the gel to activate the immune system to fight the cancer cells,” Cui said.
The gel solution consists of nano-sized filaments made with paclitaxel, an FDA-approved drug for breast, lung, and other cancers. The filaments provide a vehicle to deliver an antibody called aCD47. By blanketing the tumor cavity evenly, the gel releases medication steadily over several weeks, and its active ingredients remain close to the injection site.
The results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: https://hub.jhu.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: aCD47, Antibody, brain tumors, cancer, drug, FDA, gel, Glioblastoma, immune response, immunological memory, Johns Hopkins University, paclitaxel, surgery, tumor
April 24, 2023
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Under CEO Paul Stoffels, Belgian biotech Galapagos is testing a device that manufactures CAR-T cancer therapies in hospitals, bringing down the wait time and price. When it works, CAR-T cancer therapy can appear miraculous. With a single infusion of their own immune T-cells—genetically modified to find and kill cancer in the blood—about half of patients with leukemia and lymphoma, and about a third with myeloma, have a complete remission, achieving a functional “cure.” For the most prevalent type of pediatric cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, CAR-T therapy has demonstrated complete remission rates as high as 90%. The first two patients treated with CAR-T therapy, in 2010—adult men who had end-stage chronic lymphocytic leukemia—were still in remission a decade later. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a total of six CAR-T therapies since 2017, all for the treatment of blood cancers.
A 2022 survey by Mayo Clinic researchers found that the median time on the waiting list for CAR-T therapy was six months, and that only a quarter of patients eventually received it.
Unlike regular drugs, so-called autologous CAR-T infusions are “living medicines,” custom-made for each patient. Typically, patients will get blood drawn in a hospital or special center. The T cells are separated out, and shipped refrigerated or frozen to a central biomanufacturing facility where they’re genetically “reprogrammed” to express a tumor-seeking molecule, called a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, on their surface. The modified cells are “expanded” in an incubator for a few days or weeks to boost their numbers enough to create a therapeutic dose. After several quality testing steps, the modified CAR-T cells are frozen and sent back to the hospital to deliver to the patient. The process typically takes at least two weeks and up to eight weeks, “vein to vein.”
Current CAR-T treatments have list prices in the high $300,000 to high $400,000 range. “The reason it’s so costly,” explains Travis Young, VP of Biologics at the nonprofit California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr), “is because every point in that manufacturing process has to be very highly controlled. It requires a technician that has a lot of training, it requires clean rooms, it requires the infrastructure for shipping and cryopreservation, and then the biggest time is the pre-release testing to ensure the sterility and potency of the product.” There are numerous opportunities for glitches. “The supply chain is in its infancy,” Young says. “And it’s not just the infrastructure, it’s the number of people that have the training to do this.”
Companies are hacking away at these challenges in different ways, aiming to reduce the complexity, time, and ultimately cost of delivering CAR-T treatments to more patients. One of the more unlikely contenders is Belgium-based Galapagos NV, which last June announced a bold plan to manufacture these expensive therapies more quickly and affordably, by developing them not in a centralized facility, but at the point of care, using a small, highly automated device the size of a home microwave.
Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: blood, Calibr, California Institute for Biomedical Research, car, CAR-T cancer therapies, chimeric antigen receptor, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, drugs, Food and Drug Administration, Galapagos, immune T cells, lymphoblastic leukemia, Mayo Clinic, myeloma
April 21, 2023
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Last fall, Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi from the Watson College (Binghamton University) and his Bioelectronics and Microsystems Laboratory published their research into an ingestible biobattery activated by the Ph factor of the human intestine. Now, he and PhD student Maryam Rezaie have taken what they learned and incorporated it into new ideas for use outside the body. A new study in the journal Small, which covers nanotechnology, shares the results from using spore-forming bacteria similar to the previous ingestible version to create a device that potentially would still work after 100 years.
“The overall objective is to develop a microbial fuel cell that can be stored for a relatively long period without degradation of biocatalytic activity and also can be rapidly activated by absorbing moisture from the air,” said Choi, a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science.
“We wanted to make these biobatteries for portable, storable and on-demand power generation capabilities,” Choi said. “The problem is, how can we provide the long-term storage of bacteria until used? And if that is possible, then how would you provide on-demand battery activation for rapid and easy power generation? And how would you improve the power?”
The dime-sized fuel cell was sealed with a piece of Kapton tape, a material that can withstand temperatures from -500 to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. When the tape was removed and moisture allowed in, the bacteria mixed with a chemical germinant that encouraged the microbes to produce spores. The energy from that reaction produced enough to power an LED, a digital thermometer or a small clock.
Heat activation of the bacterial spores cut the time to full power from 1 hour to 20 minutes, and increasing the humidity led to higher electrical output. After a week of storage at room temperature, there was only a 2% drop in power generation.
Source: https://www.binghamton.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: bacteria, Binghamton University, energy, fuel cell, human intestine, ingestible biobattery, microbes, pH, Power Generation, spores, Watson College
April 20, 2023
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What if radiation treatments could be given in a handful of seconds rather than weeks of treatments? If surgeons could actually see tumor cells rather than simply hoping they got rid of them all? If scientists could come up with new ways to detect, treat and understand tumors? These were among some of the ideas presented this week in Orlando at the American Association for Cancer Research annual conference, where more than 6,500 scientists shared their work and their hopes for improving the lives of cancer patients. Work against cancer has continued over the last three years, despite the pandemic, said Dr. Robert Vonderheide, the conference’s program committee chair. The thousands of presentations and 20,000-person turnout should convince people of that. Obviously, lots of the research is worth public attention. But with Vonderheide’s guidance, USA TODAY picked three ideas that seemed among the most surprising and hopeful, the kinds of approaches that have the potential to transform cancer treatment and patients’ lives.
The first is “flash” radiation, which concentrates weeks of treatments into a few days; the second, an imaging technology that lights up cancer cells to help surgeons track them down.
“Two of the most fundamental tools, cancer surgery and cancer radiation, are undergoing before our eyes fundamental changes in their technology,” said Vonderheide, who directs the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “They are each promising better success.” A third line of research is providing insights into the role of the nervous system in cancer, which could eventually be used to help patients sleep better, heal faster and live longer. Researchers typically focus on a tumor, but there are “systemic signals that might tell us how best to treat a patient or that a patient actually has a lurking cancer,” Vonderheide said. Like the immune system, which has increasingly been manipulated to help fight cancer over the last decade, the nervous system monitors the body and remembers what it encounters.
“The immune system is probably the first system to know that cancer exists. And probably the nervous system is the next one,” he said. “Maybe there’s new inroads in early detection if we focus on neurological health and immune health.” None of these new approaches is readily available yet, but Vonderheide thinks they’re among the advances worth watching.
At least half of patients with solid tumors endure radiation at some point during their treatment. Radiation typically takes about 15 minutes, though sessions can last an hour or more and are scheduled every weekday for three to nine weeks – requiring a total of 15 to 40 visits. Patients may suffer skin burns, dry mouth, difficulties eating and swallowing, and exhaustion. They must upend their lives and often a loved one’s to get to a clinic so many times.
Radiation therapy is traditionally delivered in small doses over weeks so it can efficiently kills tumor cells while being less toxic to surrounding healthy tissue, said Constantinos Koumenis, a professor of radiation biology at the University of Pennsylvania‘s Perelman School of Medicine. But as many radiation patients can attest, treatments still do plenty of damage to normal tissue. Instead, Koumenis and dozens of other research teams have been testing “flash radiation,” which uses ultra high dose rate beams of energy to zap tumor cells. Patients might get the same amount of radiation in just two to four sessions of less than 1 second each. “The vulnerability of the tumor cells is essentially the same,” Koumenis said. “What’s different is the normal tissue is more resistant to the flash radiation.”
Source: https://eu.usatoday.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: "flash" radiation, American Association for Cancer Research, cancer, cells, radiation, tumors, University of Pennsylvania
April 19, 2023
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Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan have developed the rechargeable prototype out of common-place food stuffs with the hopes of revolutionising ingestible medical devices.
“The core of the device is represented by a couple of electrodes… To have it working we are using two materials, two molecules. For the anode, we are using riboflavin which is a vitamin we can find in almonds… and for the Cathode we are using quercetin. It’s sold as a food supplement and can be found in capers,” explained Mario Caironi, the coordinator of the project. Ingestible devices like biosensors, cameras, and drug delivery systems already exist but typically cannot be digested by the human body. Therefore, if complications arise during the digestion process, surgical intervention can be required to remove the device. The advantage of this gadget made from almonds, capers, activated charcoal, seaweed, gold leaf and beeswax, is that it can be digested completely without any health risks.
Other potential applications aside from health devices could include food quality monitoring edible soft robotics. The battery prototype operates at 0.65 volts, which is too low to cause problems inside the human body. It provides a current of 48 microamps for up to 12 minutes and can power a small LED or other miniature electronic devices. The team is now working to boost capacity as well as shrink the device into a pill-sized container that would be easier to swallow.
The proof-of-concept battery cell was described recently in a paper published in the journal Advanced Materials.
Source: https://www.euronews.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: almonds, anode, battery, biosensors, cameras, capers, cathode, charcoal, drug, edible battery, electrodes, gold leaf, ingestible medical devices, Italian Institute of Technology, LED, quercetin, Rechargeable, riboflavin, seaweed, soft robotics
April 18, 2023
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RNA sequencing and gene network data are used to identify candidate genes that could turn back the “transcriptome clock” that reflects the biological age of distinct human cell types.
Technology has the potential to treat major age-related diseases including cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. More than 150,000 people die each day across the globe, about two-thirds of them from age-related causes like cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, strokes, and cardiovascular disease. If the process of aging could be slowed or reversed, the incidence of these conditions would be dramatically reduced, and more humans would live longer, healthier lives. However, aging is a complex process involving multiple biological systems – there is no single biomarker for aging. Therefore, developing treatments that target the root causes of aging is very challenging. Ichor is a Validation Project at the Wyss Institute of Harvard that aims to address this problem using high-throughput genetic screening to identify networks of genes that are strongly implicated in aging processes and develop RNA-based therapies that can make old cells young again.
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| Tags: aging, biological age, biomarker, cancer, candidate genes, cardiovascular disease, cellular rejuvenation, gene network data, Harvard, hematopoietic stem cells, HSC, human cell, Ichor, RNA, RNA sequencing, strokes, transcriptome clock, Validation Project, Wyss Institute
April 17, 2023
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MIT neuroscientists have found a way to reverse neurodegeneration and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease by interfering with an enzyme that is typically overactive in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. When the researchers treated mice with a peptide that blocks the hyperactive version of an enzyme called CDK5, they found dramatic reductions in neurodegeneration and DNA damage in the brain. These mice also showed improvements in their ability to perform tasks such as learning to navigate a water maze.
“We found that the effect of this peptide is just remarkable,” says Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the senior author of the study. “We saw wonderful effects in terms of reducing neurodegeneration and neuroinflammatory responses, and even rescuing behavior deficits.”
With further testing, the researchers hope that the peptide could eventually be used as a treatment for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia that have CDK5 overactivation. The peptide does not interfere with CDK1, an essential enzyme that is structurally similar to CDK5, and it is similar in size to other peptide drugs that are used in clinical applications. Picower Institute Research Scientist Ping-Chieh Pao is the lead author of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Tsai has been studying CDK5’s role in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases since early in her career. As a postdoc, she identified and cloned the CDK5 gene, which encodes a type of enzyme known as a cyclin-dependent kinase. Most of the other cyclin-dependent kinases are involved in controlling cell division, but CDK5 is not. Instead, it plays important roles in the development of the central nervous system, and also helps to regulate synaptic function.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Alzheimer's, brain, CDK5, cyclin-dependent kinase, dementia, DNA, enzyme, MIT, neurodegeneration, P35, peptide, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, tau protein
April 14, 2023
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Researchers from Sanford Burnham Prebys have discovered a group of proteins that could be key for cellular reprogramming, a growing topic in regenerative medicine. So far, scientists have been using the technology to repair damaged or injured body tissues. In this study, the scientists successfully reprogrammed damaged heart cells to repair heart injuries in mice after a heart attack. The findings could be pivotal for treating not just heart diseases, but Parkinson’s and neuromuscular diseases as well.
“Even if a person survives a heart attack, there could still be long-term damage to the heart that increases the risk of heart problems down the line,” says lead author Alexandre Colas, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Development, Aging and Regeneration Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys, in a media release. “Helping the heart heal after injury is an important medical need in its own right, but these findings also pave the way for wider applications of cell reprogramming in medicine.”
The four proteins identified are called AJSZ, and they help address the barriers to reprogramming. The team was able to block the proteins, lessening scarring, and leading to an improvement in overall heart function by 50 percent. Even though these findings are relative to heart cells, the researchers say that the proteins are universal to all cell types. “This is helping us solve a very big problem that a lot of researchers are interested in,” says Colas. “Even more important, this breakthrough is a significant step forward on our way to turning these promising biological concepts into real treatments.”
In the near future, the team hopes to take this great discovery and start applying it to real-life patients by identifying different ways to block AJSZ function swiftly and effectively. The best option right now is using a small molecule drug to do so, Colas explains. “We need to find a way to inhibit these proteins in a way we can control to make sure we are only reprogramming the cells that need it,” the researcher concludes. “We will be screening for drugs that can help us inhibit these proteins in a controlled and selective manner in the coming months.”
Source: https://www.sbpdiscovery.org/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AJSZ, cellular reprogramming, heart attack, heart cells, neuromuscular diseases, Parkinson's, proteins, Sanford Burnham Prebys, tissues
April 13, 2023
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For four months, three robot dogs will put their paws to the canvas at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) later this year. They’ll be trained by Agnieszka Pilat, the artist behind their upcoming appearance at the NGV Triennial, an arts festival in Melbourne, Australia. While the event marks a departure from the Silicon Valley circles she usually paints for, Pilat has said she is excited to share her outsider perspective with the broader art world.
“I think it’s artists’ responsibility [to engage with new technology], and we have the ability to play on a much smaller scale before something becomes global,” she tells Dee Jefferson of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
Originally a classically trained painter, Pilat grew up in Poland during the final years of the Cold War, an experience that shaped her futuristic, technology-oriented style. In 2004, she moved to San Francisco and began creating machine-themed art, which quickly caught the attention of patrons in the technology sector. “Agnieszka’s work captures the magic of technology in a human, heroic way, and I think that helps us all better relate to it,” John Krafcik, the former CEO of Google’s self-driving-car unit, told New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh last year. Pilat recounts the pivotal moment when the robotics company Boston Dynamics invited her to paint Spot, the dog-like robot that has gained fame and notoriety on the internet in recent years. The opportunity changed the trajectory of her career.
“They were like, ‘You have to play with the robot, you can’t just paint it,’” Pilat tells Stephen A. Russell of the Age. “It all switched on at that moment.” Before long, Pilat was programming the robots to move across canvases with paint brushes. Since then, they have produced a series of brightly colored works, one of which sold for $31,500 at Sotheby’s in 2021. Sunrise March, another of the robots’ pieces, raised $40,000 for Ukrainian refugees at a 2022 charity auction. At the NGV Triennial, their artistic process will be slightly different. Pilat designed a series of commands for the robots, which can execute them “in whatever order they see fit—down to the direction the arm moves, how hard it presses the canvas and whether it paints a dot or a line,” per the Guardian’s Sian Cain.
Freaked out? You’re not alone. A large segment of the art world is less than thrilled about Pilat’s process. But Pilat describes herself as a “techno-optimist,” telling the Guardian, “When people meet Spot in person, the vast majority fall in love very fast—it’s hard not to be charmed by [the robots] because they’re very cute.”
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: ABC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Boston Dynamics, canvases, Google, National Gallery of Victoria, NGV, paint brushes, Robot Dogs, Sotheby’s, Spot
April 12, 2023
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A fuel cell under the skin that converts blood sugar from the body into electrical energy sounds like science fiction. Yet it works perfectly, as an ETH Zurich research team led by Martin Fussenegger, Professor of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, has shown. In type 1 diabetes, the body does not produce insulin. This means that patients have to obtain the hormone externally to regulate their blood sugar levels. Nowadays, this is mostly done via insulin pumps that are attached directly to the body. These devices, as well as other medical applications such as pacemakers, require a reliable energy supply, which at present is met primarily by power from either single-use or rechargeable batteries.
Now, a team of researchers led by Martin Fussenegger from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel (Switzerland) have put a seemingly futuristic idea into practice. They have developed an implantable fuel cell that uses excess blood sugar (glucose) from tissue to generate electrical energy. The researchers have combined the fuel cell with artificial beta cells developed by their group several years ago. These produce insulin at the touch of a button and effectively lower blood glucose levels much like their natural role models in the pancreas.
“Many people, especially in the Western industrialised nations, consume more carbohydrates than they need in everyday life,” Fussenegger explains. This, he adds, leads to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. “This gave us the idea of using this excess metabolic energy to produce electricity to power biomedical devices,” he says.
At the heart of the fuel cell is an anode (electrode) made of copper-based nanoparticles, which Fussenegger’s team created specifically for this application. It consists of copper-based nanoparticles and splits glucose into gluconic acid and a proton to generate electricity, which sets an electric circuit in motion. Wrapped in a nonwoven fabric and coated with alginate, an algae product approved for medical use, the fuel cell resembles a small tea bag that can be implanted under the skin. The alginate soaks up body fluid and allows glucose to pass from the tissue into the fuel cell within.
Source: https://ethz.ch/
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| Tags: alginate, anode, beta cells, blood, cardiovascular disease, copper, diabetes, electrical energy, electrode, energy supply, ETH Zürich, fuel cell, glucose, insulin, nanoparticles, obesity, pacemakers, pancreas, proton, rechargeable batteries, skin, sugar, type-1 diabetes
April 11, 2023
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A tiny implant has cured mice of breast cancer in just two weeks, according to a new study. The self-charging battery enables a new class of medications to kill tumors, leaving healthy tissue alone. Scientists in China explain that the device runs on salt water injected into the cancerous area, causing consumption of oxygen. Cancer cells starve without the gas, a condition called hypoxia. The technique boosts efficiency of HAPs (hypoxia-activated prodrugs) that seek to exploit this trait by only killing hypoxic cells.
“After 14 days, the tumors in the five mice that received both the working battery and HAP treatment had decreased by an average of 90 percent – with four of these mice experiencing complete tumor disappearance,” says lead author Professor Fan Zhang from Fudan University, according to a report in New Scientist, per SWNS.
The Chinese team placed the device inside the armpits of 25 lab rodents with breast cancer. Study authors split the other rodents into groups that received no treatment, HAP drugs only, a non-functional implanted battery, or just the working battery. The implant can operate for up to 500 hours within mouse tissue, producing very low voltage electricity. The idea is to optimize the action of the drugs by creating a hypoxic environment. HAPs are not currently approved for clinical use due to limited evidence of their effectiveness.
“Tumors typically deplete the oxygen in the surrounding non-cancerous tissues as they grow, resulting in the cells becoming oxygen-free, or hypoxic,” Prof. Zhang explains. “Hypoxia-activated prodrugs aim to take advantage of this feature by only targeting hypoxic cells – minimizing damage to healthy cells and reducing side effects.” “The battery can cover the tumor and persistently consume the oxygen within it for more than 14 days, which is much longer than previous agents that worked for usually not more than two days.”
Prof. Randall Johnson of Cambridge University says inducing hypoxia in a tumor can increase the risk the cancer will spread. “While this didn’t appear to occur in these mice, the costs and benefits of the battery’s use in people needs to be assessed before any human treatment,” Prof. Johnson concludes. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 297,790 new cases of invasive breast cancer in women throughout the United States in 2023.
The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
Source: https://studyfinds.org/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: armpits, breast cancer, Cambridge University, cancer, cells, Fudan University, HAPs, hypoxia, hypoxia-activated prodrugs, hypoxic cells, implant, implanted battery, oxygen, rodentrs, salt water, self-charging battery, tumors, voltage electricity
April 10, 2023
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In the United States alone, drug-resistant bacteria and fungi infect almost 3 million people per year and kill about 35,000. Antibiotics are essential and effective, but in recent years overuse has led to some bacteria developing resistance to them. The infections are so difficult to treat, the World Health Organization deemed antibiotic resistance a top 10 global public health threat. Now, Professor John E. Moses at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has created a new weapon against these drug-resistant superbugs—an antibiotic that can shape-shift by rearranging its atoms. Moses came up with the idea of shape-shifting antibiotics while observing tanks in military training exercises. With rotating turrets and nimble movements, the tanks could respond quickly to possible threats.
A few years later, Moses learned of a molecule called bullvalene. Bullvalene is a fluxional molecule, meaning its atoms can swap positions. This gives it a changing shape with over a million possible configurations—exactly the fluidity Moses was looking for. Several bacteria, including MRSA, VRSA, and VRE, have developed resistance to a potent antibiotic called vancomycin, used to treat everything from skin infections to meningitis. Moses thought he could improve the drug’s bacteria-fighting performance by combining it with bullvalene. He turned to click chemistry, a Nobel Prize–winning class of fast, high-yielding chemical reactions that “click” molecules together reliably. This makes the reactions more efficient for wide-scale use.
“Click chemistry is great,” says Moses, who studied this revolutionary development under two-time Nobel laureate K. Barry Sharpless. “It gives you certainty and the best chance you’ve got of making complex things.”
Using this technique, Moses and his colleagues created a new antibiotic with two vancomycin “warheads” and a fluctuating bullvalene center. Moses tested the new drug in collaboration with Dr. Tatiana Soares da-Costa (University of Adelaide). The researchers gave the drug to VRE-infected wax moth larvae, which are commonly used to test antibiotics. They found the shape-shifting antibiotic significantly more effective than vancomycin at clearing the deadly infection. Additionally, the bacteria didn’t develop resistance to the new antibiotic.
Researchers can use click chemistry with shape-shifting antibiotics to create a multitude of new drugs, Moses explains. Such weapons against infection may even be key to our species’ survival and evolution. “If we can invent molecules that mean the difference between life and death,” he says, “that’d be the greatest achievement ever.”
Source: https://www.cshl.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Antibiotic resistance, atoms, bacteria, bullvalene, click chemistry, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, CSHL, drug-resistant, drug-resistant superbugs, fluxional molecule, fungi, meningitis, molecule, MRSA, skin infections, University of Adelaide, vancomycin, VRE, VRSA, World Health Organization
April 7, 2023
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Hospitals have begun using “decision support tools” powered by artificial intelligence that can diagnose disease, suggest treatment or predict a surgery’s outcome. But no algorithm is correct all the time, so how do doctors know when to trust the AI’s recommendation? A new study led by Qian Yang, assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, suggests that if AI tools can counsel the doctor like a colleague – pointing out relevant biomedical research that supports the decision – then doctors can better weigh the merits of the recommendation.
The researchers will present the new study, “Harnessing Biomedical Literature to Calibrate Clinicians’ Trust in AI Decision Support Systems,” in April (23 to 28) at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Previously, most AI researchers have tried to help doctors evaluate suggestions from decision support tools by explaining how the underlying algorithm works, or what data was used to train the AI. But an education in how AI makes its predictions wasn’t sufficient, Yang said. Many doctors wanted to know if the tool had been validated in clinical trials, which typically does not happen with these tools.
“A doctor’s primary job is not to learn how AI works,” Yang said. “If we can build systems that help validate AI suggestions based on clinical trial results and journal articles, which are trustworthy information for doctors, then we can help them understand whether the AI is likely to be right or wrong for each specific case.”
To develop this system, the researchers first interviewed nine doctors across a range of specialties, and three clinical librarians. They discovered that when doctors disagree on the right course of action, they track down results from relevant biomedical research and case studies, taking into account the quality of each study and how closely it applies to the case at hand.
Yang and her colleagues built a prototype of their clinical decision tool that mimics this process by presenting biomedical evidence alongside the AI’s recommendation. They used GPT-3 to find and summarize relevant research. (ChatGPT is the better-known offshoot of GPT-3, which is tailored for human dialogue.)
Source: https://news.cornell.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, algorithm, Artificial Intelligence, Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, decision support tools, diagnosis, GPT-3, hospitals, surgery
April 6, 2023
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The late Stephen Hawking was a major voice in the debate about how humanity can benefit from artificial intelligence. Hawking made no secret of his fears that thinking machines could one day take charge. He went as far as predicting in 2018 that future developments in AI “could spell the end of the human race.”
But Hawking’s relationship with AI was far more complex than this often-cited soundbite. The deep concerns he expressed were about superhuman AI, the point at which AI systems not only replicate human intelligence processes, but also keep expanding them, without our support – a stage that is at best decades away, if it ever happens at all. And yet Hawking’s very ability to communicate those fears, and all his other ideas, came to depend on basic AI technology.
At the intelectual property and health law centers at DePaul University, my colleagues and I study the effects of emerging technologies like the ones Stephen Hawking worried about. At its core, the concept of AI involves computational technology designed to make machines function with foresight that mimics, and ultimately surpasses, human thinking processes.
Hawking cautioned against an extreme form of AI, in which thinking machines would “take off” on their own, modifying themselves and independently designing and building ever more capable systems. Humans, bound by the slow pace of biological evolution, would be tragically outwitted.
Source: https://theconversation.com
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, biological evolution, computational technology, DePaul University, humanity, Stephen Hawking, superhuman AI, thinking machine
April 5, 2023
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Lifestyle behaviors such as eating well and exercising can be significant factors in one’s overall health. But the risk of developing cancer is predominantly at the whim of an individual’s genetics. Our bodies are constantly making copies of our genes to produce new cells. However, there are occasional mistakes in those copies, a phenomenon geneticists call mutation. In some cases, these mistakes can alter proteins, fuse genes and change how much a gene gets copied, ultimately impacting a person’s risk of developing cancer. Scientists can better understand the impact of mutations by developing predictive models for tumor activity.
Christopher Plaisier, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, is developing a software tool called OncoMerge that uses genetic data to improve cancer modeling technology. OncoMerge is a platform that detects abnormal gene fusions as well as mutations that affect protein expression and how many times a gene is copied. The software then analyzes the network behind the mutations to reveal connections and develop a model to predict future changes caused by the mutations.
“We are able to look at the gene expression patterns using correlation,” says Plaisier, who is also an associate faculty member in the ASU Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society. “Then we can see what is being activated or repressed, which allows us to look at the deeper functions behind that.”
Plaisier has been reflecting on the idea of OncoMerge since his postdoctoral work, during which he first noticed a need for a platform that could process the network behind mutations. The effort combines his expertise as a human geneticist, computational biologist and cancer biologist into a single project. His most recent research tackles gene mutation detection challenges by designing a database that uses genetic data to analyze linked activity within the networks. The results are published today in the journal Cell Reports Methods.
The information derived from examining genetics has countless potential health care applications but is especially valuable for understanding cancer. Due to the significant variation among forms of cancers, Plaisier is enhancing prediction models that can offer insight into specific cancer environments.
Source: https://www.cell.com/
AND
https://www.asu.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Arizona State University, ASU, cancer, cancer biologist, cells, computational biologist, gene fusion, genes, genetic data, genetics, health, Lifestyle behaviors, mutation, OncoMerge, proteins, software
April 4, 2023
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A team of researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel has come up with nano-robots that can scan individual cells to tell whether they’re healthy or in trouble. These tiny cell inspectors, a mere ten microns across each, are even capable of transporting desired cells to a different location with the use of electricity or a magnet for later genetic analysis, making them a potentially groundbreaking new tool for diagnosing diseases or delivering drugs to a chosen location. As detailed in a study published in the journal Advanced Science, the researchers borrowed from the natural functions of other organisms found in our bodies to develop the micro-robots.
“Developing the micro-robot’s ability to move autonomously was inspired by biological micro-swimmers like bacteria and sperm cells,” said Gilad Yossifon, biomedical engineering professor at Tel Aviv University and lead author of the paper, in a statement. “This is an innovative area of research that is developing rapidly, with a wide variety of uses in fields such as medicine and the environment and as a research tool.”
The tiny robots could, for instance, be used to single out cancer cells and transport them for taking biological samples and later medical diagnosis. In tests, the researchers were able to use the robots to distinguish between healthy or dying cells and capture individual blood and cancer cells within a single bacterium.
“Our new development significantly advances the technology in two main aspects — hybrid propulsion and navigation by electric and magnetic mechanisms that are very different,” Yossifon said. “In addition, the micro-robot has an improved ability to identify and capture a single cell — without the need for tagging — for local testing or retrieval and transport to an external instrument.”
The researcher and his team are now looking to develop micro-robots that are capable of working inside the body that could, for instance, be used as “effective drug carriers that can be precisely guided to the target,” according to Yossifon.
https://futurism.com/
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| Tags: cells, diagnostic, electricity, genetic analysis, magnet, nano-robots, Tel Aviv University
April 3, 2023
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ChatGPT‘s striking ability to answer people’s questions in instantly generated, easy-to-understand answers could be a game-changer for people searching for medical advice, but a new medical journal essay says it’s not quite that simple. And so does ChatGPT. Peter Lee, a vice president at Microsoft, has spent the last six months experimenting with the latest edition of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence platform designed to answer user questions in a conversational tone.
Like other so-called large language models, ChatGPT, made by San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, is trained on vast amounts of data available on the internet, in books and from other sources. It uses algorithms to generate words in sequence based on the frequency with which they appear together online. Microsoft‘s Bing search engine now uses ChatGPT. He published an essay Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine about the potential uses of ChatGPT for recording medical notes, offering diagnostic possibilities, educating clinicians and patients and analyzing and summarizing data.
Particularly notable, he said, was the interface’s ability to provide empathetic, human-like responses. We asked Lee, also co-author of the forthcoming book “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond,” about his enthusiasm and concerns about the latest version of ChatGPT, now ChatGPT-4, which was recently released. We also posed the same questions to ChatGPT, but because it’s availability is still limited, the responses are from ChatGPT-3.
Question: Does ChatGPT provide reliable medical information?
Lee: I personally would not trust models at that level of sophistication for my own personal health advice or information and I would be concerned if doctors and nurses were making it for medical decision-making.
ChatGPT: ChatGPT is a language model trained on vast amounts of text data, including medical information. However, it’s important to note that ChatGPT is not a medical professional, and its responses should not be considered as medical advice. While ChatGPT may provide information on medical topics, it’s essential to verify that information with a qualified medical professional before making any decisions regarding your health. There is also a risk that ChatGPT may provide inaccurate or outdated medical information, which could potentially be harmful.
Question: What kinds of mistakes does ChatGPT commonly make and why?
Lee: GPT models generally are very bad at information retrieval. It’s almost by design because the GPT models don’t want to regurgitate their training data. If you’re asking it for a specific source, like a reference to a paper, it’s not able to resurrect the exact source, so it makes something up, it “hallucinates.”
ChatGPT: ChatGPT may make mistakes such as providing irrelevant or incorrect responses, repeating itself, or producing responses that are inconsistent with the context of the conversation. These mistakes can occur because ChatGPT is trained on vast amounts of text data, including unverified and potentially biased information, which can lead to incorrect or outdated information. Additionally, ChatGPT’s responses may be affected by the quality of the input it receives, which can result in irrelevant or off-topic responses.
Question: How is ChatGPT-4 better than ChatGPT-3?
Lee: We get to a different level of intelligence. The fundamental thing is you have this AI model that has a lot of cognitive capability and you have a chat interface. It ends up being really natural to interact with.
ChatGPT: It’s reasonable to expect improvements in areas such as scale, accuracy, multilingual capabilities, contextual understanding, and consistency.
Source: https://eu.usatoday.com/
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https://www.nejm.org/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Bing, ChatGPT, ChatGPT-4, data, human-like responses, large language models, medical advice, Microsoft
March 31, 2023
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A groundbreaking process developed by researchers from University of Missouri is offering new hope in the fight against blood cancers, such as lymphoma and leukemia.
A pair of researchers at the School of Medicine have developed a process for marking transplanted donor bone marrow cells so that the immune cells only attack cancerous cells but not healthy tissue. One of the reasons bone marrow transplants are often a last resort for patients with blood cancers is graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), a common occurrence where transplanted donor immune cells attack both malignant and healthy cells in the recipient.
“Our ability to biologically label these donor immune cells so that they will attack cancerous cells in the host and then stop themselves from attacking healthy tissue offers new hope that bone marrow transplants can be safer and more effective for patients,” said co-lead researcher, Esma S. Yolcu, PhD, professor of Child Health and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. “The stem cells in bone marrow have tremendous potential to combat autoimmune diseases, such as type-1 diabetes and blood cancers, such as leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma. It is critical to solve the puzzle of GVHD to unlock the full potential of bone marrow cell transplant treatment regimens.”
Yolcu and Haval Shirwan, PhD, also a professor of Child Health and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, developed the ProtEx™ platform technology to generate recombinant biologics that instruct immune cells to achieve a desired treatment outcome. Engineered donor cells display on their surface instructions for the transplanted immune cells to attack only the cancerous cells and then self-destruct before attacking healthy tissue in the host, thus preventing GVHD.
“This approach has significant potential as a treatment on its own or in combination with other clinical regimens to increase the efficacy of stem cell transplants,” said Shirwan. “The process of engineering the donor cells is straightforward and efficient, making it suitable for clinical translation.”
In their research to date, the ProtEx™ engineered immune cells have been effective in overcoming GVHD following transplantation in mice as well as in a humanized mouse model. Transplantation with the engineered cells was effective in preventing acute GVHD without a detectable negative impact on the recipient immune system. The concept is presently being pursued for testing in a large animal model of GVHD as a prelude to clinical translation for the treatment of hematological cancers.
Yolcu and Shirwan’s research was recently published in Blood Advances, entitled “Engineering donor lymphocytes with Fas ligand protein effectively prevents acute graft-versus-host disease.” The lead authors disclosed that they have a provisional patent on using SA-FasL-engineered cells as a prophylactic approach for acute GVHD. The researchers also recently received a National Institutes of Health grant for their research at the Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health Building on a treatment for type-1 diabetes that uses transplanted stem cells derived insulin producing cells to replace the need for regular insulin injections.
Source: https://medicine.missouri.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: bone marrow, cancer, cancerous cells, cells, Engineered donor cells, graft-versus-host disease, GVHD, healthy tissue, hematological cancers, immune cells, insulin, leukemia, lymphoma, ProtEx™, Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health Building, SA-FasL-engineered cells, type-1 diabetes, University of Missouri
March 30, 2023
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Tesla and SpaceX boss has doubled down on his dire warnings about the danger of artificial intelligence. The billionaire tech entrepreneur called AI more dangerous than nuclear warheads and said there needs to be a regulatory body overseeing the development of super intelligence, speaking at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin, Texas on Sunday. It is not the first time Musk has made frightening predictions about the potential of artificial intelligence — he has, for example, called AI vastly more dangerous than North Korea — and he has previously called for regulatory oversight.Musk, however, is resolute, calling those who push against his warnings “fools” at SXSW.
“The biggest issue I see with so-called AI experts is that they think they know more than they do, and they think they are smarter than they actually are,” said Musk.
“This tends to plague smart people. They define themselves by their intelligence and they don’t like the idea that a machine could be way smarter than them, so they discount the idea — which is fundamentally flawed.” Based on his knowledge of machine intelligence and its developments, Musk believes there is reason to be worried.
“I am really quite close, I am very close, to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me,”added Musk. “It’s capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.”
Musk pointed to machine intelligence playing the ancient Chinese strategy game Go to demonstrate rapid growth in AI’s capabilities. For example, London-based company, DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014, developed an artificial intelligence system, AlphaGo Zero, that learned to play Go without any human intervention. It learned simply from randomized play against itself. The Alphabet-owned company announced this development in a paper published in October. Musk worries AI’s development will outpace our ability to manage it in a safe way. “So the rate of improvement is really dramatic. We have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital super intelligence is one which is symbiotic with humanity. I think that is the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one.”
To do this, Musk recommended the development of artificial intelligence be regulated. “I am not normally an advocate of regulation and oversight — I think one should generally err on the side of minimizing those things — but this is a case where you have a very serious danger to the public,” explained Musk. “It needs to be a public body that has insight and then oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely. This is extremely important. I think the danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot and nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to build nuclear warheads if they want. That would be insane,” he said at SXSW.
“And mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. Far. So why do we have no regulatory oversight? This is insane.”
Musk called for regulatory oversight of artificial intelligence in July too, speaking to the National Governors Association. “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive,” Musk said in July.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Alphabet, AlphaGo Zero, Artificial Intelligence, DeepMind, Elon Musk, Google, regulation, regulatory body, SpaceX, SXSW, Tesla
March 29, 2023
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Researchers have developed a new type of neural implant that could restore limb function to amputees and others who have lost the use of their arms or legs. In a study carried out in rats, researchers from the University of Cambridge used the device to improve the connection between the brain and paralyzed limbs. The device combines flexible electronics and human stem cells – the body’s ‘reprogrammable’ master cells – to better integrate with the nerve and drive limb function.
Previous attempts at using neural implants to restore limb function have mostly failed, as scar tissue tends to form around the electrodes over time, impeding the connection between the device and the nerve. By sandwiching a layer of muscle cells reprogrammed from stem cells between the electrodes and the living tissue, the researchers found that the device integrated with the host’s body and the formation of scar tissue was prevented. The cells survived on the electrode for the duration of the 28-day experiment, the first time this has been monitored over such a long period.
The scientists say that by combining two advanced therapies for nerve regeneration – cell therapy and bioelectronics – into a single device, they can overcome the shortcomings of both approaches, improving functionality and sensitivity.
While extensive research and testing will be needed before it can be used in humans, the device is a promising development for amputees or those who have lost function of a limb or limbs.
The results are reported in the journal Science Advances.
Soource: https://www.cam.ac.uk/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Amputees, arms, bioelectronics, brain, electrodes, flexible electronics, legs, limb function, living tissue, master cella, muscle cells, neural implant, paralyzed limbs, scar tissue, stem cells, University of Cambridge
March 28, 2023
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Dozens of clinical trials are testing mRNA treatment vaccines in people with various types of cancer, including pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, and melanoma. Some vaccines are being evaluated in combination with drugs that enhance the body’s immune response to tumors. But no mRNA cancer vaccine has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use either alone or with other cancer treatments.
“mRNA vaccine technology is extremely promising for infectious diseases and may lead to new kinds of vaccines,” said Elad Sharon, M.D., M.P.H., of NCI‘s Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis. “For other applications, such as the treatment of cancer, research on mRNA vaccines also appears promising, but these approaches have not yet proven themselves.”
With findings starting to emerge from ongoing clinical trials of mRNA cancer vaccines, researchers could soon learn more about the safety and effectiveness of these treatments, Dr. Sharon added. Over the past 30 years, researchers have learned how to engineer stable forms of mRNA and deliver these molecules to the body through vaccines. Once in the body, the mRNA instructs cells that take up the vaccine to produce proteins that may stimulate an immune response against these same proteins when they are present in intact viruses or tumor cells. Among the cells likely to take up mRNA from a vaccine are dendritic cells, which are the sentinels of the immune system. After taking up and translating the mRNA, dendritic cells present the resulting proteins, or antigens, to immune cells such as T cells, starting the immune response.
“Dendritic cells act as teachers, educating T cells so that they can search for and kill cancer cells or virus-infected cells,” depending on the antigen, said Karine Breckpot, Ph.D., of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, who studies mRNA vaccines. The mRNA included in the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna coronavirus vaccines instructs cells to produce a version of the “spike” protein that studs the surface of SARS-CoV-2. The immune system sees the spike protein presented by the dendritic cells as foreign and mobilizes some immune cells to produce antibodies and other immune cells to fight off the apparent infection. Having been exposed to the spike protein free of the virus, the immune system is now prepared, or primed, to react strongly to a subsequent infection with the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Source: https://www.cancer.gov/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: antibodies, antigens, cancer, cells, colorectal cancer, Dendritic cells, drugs, Food and Drug Administration, immune response, melanoma, Moderna, mRNA, NCI, pancreatic cancer, Pfizer-BioNTech, proteins, SARS-CoV-2 virus, spike protein, T-cells, tumor, tumors, vaccines, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
March 27, 2023
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While some developments of AI can sound pretty scary there are times when advancements in technology can do a great deal of good. Certain forms of technology are being used to help diagnose conditions that impair a person’s mobility and there have been advances in the way we’re using Artificial Intelligence (AI) too. AI is being used in cancer screening technology to pick up potential issues long before they develop into something harmful.
This technology is currently being used to great success in Hungary, while the US, UK and the rest of Europe are also looking at testing it for themselves. While there are still many hurdles to get through, this technology could be a valuable tool for radiologists and ultimately be a lifesaver. Speaking to CNN, Dr Larry Norton of the Lauder Breast Center explained that while the technology has been around for decades AI is becoming a useful tool in refining the process and helping identify potential health issues.
An AI program was successfully able to detect breast cancer in a woman four years before it developed
“AI is a tool that machines use for looking at images and comparing those images to ones that have already been recorded in the machine to identify abnormalities,” said Dr Norton. “This technology can look at mammograms and identify areas that a human radiologist may want to look at more carefully. “It’s called computer assisted detection, it’s actually been around since the late 1990s but the technology is improving.”
“There’s lots of abnormalities that you see, they’re changes that are not really cancer. You can’t call everything cancer because anyone going for a mammogram is gonna need a biopsy. That’s not very practical. “What this work does is it identifies risk. It can tell a woman ‘you’re at high risk of developing breast cancer’ before you develop breast cancer,” explains the researcher.
However, he stressed that while AI had made some impressive advancements, this technology was in place to help human decision-makers rather than outright replace medical professionals.
“One thing humans can do that machines can’t do is order special tests. Things like contrast enhanced mammograms and MRIs,” Dr Norton said. “The other thing humans can do is look at previous mammograms and see if there’s any changes.” “We’ve got to think of AI as a tool for helping radiologists look at the images better. It’s not a standalone test, it’s not gonna replace a radiologist.”
According to the New York Times, the use of this AI technology in breast cancer screening has reduced the workload of a radiologist by around 30 percent while increasing cancer detection rates by 13 percent which sounds like entirely positive news. They also report that the AI was tested with some of the most challenging cancer cases where the early signs of breast cancer had not been spotted by radiologists, with the AI successfully managing to identify the cancer.
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, breast cancer, cancer screening, Hungary, mobility
March 24, 2023
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New technology is making mind reading possible with positive implications for the fields of healthcare, aerospace and advanced manufacturing. The technology was recently demonstrated by the Australian Army, where soldiers operated a Ghost Robotics quadruped robot using the brain-machine interface. Photo supplied by Australian Army. Researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have developed biosensor technology that will allow you to operate devices, such as robots and machines, solely through thought-control. The advanced brain-computer interface was developed by Distinguished Professor Chin-Teng Lin and Professor Francesca Iacopi, from the UTS Faculty of Engineering and IT, in collaboration with the Australian Army and Defence Innovation Hub. As well as defence applications, the technology has significant potential in fields such as advanced manufacturing, aerospace and healthcare – for example allowing people with a disability to control a wheelchair or operate prosthetics.
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“The hands-free, voice-free technology works outside laboratory settings, anytime, anywhere. It makes interfaces such as consoles, keyboards, touchscreens and hand-gesture recognition redundant,” said Professor Iacopi. “By using cutting edge graphene material, combined with silicon, we were able to overcome issues of corrosion, durability and skin contact resistance, to develop the wearable dry sensors,” she said.
A new study shows that the graphene sensors developed at UTS are very conductive, easy to use and robust. The hexagon patterned sensors are positioned over the back of the scalp, to detect brainwaves from the visual cortex. The sensors are resilient to harsh conditions so they can be used in extreme operating environments. The user wears a head-mounted augmented reality lens which displays white flickering squares. By concentrating on a particular square, the brainwaves of the operator are picked up by the biosensor, and a decoder translates the signal into commands.
The technology was recently demonstrated by the Australian Army, where soldiers operated a Ghost Robotics quadruped robot using the brain-machine interface. The device allowed hands-free command of the robotic dog with up to 94% accuracy. “Our technology can issue at least nine commands in two seconds. This means we have nine different kinds of commands and the operator can select one from those nine within that time period,” Professor Lin said. “We have also explored how to minimise noise from the body and environment to get a clearer signal from an operator’s brain,” he said.
The researchers believe the technology will be of interest to the scientific community, industry and government, and hope to continue making advances in brain-computer interface systems.
Source: https://www.uts.edu.au/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: advanced manufacturing, aerospace, augmented reality lens, Australian Army, biosensor, brain-computer interface, brain-machine interface, brainwaves, decoder, defence, Defence Innovation Hub, defense, Ghost Robotics, graphene sensors, healthcare, mind reading, quadruped robot, robot, signals, thought, thought-control, University of Technology Sydney, UTS, visual cortex
March 23, 2023
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Terminal leukaemia patients who were not responding to treatment now have hope for a cure, thanks to a new experimental pill called revumenib. This drug has completely eliminated cancer in a third of the participants in a long-awaited clinical trial in the United States. Although not all patients showed complete remission, scientists remain hopeful as the results indicate that the pill might pave the way to a cure for leukaemia in the future.
“We’re incredibly hopeful by these results of patients that received this drug. This was their last chance,” said study co-author Dr Ghayas Issa, a leukaemia physician at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas. “They have progressed on multiple lines of therapy and a fraction of them, about half, had disappearance of their leukaemia cells from their bone marrow,” he told Euronews Next.
Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) is a type of cancer that attacks the bone marrow, where blood cells are produced, and causes the uncontrolled production of defective cells. Revumenib is a new class of targeted therapy for acute leukaemia that inhibits a specific protein called menin. The drug works by reprogramming leukaemia cells back into normal cells. Menin is involved in the complex machinery that gets hijacked by leukaemia cells and causes normal blood cells to turn into cancerous ones. By using revumenib, Issa explained, the engine is turned off and leukaemia cells are turned back into normal cells, resulting in remission.
This formula has already saved 18 lives as part of the clinical trial, whose promising results were published this month in Nature. The preliminary results showed that 53 per cent of patients responded to revumenib, and 30 per cent had a complete remission with no cancer detectable in their blood. Based on the data from this trial, in December 2022 the US Food and Drug Administration granted revumenib “breakthrough therapy designation” to help fast-track its development and regulatory review.
“This is definitely a breakthrough and it’s a result of years of science. A lot of groups had worked hard in the lab to understand what is causing these leukaemias,” Issa said. However, he explained that the drug does not work for all patients. It is for a specific subset of leukaemias that generally have missing or mislabeled genes or a chromosome fusion. The experimental pill targets the most common mutation in acute myeloid leukaemia, a gene called NPM1, and a less common fusion called KMT2A. Combined, these mutations are estimated to occur in about 30 to 40 per cent of people with acute myeloid leukaemia.
The phase 1 trial enrolled 68 patients at nine US hospitals. All of them had seen their leukaemia return after other treatments or had never responded well to traditional chemotherapy drugs in the first place.
Source: https://www.euronews.com/next/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Acute myeloid leukaemia, AML, bone marrow, cancer, cells, drug, Food and Drug Administratio, gene, KMT2A, leukaemia, Menin, NPM1, pill, protein, remission, revumenib, University of Texas
March 22, 2023
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In 1906, a German psychiatrist and neuroanatomist performed an autopsy on the brain of a patient who displayed abnormal symptoms while alive. Over the course of several years, this woman’s behavior, as well as her speech and language, became erratic. She forgot who people were, became paranoid, and, as her condition worsened, suffered total memory loss. When her doctor dissected her brain, he found unusual plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in her cerebral cortex. He quickly alerted his colleagues of this “peculiar severe disease.” The doctor was Alois Alzheimer. More than a century later, the medical community is still trying to understand Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative brain disorder. But early studies have demonstrated that we may be able to mitigate some of the damage created by AD simply by exposing people to certain waves of sound and light.
Li-Huei Tsai, a neuroscientist and the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spent the past three decades working to understand and treat neurodegenerative diseases, in particular AD.
“It has not turned out to be a disease attributable to just one runaway protein or just one gene,” Li- Huei explained in a 2021 op-ed in The Boston Globe. “In fact, although Alzheimer’s is referred to as a single name, we in the Alzheimer’s research community don’t yet know how many different types of Alzheimer’s there may be, and, therefore, how many different treatments might ultimately prove necessary across the population.”
AD researchers have traditionally pursued small-molecule pharmaceuticals and immunotherapies that target a single errant protein, the amyloid. But Li-Huei believes Alzheimer’s to be a broader systemic breakdown, and she has thought about more encompassing, and hopefully effective, treatments. For several years now, her lab has pursued novel approaches using the aesthetic interventions of light and sound. We know the influence that light and sound have on the human body. People suffering from seasonal affective disorder benefit from light therapy. Blue light before bed stimulates our brain and disrupts sleep. Sound vibrations change our physiology. But how might this work on a brain experiencing AD?
Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AD, Alzheimer's, amyloid, cerebral cortex, light, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, neurodegenerative diseases, neurofibrillary tangles, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, plaques, protein, sound, waves of sound
March 21, 2023
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Scientists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have made a breakthrough towards designing an off-the-shelf treatment for immunotherapy against cancer. A synthetic protein tweak can allow immune cells from any donor to be given to any patient without the risk of a dangerous immune reaction. Cancer patients might one day benefit from being administered immune cells from healthy donors. But as things stand, receiving donor cells can cause severe or even fatal immune reactions. A researcher at ETH Zurich has now developed a technology that avoids these.
Edo Kapetanovic is a medical doctor, but for a while now he has devoted himself entirely to research in synthetic immunology. He has completed his doctoral studies in immunoengineering and is working at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel. His big goal is to develop new cancer therapies by providing patients with immune cells derived from donor blood. He is now getting closer to this goal: he has managed to modify donor cells so that they attack only the tumour cells and not patient’s healthy cells. The technology has been tested in the lab in human cells, but it will take more time and development before the patients can benefit from the technology.
Administering donor cells is far from straightforward: the immune system is specialised in distinguishing foreign molecules from ‘self’ and will attack any foreign cell. This is particularly dangerous for immunocompromised patients, as donor cells can recognize patient cells as foreign and trigger a violent and, consequently, fatal immune response in the recipient, known as a graft-versus-host reaction. That is why today’s immunotherapeutic treatments for cancer mainly use a patient’s own immune cells rather than donated cells.
Kapetanovic and his team have now succeeded in engineering immune cells that are safe of graft-versus-host reaction. Generally speaking, approved immunotherapies for cancer take one of two approaches, and both depend on cells known as killer cells, mostly killer T cells. In one approach, experts extract the patient’s own killer cells and modify them in the lab so that they specifically recognise and eliminate cancer cells. These modified cells are then administered to the patient.
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| Tags: bispecific antibodies, cancer, donor, ETH Zürich, graft-versus-host reaction, immune cells, immunoengineering, immunotherapy, killer T-cells, synthetic immunology, synthetic protein, synthetic TCR-CD3 complex, TCR-CD3
March 20, 2023
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In less than a month, researchers have used AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered protein structure database, to design and synthesize a potential drug to treat hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of primary liver cancer. The researchers successfully applied AlphaFold to an end-to-end AI-powered drug discovery platform called Pharma.AI. That included a biocomputational engine, PandaOmics, and a generative chemistry engine, Chemistry42. They discovered a novel target for HCC – a previously undiscovered treatment pathway – and developed a “novel hit molecule” that could bind to that target without the aid of an experimentally determined structure. The feat was accomplished in just 30 days from target selection and after only synthesizing seven compounds.
In a second round of AI-powered compound generation, researchers discovered a more potent hit molecule – although any potential drug would still need to undergo clinical trials. The study – published in Chemical Science – is led by the University of Toronto Acceleration Consortium Director Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Nobel laureate Michael Levitt and Insilico Medicine founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov.
“While the world was fascinated with advances in generative AI in art and language, our generative AI algorithms managed to design potent inhibitors of a target with an AlphaFold-derived structure,” Zhavoronkov said. “AlphaFold broke new scientific ground in predicting the structure of all proteins in the human body,” added co-author Feng Ren, chief scientific officer and co-CEO of Insilico Medicine. “At Insilico Medicine, we saw that as an incredible opportunity to take these structures and apply them to our end-to-end AI platform in order to generate novel therapeutics to tackle diseases with high unmet need. This paper is an important first step in that direction.”
Source: https://www.utoronto.ca/
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, AlphaFold, Artificial Intelligence, Chemistry42, drug, HCC, hepatocellular carcinoma, Insilico Medicine, liver cancer, PandaOmics, Pharma.AI, protein structure database, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Acceleration Consortium
March 17, 2023
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In the first day after it was unveiled, GPT-4 stunned many users in early tests and a company demo with its ability to draft lawsuits, pass standardized exams and build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch.
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the next-generation version of the artificial intelligence technology that underpins its viral chatbot tool, ChatGPT. The more powerful GPT-4 promises to blow previous iterations out of the water, potentially changing the way we use the internet to work, play and create. But it could also add to challenging questions around how AI tools can upend professions, enable students to cheat, and shift our relationship with technology.
GPT-4 is an updated version of the company’s large language model, which is trained on vast amounts of online data to generate complex responses to user prompts. It is now available via a waitlist and has already made its way into some third-party products, including Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing search engine. Some users with early access to the tool are sharing their experiences and highlighting some of its most compelling use cases.
https://edition.cnn.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Bing, chatbot, ChatGPT, GPT-4, large language model, Microsoft, OpenAI
March 16, 2023
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Tumor cells typically alter their energy metabolism and increase glucose uptake to support their rapid division and spread. This limits glucose availability for immune cells and therefore dampens the body’s anti-cancer immune response. By searching for proteins that both regulate the metabolism of cancer cells and affect immune cells in tumors, a team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) recently identified a potential target for therapies that could simultaneously drain tumors of energy and boost the immune response against them.
For the research, which is published in Cancer Discovery, Keith T. Flaherty, MD, the director of Clinical Research at the MGH Cancer Center and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues developed a new computational tool called BipotentR that can identify targets that block immune activation and also stimulate a second user-defined pathway (in this case, metabolism). When applied to gene expression data from patients with cancer who were treated with immunotherapy, as well as from cell lines and animal models, the tool identified 38 cancer cell–specific immune-metabolic regulators.
Artificial intelligence techniques showed that the activity level of these regulators in tumors predicted patients’ outcomes after receiving immunotherapy. The topmost identified regulator, ESRRA (Estrogen Related Receptor Alpha), was activated in immunotherapy-resistant tumors of many types. Inhibiting ESRAA killed tumors by suppressing energy metabolism and activating two immune mechanisms involving different types of immune cells.The scientists also demonstrated that BipotentR can be applied to other survival mechanisms used by cancer cells, such as their ability to promote blood vessel formation to increase their blood supply. Therefore, BipotentR, available at http://bipotentr.dfci.harvard.edu, provides a resource for discovering single drugs that can act through one cancer-related pathway while simultaneously stimulating an immune response.
Source: https://www.massgeneral.org/
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https://www.thebrighterside.news/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: (Estrogen Related Receptor Alpha, AI, Artificial Intelligence, BipotentR, cancer, energy metabolism, ESRA, gene expression, Harvard Medical School, immune cells, immunity, immunotherapy, Massachusetts General Hospital, MGH, proteins, tumor cells
March 15, 2023
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A new blood test may be able to detect Alzheimer’s disease-related pathology up to 10 years before symptoms appear, according to a press release from Durin Technologies.
“Our test correctly identified nearly 97% of participants who were diagnosed as cognitively normal at the time their samples were taken, but who progressed, within an average of 48 months, to either the mild cognitive impairment stage or more advanced Alzheimer’s disease,” Cassandra DeMarshall, PhD, Durin Technologies director, said in a press release. “To our knowledge, this is the first blood test to accurately detect Alzheimer’s-related pathology several years before either clinical symptoms or more expensive and invasive tests can identify the disease.”
The minimally invasive test was developed through a collaboration between researchers at Durin Technologies, a biotechnology company, and Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine (SOM) in Stratford, New Jersey. Researchers evaluated 328 blood samples, with 106 samples from participants without dementia for comparison. Samples were analyzed for eight autoantibody biomarkers, according to the release.
“An accurate, noninvasive blood test for early detection and monitoring of AD could bend the curve of clinical outcomes through earlier participation in clinical trials and monitoring of AD progression of patients under treatment,” Robert Nagele, PhD, Durin’s founder and chief scientific officer and professor of geriatrics and gerontology at Rowan-Virtua SOM, said in the release.
Source: https://www.durintechnologies.com/
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https://www.healio.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Alzheimer's, autoantibody biomarkers, blood test, Durin Technologies, Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine, SOM, symptoms
March 14, 2023
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Scientists have set out a way to suck planet-heating carbon pollution from the air, turn it into sodium bicarbonate and store it in oceans, according to a new paper. The technique could be up to three times more efficient than current carbon capture technology, say the authors of the study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
Tackling the climate crisis means drastically reducing the burning of fossil fuels, which releases planet-heating pollution. But because humans have already pumped so much of this pollution into the atmosphere and are unlikely to sufficiently reduce emissions in the near term, scientists say we also need to remove it from the air. Nature does this – forests and oceans, for example, are valuable carbon sinks – but not quickly enough to keep pace with the amounts humans are producing. So we have turned to technology.
One method is to capture carbon pollution directly at the source, for example from steel or cement plants. But another way, which this study focuses on, is “direct air capture.” This involves sucking carbon pollution directly out of the atmosphere and then storing it, often by injecting it into the ground. The problem with direct air capture is that while carbon dioxide may be a very potent planet-heating gas, its concentrations are very small – it makes up about 0.04% of air. This means removing it directly from the air is challenging and expensive.
“It’s a “significant hurdle,” Arup SenGupta, a professor at Lehigh University and a study author. Even the biggest facilities can only remove relatively small amounts and it costs several hundred dollars to remove each ton of carbon. Climeworks’ direct air removal project in Iceland is the largest facility, according to the company, and can capture up to 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. That’s equivalent to the carbon pollution produced by fewer than 800 cars over a year. The new technique laid out in the study can help tackle those problems, said SenGupta. The team have used copper to modify the absorbent material used in direct air capture. The result is an absorbent “which can remove CO2 from the atmosphere at ultra-dilute concentration at a capacity which is two to three times greater than existing absorbents,” SenGupta said. This material can be produced easily and cheaply and would help drive down the costs of direct air capture, he added. Once the carbon dioxide is captured, it can then be turned into sodium bicarbonate – baking soda – using seawater and released into the ocean at a small concentration.
The oceans “are infinite sinks,” SenGupta explained. “If you put all the CO2 from the atmosphere, emitted every day – or every year – into the ocean, the increase in concentration would be very, very minor.” Gupta’s idea is that direct air capture plants can be located offshore, giving them access to abundant amounts of seawater for the process.
Source: https://www.science.org/
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https://edition.cnn.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Air, air capture, carbon dioxide, climate change, Climeworks, CO2, copper, forests, fossil fuels, Lehigh University, nature, oceans, pollution, sodium bicarbonate
March 13, 2023
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In a historic achievement, University of Rochester researchers have created a superconducting material at both a temperature and pressure low enough for practical applications.
“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” according to a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of physics. In a paper in Nature, the researchers describe a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH) that exhibits superconductivity at 69 degrees Fahrenheit (26 degrees Celsius) and 10 kilobars (145,000 pounds per square inch, or psi) of pressure.
Although 145,000 psi might still seem extraordinarily high (pressure at sea level is about 15 psi), strain engineering techniques routinely used in chip manufacturing, for example, incorporate materials held together by internal chemical pressures that are even higher.
Scientists have been pursuing this breakthrough in condensed matter physics for more than a century. Superconducting materials have two key properties: electrical resistance vanishes, and the magnetic fields that are expelled pass around the superconducting material. Such materials could enable:
- Power grids that transmit electricity without the loss of up to 200 million megawatt hours (MWh) of the energy that now occurs due to resistance in the wires
- Frictionless, levitating high-speed trains
- More affordable medical imaging and scanning techniques such as MRI and magnetocardiography
- Faster, more efficient electronics for digital logic and memory device technology
- Tokamak machines that use magnetic fields to confine plasmas to achieve fusion as a source of unlimited power
Previously, the Dias team reported creating two materials—carbonaceous sulfur hydride and yttrium superhydride—that are superconducting at 58 degrees Fahrenheit (14,4 degrees Celsius) /39 million psi and 12 degrees Fahreneheit/26 million psi respectively, in papers in Nature and Physical Review Letters.
Source: https://www.rochester.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: carbonaceous sulfur hydride, chip, levitating high-speed trains, medical imaging, MRI, NDLH, nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride, Power grids, pressure, stress, superconducting material, superconductivity, temperature, tokamak, University of Rochester, yttrium superhydride
March 10, 2023
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Nearly two dozen experimental therapies targeting the immune system are in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease, a reflection of the growing recognition that immune processes play a key role in driving the brain damage that leads to confusion, memory loss and other debilitating symptoms.
Many of the immunity-focused Alzheimer’s drugs under development are aimed at microglia, the brain’s resident immune cells, which can injure brain tissue if they’re activated at the wrong time or in the wrong way. A new study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis indicates that microglia partner with another type of immune cell — T cells — to cause neurodegeneration. Studying mice with Alzheimer’s-like damage in their brains due to the protein tau, the researchers discovered that microglia attract powerful cell-killing T cells into the brain, and that most of the neurodegeneration could be avoided by blocking the T cells’ entry or activation. The findings, published March 8 in the journal Nature, suggest that targeting T cells is an alternative route to preventing neurodegeneration and treating Alzheimer’s disease and related diseases involving tau, collectively known as tauopathies.
“This could really change the way we think about developing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related conditions,” said senior author David M. Holtzman, MD, Professor of Neurology. “Before this study, we knew that T cells were increased in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other tauopathies, but we didn’t know for sure that they caused neurodegeneration. These findings open up exciting new therapeutic approaches. Some widely used drugs target T cells. Fingolomid, for example, is commonly used to treat multiple sclerosis, which is an autoimmune disease of the brain and spinal cord. It’s likely that some drugs that act on T cells could be moved into clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease and other tauopathies if these drugs are protective in animal models.”
Source: https://medicine.wustl.edu
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Alzheimer's, confusion, immune cells, immune system, memory loss, microglia, neurodegeneration, protein Tau, tauopathies, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
March 9, 2023
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Scientists have created mice with two biological fathers by generating eggs from male cells, a development that opens up radical new possibilities for reproduction. The advance could ultimately pave the way for treatments for severe forms of infertility, as well as raising the tantalising prospect of same-sex couples being able to have a biological child together in the future.
“This is the first case of making robust mammal oocytes from male cells,” said Katsuhiko Hayashi, who led the work at Kyushu University in Japan and is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of lab-grown eggs and sperm.
Hayashi, who presented the development at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the Francis Crick Institute in London on Wednesday, predicts that it will be technically possible to create a viable human egg from a male skin cell within a decade. Others suggested this timeline was optimistic given that scientists are yet to create viable lab-grown human eggs from female cells. Previously scientists have created mice that technically had two biological fathers through a chain of elaborate steps, including genetic engineering. However, this is the first time viable eggs have been cultivated from male cells and marks a significant advance. Hayashi’s team is now attempting to replicate this achievement with human cells, although there would be significant hurdles for the use of lab-grown eggs for clinical purposes, including establishing their safety.
“Purely in terms of technology, it will be possible [in humans] even in 10 years,” he said, adding that he personally would be in favour of the technology being used clinically to allow two men to have a baby if it were shown to be safe. “I don’t know whether they’ll be available for reproduction,” he said. “That is not a question just for the scientific programme, but also for [society].”
The technique could also be applied to treat severe forms of infertility, including women with Turner’s syndrome, in whom one copy of the X chromosome is missing or partly missing, and Hayashi said this application was the primary motivation for the research. “Creating lab-grown gametes from human cells was more challenging than for mouse cells,” said Prof George Daley, the dean of Harvard Medical School. “We still don’t understand enough of the unique biology of human gametogenesis to reproduce Hayashi’s provocative work in mice.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Francis Crick Institute in London, genetic engineering, human egg, infertility, Kyushu University, male cells, Same-Sex Couples, Turner’s syndrome
March 8, 2023
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Allergan, an AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) company, today announced that VUITY™ (pilocarpine HCl ophthalmic solution) 1.25%, the first and only eye drop approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat presbyopia, is now available by prescription in pharmacies nationwide. Presbyopia, or age-related blurry near vision, can be diagnosed through a basic eye exam by an eye doctor (optometrist or ophthalmologist) and is a common and progressive eye condition that affects 128 million Americans, or nearly half of the U.S. adult population.
“We are pleased to be able to bring this first-of-its-kind treatment to market sooner than expected for the millions of Americans with presbyopia who may benefit from it,” said Jag Dosanjh, senior vice president medical therapeutics, Allergan, an AbbVie company. “This significant innovation in age-related eye health reflects our commitment to advance vision care and expands our leading portfolio of treatments for eye care providers and their patients.”
“Many Americans deal with presbyopia, which typically begins around age 40, by relying on reading glasses or resorting to work-arounds like zooming in on their digital devices to see up close. As an optometrist who also has presbyopia, I’m personally and professionally excited to try VUITY for myself, as well as offer it to my patients with age-related blurry near vision,” said optometrist Dr. Selina McGee, Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry. “With VUITY now available, it is a good time for those who experience age-related blurry near vision to visit their eye doctor for an exam and to discuss their options to manage this common condition.”
Source: https://news.abbvie.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AbbVie, Academy of Optometry, Allergan, BLURRY, eye doctor, eye exam, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, ophthalmologist, optometrist, pharmacies, pilocarpine HCl ophthalmic solution, presbyopia, vision, Vuity
March 7, 2023
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Some cities fight gangs with ex-members who educate kids and starve gangs of new recruits. Stanford Medicine researchers have done something similar with cancer — altering cancer cells so that they teach the body’s immune system to fight the very cancer the cells came from.
“This approach could open up an entirely new therapeutic approach to treating cancer,” said Ravi Majeti, MD, PhD, a professor of hematology and the study’s senior author. The research was published March 1 in Cancer Discovery. The lead author is Miles Linde, PhD, a former PhD student in immunology who is now at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute in Seattle.
Some of the most promising cancer treatments use the patient’s own immune system to attack the cancer, often by taking the brakes off immune responses to cancer or by teaching the immune system to recognize and attack the cancer more vigorously. T cells, part of the immune system that learns to identify and attack new pathogens such as viruses, can be trained to recognize specific cancer antigens, which are proteins that generate an immune response. For instance, in CAR T-cell therapy, T cells are taken from a patient, programmed to recognize a specific cancer antigen, then returned to the patient. But there are many cancer antigens, and physicians sometimes need to guess which ones will be most potent.
A better approach would be to train T cells to recognize cancer via processes that more closely mimic the way things naturally occur in the body — like the way a vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize pathogens. T cells learn to recognize pathogens because special antigen presenting cells (APCs) gather pieces of the pathogen and show them to the T cells in a way that tells the T cells, “Here is what the pathogen looks like — go get it.” Something similar in cancer would be for APCs to gather up the many antigens that characterize a cancer cell. That way, instead of T cells being programmed to attack one or a few antigens, they are trained to recognize many cancer antigens and are more likely to wage a multipronged attack on the cancer. Now that researchers have become adept at transforming one kind of cell into another, Majeti and his colleagues had a hunch that if they turned cancer cells into a type of APC called macrophages, they would be naturally adept at teaching T cells what to attack.
“We hypothesized that maybe cancer cells reprogrammed into macrophage cells could stimulate T cells because those APCs carry all the antigens of the cancer cells they came from,” said Majeti, who is also the RZ Cao Professor, assistant director of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Stem Cell Research and Medicine.
The study builds on prior research from the Majeti lab showing that cells taken from patients with a type of acute leukemia could be converted into non-leukemic macrophages with many of the properties of APCs. In the current study, the researchers programmed mouse leukemia cells so that some of them could be induced to transform themselves into APCs. When they tested their cancer vaccine strategy on the mouse immune system, the mice successfully cleared the cancer. “When we first saw the data showing clearance of the leukemia in the mice with working immune systems, we were blown away,” Majeti said. “We couldn’t believe it worked as well as it did.”
Source: https://med.stanford.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: antigens, APCs, cancer cells, CAR T-cell therapy, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, immune system, Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, leukemia, Ludwig Center for Cancer Stem Cell Research and Medicine, macrophages, proteins, Stanford Medicine, T-cells, virus
March 6, 2023
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No two hearts beat alike. The size and shape of the the heart can vary from one person to the next. These differences can be particularly pronounced for people living with heart disease, as their hearts and major vessels work harder to overcome any compromised function.
“All hearts are different,” says Luca Rosalia, a graduate student in the MIT-Harvard Program in Health Sciences and Technology. “There are massive variations, especially when patients are sick. The advantage of our system is that we can recreate not just the form of a patient’s heart, but also its function in both physiology and disease.”
MIT engineers are hoping to help doctors tailor treatments to patients’ specific heart form and function, with a custom robotic heart. The team has developed a procedure to 3D print a soft and flexible replica of a patient’s heart. They can then control the replica’s action to mimic that patient’s blood-pumping ability.
The procedure involves first converting medical images of a patient’s heart into a three-dimensional computer model, which the researchers can then 3D print using a polymer-based ink. The result is a soft, flexible shell in the exact shape of the patient’s own heart. The team can also use this approach to print a patient’s aorta — the major artery that carries blood out of the heart to the rest of the body.
To mimic the heart’s pumping action, the team has fabricated sleeves similar to blood pressure cuffs that wrap around a printed heart and aorta. The underside of each sleeve resembles precisely patterned bubble wrap. When the sleeve is connected to a pneumatic system, researchers can tune the outflowing air to rhythmically inflate the sleeve’s bubbles and contract the heart, mimicking its pumping action.
The researchers can also inflate a separate sleeve surrounding a printed aorta to constrict the vessel. This constriction, they say, can be tuned to mimic aortic stenosis — a condition in which the aortic valve narrows, causing the heart to work harder to force blood through the body.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: 3D print, artery, constriction, custom robotic heart, flexible replica, hearts, MIT-Harvard Program in Health Sciences and Technology, vessels
March 3, 2023
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Carbon dioxide and methane are the largest gaseous hurdles the world needs to overcome to combat climate change—but they’re far from the worst gases that can be unleashed on our atmosphere. Take, for instance, Sulfur Hexafluoride (SF6). Although a little-known gas to most of us, it’s an extremely useful synthetic compound that has been used in electric utilities since the 1950s thanks to its insulating properties. However, SF6 has a dark side: it’s the most deadly greenhouse gas known to science.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that SF6 is a staggering 22,800 times more effective at trapping infrared radiation than carbon dioxide. It’s also extremely long-lasting and can remain in the atmosphere for centuries, so even a little bit of the gas can have a devastating impact. Because of its stable structure, it’s extremely hard to render inert, but scientists from Paderborn University in Germany have developed a “Lewis superacid” that’s potentially capable of breaking down Sulfur Hexafluoride and other non-biodegradable substances into more environmentally-friendly chemicals. The authors published their findings in the journal Angewandte Chemie (Applied Chemistry).
“For strong bonds, you need highly reactive reagents,” Paderborn chemistry professor Jan Paradies says in a university press release. “We managed to produce such molecules and use them in catalytic reactions. This makes it possible to, for example, activate and further convert … carbon-fluorine or sulfur-fluorine bonds.”
“Lewis acids,” named after American chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis, add electron pairs, which makes them perfect for speeding up chemical reactions. However, superacids—as their name suggests—are even stronger than the strongest Lewis acid, which is antimony pentafluoride (SbF5). As a result, these Lewis superacids are more than capable of breaking down even the strongest chemical bonds.
Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: antimony pentafluoride, carbon dioxide, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, Lewis superacid, methane, Paderborn University, SbF5, SF6, Sulfur Hexafluoride
March 2, 2023
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A new Pew Research Center survey explores public views on artificial intelligence (AI) in health and medicine – an area where Americans may increasingly encounter technologies that do things like screen for skin cancer and even monitor a patient’s vital signs. The figures demonstrate that on a personal level, there’s significant discomfort among Americans with the idea of AI being used in their own health care. Six-in-ten U.S. adults say they would feel uncomfortable if their own health care provider relied on artificial intelligence to do things like diagnose disease and recommend treatments; a significantly smaller share (39%) say they would feel comfortable with this.
One factor in these views: A majority of the public is unconvinced that the use of AI in health and medicine would improve health outcomes. The Pew Research Center work, conducted Dec. 12-18, 2022, of 11,004 U.S. adults finds only 38% say AI being used to do things like diagnose disease and recommend treatments would lead to better health outcomes for patients generally, while 33% say it would lead to worse outcomes and 27% say it wouldn’t make much difference.
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| Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, doctor, health, medicine, Pew Research Center, skin cancer, US
March 1, 2023
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MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision. The headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it. The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals, which can pass through common materials like cardboard boxes, plastic containers, or wooden dividers, to find hidden items that have been labeled with RFID tags, which reflect signals sent by an RF antenna. The headset directs the wearer as they walk through a room toward the location of the item, which shows up as a transparent sphere in the augmented reality (AR) interface. Once the item is in the user’s hand, the headset, called X-AR, verifies that they have picked up the correct object. When the researchers tested X-AR in a warehouse-like environment, the headset could localize hidden items to within 9.8 centimeters, on average. And it verified that users picked up the correct item with 96 percent accuracy. X-AR could aid e-commerce warehouse workers in quickly finding items on cluttered shelves or buried in boxes, or by identifying the exact item for an order when many similar objects are in the same bin. It could also be used in a manufacturing facility to help technicians locate the correct parts to assemble a product.
“Our whole goal with this project was to build an augmented reality system that allows you to see things that are invisible — things that are in boxes or around corners — and in doing so, it can guide you toward them and truly allow you to see the physical world in ways that were not possible before,” says Fadel Adib, who is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the director of the Signal Kinetics group in the Media Lab, and the senior author of a paper on X-AR.
Adib’s co-authors are research assistants Tara Boroushaki, who is the paper’s lead author; Maisy Lam; Laura Dodds; and former postdoc Aline Eid, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. The research will be presented at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: augmented-reality headset, cardboard boxes, Media Lab, MIT, Networked Systems Design and Implementation, plastic containers, radio frequecy, RF, RF antenna, RFID tags, Signal Kinetics, signals, University of Michigan, USENIX Symposium, wooden dividers, X-AR, X-ray, X-ray vision
February 28, 2023
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A new highly accurate blood test for prostate cancer is giving doctors hope that they will soon be able to screen for the disease. Almost one in eight men in Britain will develop prostate cancer in their lives, and the disease claims 12,000 lives a year – as many as breast cancer. Yet no screening programme exists because the current method, the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, is notoriously unreliable – missing cancers and resulting in many ‘false positives’.
Now scientists say they have robust results from a study of nearly 1,000 men, showing a new test which looks for prostate cancer cells in the blood is highly accurate. Last night, experts said the ‘Trublood’ test offered ‘great promise’ to improve early detection of the disease.
British medics have been working to evaluate the test, developed by Indian firm Datar Cancer Genetics. Results of the study, seeing how well it can spot cancer in 960 men – of whom 160 were known to have prostate cancer – have proven highly encouraging. It correctly spotted all 160 with the disease, without mis-identifying any of the 800 healthy men as having it.
Researchers in India collaborated with Imperial College and Guy’s Hospital in London on the study, which is published in the journal Cancer Medicine.
‘These results show great promise and suggest that it may be possible to use this test to detect the cancer in the first place,’ said Prostate Cancer UK.
Source: https://phys.org/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: blood test, breast cancer, cells, Datar Cancer Genetics, Guy’s Hospital in London, Imperial College, prostate cancer, prostate-specific antigen, PSA, Trublood
February 27, 2023
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Nature has an extraordinary knack for producing composite materials that are simultaneously light and strong, porous and rigid – like mollusk shells or bone. But producing such materials in a lab or factory – particularly using environmentally friendly materials and processes – is extremely challenging. Researchers in the Soft Materials Laboratory of EPFL in Switzerland turned to nature for a solution. They have pioneered a 3D printable ink that contains Sporosarcina pasteurii: a bacterium which, when exposed to a urea-containing solution, triggers a mineralization process that produces calcium carbonate (CaCO3). The upshot is that the researchers can use their ink – dubbed BactoInk – to 3D-print virtually any shape, which will then gradually mineralize over the course of a few days.
“3D printing is gaining increasing importance in general, but the number of materials that can be 3D printed is limited for the simple reason that inks must fulfil certain flow conditions,” explains lab head Esther Amstad. “For example, they must behave like a solid when at rest, but still be extrudable through a 3D printing nozzle – sort of like ketchup.”
Amstad explains that 3D printing inks containing small mineral particles have previously been used to meet some of these flow criteria, but that the resulting structures tend to be soft, or to shrink upon drying, leading to cracking and loss of control over the shape of the final product. “So, we came up with a simple trick: instead of printing minerals, we printed a polymeric scaffold using our BactoInk, which is then mineralized in a second, separate step. After about four days, the mineralization process triggered by the bacteria in the scaffold leads to a final product with a mineral content of over 90%.” The result is a strong and resilient bio-composite, which can be produced using a standard 3D printer and natural materials, and without the extreme temperatures often required for manufacturing ceramics. Final products no longer contain living bacteria, as they are submerged in ethanol at the end of the mineralization process.
A paper on the study was recently published in the journal Materials Today.
Source: https://actu.epfl.ch/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: 3D printable ink, bacterium, BactoInk, bio-composite, bone, CaCO3, calcium carbonate, ceramics, composite materials, mineralization, polymeric scaffold, Sporosarcina pasteurii
February 24, 2023
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A million here, times a million there. Pretty soon you’re talking about big numbers. So the chip maker Nvidia claims for its AI accelerating hardware in terms of the performance boost it has delivered over the last decade and will deliver again over the next 10 years. The result, if Nvidia is correct, will be a new industry of AI factories across the world and gigantic breakthroughs in AI processing power. It also means, ostensibly, AI models one million times more powerful than existing examples, including ChatGPT, in AI processing terms at least. CEO Jensen Huang claimed that Nvidia‘s GPUs had boosted AI processing performance by a factor of no less than one million in the last 10 years.
“Moore’s Law, in its best days, would have delivered 100x in a decade,” Huang explained. “By coming up with new processors, new systems, new interconnects, new frameworks and algorithms and working with data scientists, AI researchers on new models, across that entire span, we’ve made large language model processing a million times faster.”
Put another way: no Nvidia, no ChatGPT. The AI language model that is said to run on around 10,000 Nvidia GPUs and has captured the world’s consciousness by demonstrating something akin to its own actual consciousness in recent months wouldn’t be here without Jensen. And, of course, the team at OpenAI who actual put it into operation.
If one million times the performance in the last decade isn’t impressive enough, Huang has news for you: Nvidia‘s going to do it again.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, AI language model, AI models, AI processing, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, GPU, Nvidia, OpenAI
February 23, 2023
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Israeli scientists gave an artificial molecule they invented to 30 mice suffering from Alzheimer’s — and found that all of them recovered, regaining full cognitive abilities. They stress that this was a small sample of mice and that human testing is far off, but believe the result indicates that within a decade, their synthetic molecule could be developed into a drug for treating the degenerative disease. The peer-reviewed research, led by neuroscientists from Ben-Gurion University, was recently published in the journal Translational Neurodegeneration.
“We are taking a very different approach than efforts at Alzheimer’s medicines that we have seen so far,” Prof. Varda Shoshan-Barmatz, the lead author, told The Times of Israel. “Most are trying to address plaque that forms in the brain, but we are addressing dysfunction elsewhere. And we’re optimistic. Mice who had Alzheimer’s and received our molecule and then underwent tests had the same cognitive abilities as mice who’d never had Alzheimer’s.”
Interestingly, the molecule appears to have been effective without significantly reducing the amount of plaque, which she thinks indicates that scientists may have been overly fixated on the plaque. There is scientific literature on the dysfunction of mitochondria among people with Alzheimer’s. Mitochondria are organelles — tiny miniature organs within cells — that provide the cell with power. Scientists believe that when they malfunction and fail to produce the normal quantities of energy, it can lead to cell death, inflammation and reduced immune response.
Despite Alzheimer’s being linked to mitochondrial dysfunction, no drug candidates are currently focused on mitochondria. Drug research is mostly concerned with combatting the buildup of protein fragments between nerve cells in the brain, which are thought to be linked to Alzheimer’s. The Ben-Gurion University team set out to normalize mitochondrial activity by countering the harmful effects that occur when a protein called VDAC1 is over-produced. The protein plays a crucial role in regulating the metabolic and energetic functions of mitochondria when produced in normal quantities. But the scientists found that it is produced in huge levels in the brains of mice with Alzheimer’s, and interferes with mitochondrial activity.
“In our research, we have shifted the focus of Alzheimer’s treatments from the plaque to this protein, which is produced in the nerve cells around the plaque instead,” said Shoshan-Barmatz. “We prevent this protein from causing cell death, as the molecule interferes with its harmful effect.”
Source: https://in.bgu.ac.il/
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https://www.timesofisrael.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Alzheimer's, artificial molecule, Ben-Gurion University, brain, cell, cognitive abilities, degenerative disease, drug, immune response, inflammation, mitochondria, nerve cells, organelles, plaque, protein, Translational Neurodegeneration, VDAC1
February 22, 2023
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Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines may be the hottest thing in science now, as they helped turn the tide against COVID-19. But even before the pandemic began, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center researchers had already been working to use mRNA vaccine technology to treat cancer. Vinod Balachandran a physician-scientist affiliated with the David M. Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, is leading the only clinical trial to test mRNA vaccines for pancreatic cancer. The key to these vaccines appears to be proteins in the pancreatic tumors, called neoantigens, which alert the immune system to keep the cancer at bay.
The vaccines are custom-made for every person. The hope is that the vaccine will stimulate the production of certain immune cells, called T cells, that recognize pancreatic cancer cells. This could reduce the risk of the cancer returning after the main tumor was removed by surgery. In 8 of 16 patients studied, the vaccines activated T cells that recognize the patient’s own pancreatic cancers. These patients also showed delayed recurrence of their pancreatic cancers, suggesting the T cells activated by the vaccines may be having the desired effect to keep pancreatic cancers in check.
There has been great interest in using immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer because nothing else has worked very well. We thought immunotherapy held promise because of research we began about seven years ago. A small subset of patients with pancreatic cancer manage to beat the odds and survive after their tumor is removed. We looked at the tumors taken from these select patients and saw that the tumors had an especially large number of immune cells in them, especially T cells. Something in the tumor cells seemed to be sending out a signal that alerted the T cells and drew them in.
Source: https://www.thebrighterside.news/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: cancer, cells, COVID-19, David M. Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research, immune cells, immune system, immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, messenger RNA, mRNA, neoantigens, pancreatic cancer, pancreatic tumors, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, proteins, T-cells, vaccines
February 21, 2023
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A new technological development could give people the ability to access their devices with only their minds. Precision Neuroscience is introducing its breakthrough in medical science as a benefit for those who have experienced paralysis or other forms of limited mobility.
Precision CEO and co-founder Michael Mager shared in an interview how brain-computer interface (BCI) technology converts thoughts into action. “It’s a direct communication pathway between the brain’s electrical activity and an external device, most often a computer, but it also can be like a prosthetic,” he said. BCIs have been proven to be functional for more than 15 years, but to date have only been implanted in about 40 people — which New York City-based Mager said he considered a “real shame.”
“Our fundamental goal is to change that,” he said. “To take this technology that has been proven to work and roll it out to the hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of people who could benefit enormously from it.” These developments reportedly have been a lifelong venture for Precision‘s chief science officer Ben Rapoport, who has two decades of experience developing BCIs, including during his work as a founding member at Neuralink.
Source: https://precisionneuro.io/
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https://www.foxbusiness.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: BCI, brain-computer interface, minds, mobility, Neuralink, paralysis, Precision Neuroscience, thoughts
February 20, 2023
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ZeroAvia conducted a test flight of its Dornier 228 testbed hydrogen plane aircraft on last month, making aviation history with its successful completion of the low-emission flight test. The hydrogen plane took off from Cotswold Airport in the United Kingdom and flew for approximately 10 minutes in total. Although the right side engines relied on fossil fuel kerosene for their power, the left engines were powered by a combination of hydrogen fuel cells (50%) and batteries (50%).
The plane, a 19-seat Dornier 228, is the largest plane ZeroAvia has tested in the air to date. It is also the largest plane to fly that is partially powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. As such, this was not only a record flight for ZeroAvia, but for low-carbon aviation, and a significant step for zero-emission flight.
At a press conference announcing the results of the test flight, ZeroAvia founder and CEO, Val Miftakhov said, “This is putting us straight on the path to commercial launches.“
Source: https://www.hydrogenfuelnews.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: batteries, Dornier 228, hydrogen, hydrogen fuel cells, low-carbon aviation, low-emission flight, plane, ZeroAvia
February 17, 2023
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Researchers from The University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia have discovered the active compound from an edible mushroom that boosts nerve growth and enhances memory. Professor Frederic Meunier from the Queensland Brain Institute said the team had identified new active compounds from the mushroom, Hericium erinaceus.
“Extracts from these so-called ‘lion’s mane’ mushrooms have been used in traditional medicine in Asian countries for centuries, but we wanted to scientifically determine their potential effect on brain cells,” Professor Meunier said. “Pre-clinical testing found the lion’s mane mushroom had a significant impact on the growth of brain cells and improving memory. “Laboratory tests measured the neurotrophic effects of compounds isolated from Hericium erinaceus on cultured brain cells, and surprisingly we found that the active compounds promote neuron projections, extending and connecting to other neurons. “Using super-resolution microscopy, we found the mushroom extract and its active components largely increase the size of growth cones, which are particularly important for brain cells to sense their environment and establish new connections with other neurons in the brain.”
Co-author, UQ’s Dr Ramon Martinez-Marmol said the discovery had applications that could treat and protect against neurodegenerative cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. “Our idea was to identify bioactive compounds from natural sources that could reach the brain and regulate the growth of neurons, resulting in improved memory formation,” Dr Martinez-Marmol said.
Dr Dae Hee Lee from CNGBio Co, which has supported and collaborated on the research project, said the properties of lion’s mane mushrooms had been used to treat ailments and maintain health in traditional Chinese medicine since antiquity. “This important research is unravelling the molecular mechanism of lion’s mane mushroom compounds and their effects on brain function, particularly memory,” Dr Lee said.
The study was published in the Journal of Neurochemistry.
Source: https://www.uq.edu.au/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Alzheimer's, brain, brain cells, CNGBio Co, edible mushroom, Hericium erinaceus, lion's mane mushroom, memory, mushroom, nerve, neurodegenerative cognitive disorders, neuron projections, neurotrophic effects, Queensland Brain Institute, traditional Chinese medicine, University of Queensland, UQ
February 16, 2023
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At 82 years old, with an aggressive form of blood cancer that six courses of chemotherapy had failed to eliminate, “Paul” appeared to be out of options. With each long and unpleasant round of treatment, his doctors had been working their way down a list of common cancer drugs, hoping to hit on something that would prove effective—and crossing them off one by one. The usual cancer killers were not doing their job.
With nothing to lose, Paul’s doctors enrolled him in a trial set up by the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, where he lives. The university was testing a new matchmaking technology developed by a UK-based company called Exscientia that pairs individual patients with the precise drugs they need, taking into account the subtle biological differences between people.
The researchers took a small sample of tissue from Paul (his real name is not known because his identity was obscured in the trial). They divided the sample, which included both normal cells and cancer cells, into more than a hundred pieces and exposed them to various cocktails of drugs. Then, using robotic automation and computer vision (machine-learning models trained to identify small changes in cells), they watched to see what would happen. In effect, the researchers were doing what the doctors had done: trying different drugs to see what worked. But instead of putting a patient through multiple months-long courses of chemotherapy, they were testing dozens of treatments all at the same time.
The approach allowed the team to carry out an exhaustive search for the right drug. Some of the medicines didn’t kill Paul’s cancer cells. Others harmed his healthy cells. Paul was too frail to take the drug that came out on top. So he was given the runner-up in the matchmaking process: a cancer drug marketed by the pharma giant Johnson & Johnson that Paul’s doctors had not tried because previous trials had suggested it was not effective at treating his type of cancer.
It worked. Two years on, Paul was in complete remission—his cancer was gone. The approach is a big change for the treatment of cancer, says Exscientia’s CEO, Andrew Hopkins: “The technology we have to test drugs in the clinic really does translate to real patients.”
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, cancer cells, cells, chemotherapy, complete remission, drugs, Exscientia, Johnson & Johnson, machine-learning, matchmaking technology, Medical University of Vienna, robotic automation, tissue
February 15, 2023
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Google isn’t about to let Microsoft or anyone else make a swipe for its search crown without a fight. The company announced today that it will roll out a chatbot named Bard “in the coming weeks.” The launch appears to be a response to ChatGPT, the sensationally popular artificial intelligence chatbot developed by startup OpenAI with funding from Microsoft.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, wrote in a blog post that Bard is already available to “trusted testers” and designed to put the “breadth of the world’s knowledge” behind a conversational interface. It uses a smaller version of a powerful AI model called LaMDA, which Google first announced in May 2021 and is based on similar technology to ChatGPT. Google says this will allow it to offer the chatbot to more users and gather feedback to help address challenges around the quality and accuracy of the chatbot’s responses.
Google and OpenAI are both building their bots on text generation software that, while eloquent, is prone to fabrication and can replicate unsavory styles of speech picked up online. The need to mitigate those flaws, and the fact that this type of software cannot easily be updated with new information, poses a challenge for hopes of building powerful and lucrative new products on top of the technology, including the suggestion that chatbots could reinvent web search.
Notably, Pichai did not announce plans to integrate Bard into the search box that powers Google’s profits. Instead he showcased a novel, and cautious, use of the underlying AI technology to enhance conventional search. For questions for which there is no single agreed-on answer, Google will synthesize a response that reflects the differing opinions.
For example, the query “Is it easier to learn the piano or the guitar?” would be met with “Some say the piano is easier to learn, as the finger and hand movements are more natural … Others say that it’s easier to learn chords on the guitar.” Pichai also said that Google plans to make the underlying technology available to developers through an API, as OpenAI is doing with ChatGPT, but did not offer a timeline.
https://www.wired.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, API, Artificial Intelligence, Bard, chatbot, ChatGPT, DEVELOPERS, Google, LaMDA, Microsoft, no single agreed-on answer, OpenAI, text generation, web search
February 14, 2023
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Retinal cells grown from stem cells can reach out and connect with neighbors, according to a new study, completing a “handshake” that may show the cells are ready for trials in humans with degenerative eye disorders. Over a decade ago, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison) developed a way to grow organized clusters of cells, called organoids, that resemble the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye. They coaxed human skin cells reprogrammed to act as stem cells to develop into layers of several types of retinal cells that sense light and ultimately transmit what we see to the brain.
“We wanted to use the cells from those organoids as replacement parts for the same types of cells that have been lost in the course of retinal diseases,” says David Gamm, the UW–Madison ophthalmology professor and director of the McPherson Eye Research Institute whose lab developed the organoids. “But after being grown in a laboratory dish for months as compact clusters, the question remained — will the cells behave appropriately after we tease them apart? Because that is key to introducing them into a patient’s eye.”
During 2022, Gamm and UW–Madison collaborators published studies showing that dish-grown retinal cells called photoreceptors respond like those in a healthy retina to different wavelengths and intensities of light, and that once they are separated from adjacent cells in their organoid, they can reach out toward new neighbors with characteristic biological cords called axons.
“The last piece of the puzzle was to see if these cords had the ability to plug into, or shake hands with, other retinal cell types in order to communicate,” says Gamm, whose new results on successful connections between the cells will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Cells in the retina and brain communicate across synapses, tiny gaps at the tips of their cords. To confirm that their lab-grown retinal cells have the capacity to replace diseased cells and carry sensory information like healthy ones, the researchers needed to show that they could make synapses.
Source: https://news.wisc.edu/
AND
https://www.thebrighterside.news/
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| Tags: axons, biological cords, blindness, brain, cells, degenerative eye disorders, light, organoids, photoreceptors, retina, Retinal cells, synapse, University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-Madison
February 13, 2023
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Researchers in the U.K. have achieved something of a world first: they have manufactured blood in the lab, which they’ve since administered to humans. The clinical trial will aim to test the safety and effectiveness of the lab-made blood in at least 10 healthy people. Two volunteers have already received a dose. The scientists — from the University of Cambridge, the National Health Service and the University of Bristol — are keen to find out whether their novel blood can last as long as normal red blood cells (which normally stay alive for about 120 days inside the human body) and whether there are any side effects.
Transfusing donated blood has saved countless lives, allowing patients to get through complicated operations in good health. Blood products also help to treat chronic conditions such as sickle cell anemia. But blood donation, as a system, has many drawbacks. It requires a complicated infrastructure to collect and deliver blood where it’s needed safely. That requires adequate refrigeration all along the route, and while that might be relatively straightforward for developed countries, it remains a challenge elsewhere in the world. Rarer blood types also suffer from dwindling supplies in the blood banks, which often means it’s harder to find a suitable blood match for certain racial and ethnic groups. It’s also costly to maintain the infrastructure; the average donation of less than half a liter of blood costs the U.K.’s National Health Service approximately £130 ($155). That’s why scientists from around the world, often funded by military agencies, have been searching for more practical alternatives for decades. Still, it’s an endeavor that has thus far enjoyed limited success.
“After 9/11, the U.S. Army invested millions of dollars in producing a blood replicant to be used for casualties in the battlefield, but it came to naught,” says Lt. Col. Matthew Armstrong, who studies the fluid dynamics of blood at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
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| Tags: blood banks, lab-made blood, National Health Service, oxygen-carrying role, Rarer blood types, red cells, refrigeration, sickle cell anemia, stem cells, Transfusing donated blood, University of Bristol, University of Cambridge, West Point
February 10, 2023
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Cancer cells have a series of features that allow the immune system to identify and attack them. However, these same cells create an environment that blocks immune cells and protects the tumour. This means that immune cells cannot reach the cancer cells to remove them. The scientific community has been working for years to increase the effectiveness of the immune system against cancer by using vaccines based on dead tumour cells.
Scientists at IRB Barcelona, led by ICREA researcher Dr. Manuel Serrano, and Dr. Federico Pietrocola, now at the Karolinska Institutet, in Sweden, have studied how inducing senescence in cancer cells improves the effectiveness of the immune response to a greater degree than the dead cancer cells. After vaccinating healthy mice with senescent cancer cells and then stimulating the formation of tumours, the researchers observed that the animals did not develop cancer or that the number that do is significantly reduced. They also analysed the efficacy of vaccination in animals that had already developed tumours. In this setting, although the results were more moderate due to the protective barrier of the tumour, improvements were also observed.
"Our results indicate that senescent cells are a preferred option when it comes to stimulating the immune system against cancer, and they pave the way to considering vaccination with these cells as a possible therapy," explains Dr. Serrano, head of the Cellular Plasticity and Disease lab at IRB Barcelona.
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| Tags: cancer cells, ICREA, immune system, immunotherapy treatments, IRB Barcelona, Karolinska Institutet, melanoma, pancreatic cancer, senescence, tissue regeneration, tumors, vaccines
February 9, 2023
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Age catches up with us all eventually, but in some people the right genes can make that chase into our twilight years a relatively leisurely one.
A few years ago Italian researchers discovered something special about people who live well into their 90s and beyond: they commonly have a version of a gene called BPIFB4 that protects against cardiovascular damage and keeps the heart in good shape for a longer period of time.
By introducing the mutated gene into older mice, the scientists have now seen how the variant rewinds markers of biological heart aging by the equivalent of more than 10 human years.
In middle-aged mice, the same therapy was shown to halt the decline of heart function.
How quickly the heart and its nearest blood vessels typically decay depends on numerous factors, including how much we drink and whether or not we smoke. Based on the study's results, mutations in protein-encoding genes also have a key part to play.
The longevity-associated variant (LAV) of the BPIFB4 gene that the researchers looked at is already associated with longevity in people, and is frequently found in individuals who live longer than normal, including those in their late 90s and beyond. This finding prompted the researchers to take a closer look at the variant's physiological effects.
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| Tags: aging, BPIFB4 gene, cardiovascular damage, drink, heart, heart transplants, IRCCS Multimedica Group, LAV, longevity-associated variant, markers, mutated gene, pericyte cells, smoke
February 8, 2023
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Rome's Pantheon stands defiant 2,000 years after it was built, its marble floors sheltered under the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. For decades, researchers have probed samples from Roman concrete structures—tombs, breakwaters, aqueducts, and wharves—to find out why these ancient buildings endure when modern concrete may crumble after only a few decades.
In a recent study, scientists have got closer to the answer—and their findings could reverberate long into the future. Not only is Roman concrete exponentially more durable than modern concrete, but it can also repair itself. Creating a modern equivalent that lasts longer than existing materials could reduce climate emissions and become a key component of resilient infrastructure, like seawalls. Currently, concrete is second only to water as the world’s most consumed material, and making it accounts for about 7 percent of global emissions.
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| Tags: aqueduc, breakwaters, calcium, calcium carbonate, climate emissions, concrete, Harvard, heat, lime clasts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, Pantheon, Privernum, Rome, seawalls, tombs, volcanic tephra, wharves
February 7, 2023
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Generative artificial intelligence (AI) describes algorithms (such as ChatGPT) that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos. Recent new breakthroughs in the field have the potential to drastically change the way we approach content creation.
Generative AI systems fall under the broad category of machine learning, and here’s how one such system—ChatGPT—describes what it can do:
Ready to take your creativity to the next level? Look no further than generative AI! This nifty form of machine learning allows computers to generate all sorts of new and exciting content, from music and art to entire virtual worlds. And it’s not just for fun—generative AI has plenty of practical uses too, like creating new product designs and optimizing business processes. So why wait? Unleash the power of generative AI and see what amazing creations you can come up with!
Did anything in that paragraph seem off to you? Maybe not. The grammar is perfect, the tone works, and the narrative flows. That’s why ChatGPT—the GPT stands for generative pretrained transformer—is receiving so much attention right now. It’s a free chatbot that can generate an answer to almost any question it’s asked. Developed by OpenAI, and released for testing to the general public in November 2022, it’s already considered the best AI chatbot ever. And it’s popular too: over a million people signed up to use it in just five days. Starry-eyed fans posted examples of the chatbot producing computer code, college-level essays, poems, and even halfway-decent jokes.
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| Tags: advertising copywriters, AI, algorithms, art, audio, chatbot, ChatGPT, code, Computers, content, DALL-E, Generative artificial intelligence, generative pretrained transformer, images, machine-learning, medical imaging analysis, music, OpenAI, professors, simulations, text, videos, virtual worlds, weather forecast
February 6, 2023
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Genes that trigger cancer could be turned off - before people are even born, according to new research. Scientists have found a tumour 'switch' that develops hours after fertilisation. The discovery offers hope of a screening program, personalised vaccines - or even embryo engineering.
"Our work could open a new clinical chapter for the early detection of cancer," sait Co author Professor Tony Perry, of the University of Bath.
In experiments on mice, the international team found gene activity in embryos kicks off within four hours of sperm injection. These include 'oncogenes' which have the potential to cause cancer - if mutated. The findings are expected to apply to humans. "Many factors responsible for the dawn of gene activity in embryos have long been known to be major oncogenes," explained Prof Perry. It is the first time a pre-set order of events has been established in one-cell embryos in any species.
When an embryo is formed, its genes – donated by a fertilising sperm and egg – are silent. Somehow, at an early stage of development, embryo genes must be switched on. Without this vital 'genes on' switch in the embryo, none of us would be here, yet surprisingly little is known about what the switch looks like, or the identity of the 'molecular finger' that pushes the switch.
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| Tags: birth, cancer, cells, egg, embryo engineering, embryologists, embryos, genes, messenger RNA, molecular finger, mRNA, mutation, oncogenes, proteins, sequencing, sperm, switch, tumour 'switch', University of Bath, University of Cambridge
February 3, 2023
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Using an AI model similar to the one powering internet darling ChatGPT, the California-based biotech Profluent has created novel antimicrobial proteins, and they’ve already proven capable of killing bacteria in the lab.
The successful proteins, published in Nature Biotechnology, were part of the first clutch of designs generated by Profluent’s AI platform, ProGen.
ProGen is a large language model (LLM), a form of Deep Learning AI that utilizes a universe’s worth of text as its training data, developing the ability to analyze and generate language — like ChatGPT, except in Progen’s case the language is that of proteins.
“While companies are experimenting with exciting new biotechnology like CRISPR genome editing by repurposing what nature has given us, we’re doing something different,” Ali Madani, Profluent’s founder, said in a statement announcing the startups’ launch.
“We use AI and large language models like the ones which power ChatGPT to learn the fundamental language of biology, and design new proteins which have the potential to cure diseases.”
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| Tags: AI platform, antibiotics, antimicrobial proteins, bacteria, ChatGPT, Deep learning AI, large language model, LLM, lysozymes, Profluent, ProGen, protein sequences
February 2, 2023
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A new way to significantly increase the potency of almost any vaccine has been developed by researchers from the International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) at Northwestern University.
The scientists used chemistry and nanotechnology to change the structural location of adjuvants and antigens on and within a nanoscale vaccine, greatly increasing vaccine performance. The antigen targets the immune system, and the adjuvant is a stimulator that increases the effectiveness of the antigen.
“The work shows that vaccine structure and not just the components is a critical factor in determining vaccine efficacy,” said lead investigator Chad A. Mirkin, director of the IIN. “Where and how we position the antigens and adjuvant within a single architecture markedly changes how the immune system recognizes and processes it."
This new heightened emphasis on structure has the potential to improve the effectiveness of conventional cancer vaccines, which historically have not worked well, Mirkin said.
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| Tags: adjuvant, antigen-, colon cancer, IIN, International Institute for Nanotechnology, melanoma, nanoscale vaccine, nanotechnology, Northwestern University, papillomavirus-induced cervical cancer, prostate cancer, SNAs, spherical nucleic acids, T-cells, triple negative breast cancer, tumour, vaccine, vaccines' architecture
February 1, 2023
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Eight years ago, a patient lost her power of speech because of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which causes progressive paralysis. She can still make sounds, but her words have become unintelligible, leaving her reliant on a writing board or iPad to communicate.
Now, after volunteering to receive a brain implant, the woman has been able to rapidly communicate phrases like “I don’t own my home” and “It’s just tough” at a rate approaching normal speech.
That is the claim in a paper published over the weekend on the website bioRxiv by a team at Stanford University. The study has not been formally reviewed by other researchers. The scientists say their volunteer, identified only as “subject T12,” smashed previous records by using the brain-reading implant to communicate at a rate of 62 words a minute, three times the previous best.
Philip Sabes, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the project, called the results a “big breakthrough” and said that experimental brain-reading technology could be ready to leave the lab and become a useful product soon.
“The performance in this paper is already at a level which many people who cannot speak would want, if the device were ready,” says Sabes. “People are going to want this.” People without speech deficits typically talk at a rate of about 160 words a minute. Even in an era of keyboards, thumb-typing, emojis, and internet abbreviations, speech remains the fastest form of human-to-human communication.
The new research was carried out at Stanford University. The preprint, published January 21, began drawing extra attention on Twitter and other social media because of the death the same day of its co-lead author, Krishna Shenoy, from pancreatic cancer.
Shenoy had devoted his career to improving the speed of communication through brain interfaces, carefully maintaining a list of records on his laboratory website. In 2019, another volunteer Shenoy worked with managed to use his thoughts to type at a rate of 18 words a minute, a record performance at the time.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/
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| Tags: ALS, brain implant, brain-interface, paralysis, San Francisco, speech, Stanford, University of California
January 31, 2023
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In the world of artificial intelligence, the idea of “singularity” looms large. This slippery concept describes the moment AI exceeds beyond human control and rapidly transforms society. The tricky thing about AI singularity (and why it borrows terminology from black hole physics) is that it’s enormously difficult to predict where it begins and nearly impossible to know what’s beyond this technological “event horizon.”
However, some AI researchers are on the hunt for signs of reaching singularity measured by AI progress approaching the skills and ability comparable to a human. One such metric, defined by Translated, a Rome-based translation company, is an AI’s ability to translate speech at the accuracy of a human. Language is one of the most difficult AI challenges, but a computer that could close that gap could theoretically show signs of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
“That’s because language is the most natural thing for humans,” Translated CEO Marco Trombetti said at a conference in Orlando, Florida, in December. “Nonetheless, the data Translated collected clearly shows that machines are not that far from closing the gap.”
The company tracked its AI’s performance from 2014 to 2022 using a metric called “Time to Edit,” or TTE, which calculates the time it takes for professional human editors to fix AI-generated translations compared to human ones. Over that 8-year period and analyzing over 2 billion post-edits, Translated’s AI showed a slow, but undeniable improvement as it slowly closed the gap toward human-level translation quality.
On average, it takes a human translator roughly one second to edit each word of another human translator, according to Translated. In 2015, it took professional editors approximately 3.5 seconds per word to check a machine-translated (MT) suggestion — today that number is just 2 seconds. If the trend continues, Translated’s AI will be as good as human-produced translation by the end of the decade (or even sooner).
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| Tags: AGI, AI, artificial general intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, language, MT, singularity, speech, Time to Edit, Translated, translation, TTE
January 30, 2023
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Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch recently tested the technology with questions from his final exam in operations management— which was once a required class for all MBA students — and published his findings.
Terwiesch concluded that the bot did an “amazing job” answering basic operations questions based on case studies, which are focused examinations of a person, group, or company, and a common way business schools teach students.
In other instances though, ChatGPT made simple mistakes in calculations that Terwiesch thought only required 6th-grade-level math. Terwiesch also noted that the bot had issues with more complex questions that required an understanding of how multiple inputs and outputs worked together.
Ultimately, Terwiesch said the bot would receive an B or B- on the exam.
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| Tags: Axios, business analyst, ChatGPT, exam, lawyer, United States Medical Licensing Exam, virtual doctor, Wharton
January 27, 2023
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Scientists are harnessing a new way to turn cancer cells into potent, anti-cancer agents. In the latest work from the lab of Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, investigators have developed a new cell therapy approach to eliminate established tumors and induce long-term immunity, training the immune system so that it can prevent cancer from recurring. The team tested their dual-action, cancer-killing vaccine in an advanced mouse model of the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma, with promising results.
“Our team has pursued a simple idea: to take cancer cells and transform them into cancer killers and vaccines,” said corresponding author Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, director of the Center for Stem Cell and Translational Immunotherapy (CSTI) and the vice chair of research in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Brigham and faculty at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI). “Using gene engineering, we are repurposing cancer cells to develop a therapeutic that kills tumor cells and stimulates the immune system to both destroy primary tumors and prevent cancer.”
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| Tags: Brigham and Women's Hospital, cancer, cancer-killing vaccine, Cell Therapy, Center for Stem Cell and Translational Immunotherapy, CRISPR-Cas9, CSTI, Gene-editing, Glioblastoma, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Stem Cell Institute, HSCI, inactivated tumor cells, living tumor cells, long-term immunity, Mass General Brigham, therapeutic tumor cells, ThTC, tumors
January 26, 2023
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NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced Tuesday a collaboration to demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space, an enabling capability for NASA crewed missions to Mars. NASA and DARPA will partner on the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, or DRACO, program.
“NASA will work with our long-term partner, DARPA, to develop and demonstrate advanced nuclear thermal propulsion technology as soon as 2027. With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever – a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
Using a nuclear thermal rocket allows for faster transit time, reducing risk for astronauts. Reducing transit time is a key component for human missions to Mars, as longer trips require more supplies and more robust systems. Maturing faster, more efficient transportation technology will help NASA meet its Moon to Mars Objectives.
Other benefits to space travel include increased science payload capacity and higher power for instrumentation and communication. In a nuclear thermal rocket engine, a fission reactor is used to generate extremely high temperatures. The engine transfers the heat produced by the reactor to a liquid propellant, which is expanded and exhausted through a nozzle to propel the spacecraft. Nuclear thermal rockets can be three or more times more efficient than conventional chemical propulsion.
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| Tags: DARPA, deep space, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, DRACO, Mars, NASA, Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application, nuclear thermal propulsion, nuclear thermal rocket engine, space, Space Technology Mission Directorate, space travel, spacecraft, STMD
January 25, 2023
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University Hospitals Galway (UHG) in Ireland has carried out the first Robotic Guided Coronary Intervention. The innovative procedure combines the benefits of coronary intervention with the precision of robotics, offering a range of benefits to patients. The new technology is used in stent procedures to relieve blockages in the arteries of the heart. It allows for greater precision in positioning stents, allowing the Interventional Cardiologists to move the stent a millimetre at a time.
It also allows the medical team to have an enhanced, close up view of the angiographic images and information during the entire procedure. The scientific breakthrough allows Interventional Cardiologists to use the robot as an extension of their own hand, allowing for robotic precision and details visualization when positioning of guide catheters, guidewires and balloon/stent catheters.
“Robotic innovation has come a long way in the last decade. And we in Galway are delighted to have performed the first Robotic Guided Coronary Intervention in Ireland and the UK.”, said Prof Faisal Sharif, who carried out the first procedure in UHG. The Consultant Cardiologist welcomed the addition of the CorPath Robotic Angioplasy as a game changer.
“The main advantage of robotics is that it is safe and very precise in stent placement. It allows the accurate placement for up to 1mm at a time,” he said. The use of robotics in the procedure will also benefit staff, reducing their exposure to radiation. “Traditionally, the coronary stent placement procedure is performed in the Cardiac Cath Lab resulting in staff exposure to radiation. The second main advantage of using Robotics is the reduction in radiation exposure for the staff.”
“We recently successfully completed the first case and going forward we will be performing these procedures regularly,” added Prof Sharif.
Source: https://www.saolta.ie/
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| Tags: angiographic images, arteries, CorPath Robotic Angioplasy, heart, Irland, radiation, robot, Robotic Guided Coronary Intervention, stent, UHG, University Hospitals Galway
January 24, 2023
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Researchers have developed a new tool and technique that uses “vortex ultrasound” – a sort of ultrasonic tornado – to break down blood clots in the brain. The new approach worked more quickly than existing techniques to eliminate clots formed in an in vitro model of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST).
“Our previous work looked at various techniques that use ultrasound to eliminate blood clots using what are essentially forward-facing waves,” says Xiaoning Jiang, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work. “Our new work uses vortex ultrasound, where the ultrasound waves have a helical wavefront. “In other words, the ultrasound is swirling as it moves forward,” says Jiang, who is the Dean F. Duncan Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University. “Based on our in vitro testing, this approach eliminates blood clots more quickly than existing techniques, largely because of the shear stress induced by the vortex wave.”
“The fact that our new technique works quickly is important, because CVST clots increase pressure on blood vessels in the brain,” says Chengzhi Shi, co-corresponding author of the work and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. “This increases the risk of a hemorrhage in the brain, which can be catastrophic for patients. “Existing techniques rely in large part on interventions that dissolve the blood clot. But this is a time-consuming process. Our approach has the potential to address these clots more quickly, reducing risk for patients.”
CVST occurs when a blood clot forms in the veins responsible for draining blood from the brain. Incidence rates of CVST were between 2 and 3 per 100,000 in the United States in 2018 and 2019, and the incidence rate appears to be increasing.
“Another reason our work here is important is that current treatments for CVST fail in 20-40% of cases,” Jiang says.
Source: https://news.ncsu.edu/
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| Tags: Blood Clot, brain, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, CVST, Georgia Tech, hemorrhage, North Carolina State University, ultrasonic tornado, vortex ultrasound
January 23, 2023
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A team of researchers led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has developed a novel delivery system for messenger RNA (mRNA) using extracellular vesicles (EVs). The new technique has the potential to overcome many of the delivery hurdles faced by other promising mRNA therapies.
In the study, published today in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the researchers use EV-encapsulated mRNA to initiate and sustain collagen production for several months in the cells of photoaged skin in laboratory models. It is the first therapy to demonstrate this ability and represents a proof-of-concept for deploying the EV mRNA therapy.
“This is an entirely new modality for delivering mRNA,” said corresponding author Betty Kim, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Neurosurgery. “We used it in our study to initiate collagen production in cells, but it has the potential to be a delivery system for a number of mRNA therapies that currently have no good method for being delivered.”
The genetic code for building specific proteins is contained in mRNA but delivering mRNA within the body is one of the largest hurdles facing clinical applications of many mRNA-based therapies. The current COVID-19 vaccines, which marked the first widespread use of mRNA therapy, use lipid nanoparticles for delivery, and the other primary delivery systems for genetic materials so far have been viral based. However, each of these approaches comes with certain limitations and challenges.
Extracellular vesicles are small structures created by cells that transport biomolecules and nucleic acids in the body. These naturally occurring particles can be modified to carry mRNAs, which gives them the benefit of innate biocompatibility without triggering a strong immune response, allowing them to be administered multiple times. Additionally, their size allows them to carry even the largest human genes and proteins.
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| Tags: biomolecules, cells, COL1A1 mRNA, collagen, collagen production, ev, extracellular vesicles, genetic, immune response, lipid nanoparticles, messenger RNA, mRNA, nucleic acids, photoaged skin, proteins, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, WRINKLES
January 20, 2023
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A new kind of solar panel, developed at the University of Michigan, has achieved 9% efficiency in converting water into hydrogen and oxygen—mimicking a crucial step in natural photosynthesis. Outdoors, it represents a major leap in the technology, nearly 10 times more efficient than solar water-splitting experiments of its kind.
But the biggest benefit is driving down the cost of sustainable hydrogen. This is enabled by shrinking the semiconductor, typically the most expensive part of the device. The team’s self-healing semiconductor withstands concentrated light equivalent to 160 suns.
Currently, humans produce hydrogen from the fossil fuel methane, using a great deal of fossil energy in the process. However, plants harvest hydrogen atoms from water using sunlight. As humanity tries to reduce its carbon emissions, hydrogen is attractive as both a standalone fuel and as a component in sustainable fuels made with recycled carbon dioxide. Likewise, it is needed for many chemical processes, producing fertilizers for instance.
“In the end, we believe that artificial photosynthesis devices will be much more efficient than natural photosynthesis, which will provide a path toward carbon neutrality,” said Zetian Mi, U-M professor of electrical and computer engineering who led the study reported in Nature.
https://news.umich.edu/
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| Tags: carbon emissions, fertilizers, fossil energy, hydrogen, methane, photosynthesis, recycled carbon dioxide, semiconductor, solar panel, University of Michigan, water splitting
January 19, 2023
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A new blood test that tracks the breakdown of nerve cells in the brain in Alzheimer's disease. It is an innovation that is now being presented by researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, together with colleagues in Italy, Great Britain and the United States.
In recent years, great progress has been made in the development of blood tests, so-called biomarkers, for screening and monitoring various disease processes in Alzheimer's disease. Partly, it has involved identifying amyloid plaques in the brain (formed by the protein beta-amyloid) via blood samples, and in later research also the formation of neurofibrils, small thread-like protein structures that consist of a modified (phosphorylated) form of the nerve cell protein tau.
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| Tags: Alzheimer's, amyloid plaques, BD-tau, beta-amyloid, biomarkers, blood test, brain, brain-derived tau, nerve cell, nerve cells, neurofibrils, protein, protein Tau, spinal fluid, University of Gothenburg
January 18, 2023
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Undergoing clinical trials around the world is a brain surgery that doesn’t need an incision or produce any blood yet drastically improves the lives of people with essential tremor, depression and more. The procedure, known as a focused ultrasound, aims sound waves at parts of the brain to disrupt faulty brain circuits causing symptoms.
Pictured are scans of a 80-year-old patient's brain. Focused ultrasound signficantly improved the tremors.
“Focused ultrasound is a noninvasive therapeutic technology,” said Dr. Neal Kassell, founder and chairman of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation. “We’ve said that focused ultrasound is the most powerful sound you will never hear, but sound that someday could save your life.”
Kassell describes the way it works as “analogous to using a magnifying glass to focus beams of light on a point and burn a hole in a leaf.” “With focused ultrasound, instead of using an optical lens to focus beams of light,” he added, “an acoustic lens is used to focus multiple beams of ultrasound energy on targets deep in the body with a high degree of precision and accuracy, sparing the adjacent normal tissue.”
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| Tags: brain, depression, essential tremor, focused ultrasound, Focused Ultrasound Foundation, ultrasound, University of Virginia, WAVE
January 17, 2023
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Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre have discovered that a protein, called Menin, contributes to abnormal deactivation of specific genes in cancer cells.
One of the hallmarks of cancer is that the normal regulation of genes is disrupted, and this causes cancer cells to look and behave differently to normal cells. Cancer cells can switch off certain genes, keeping them in a dormant state. By deactivating specific immune genes, some cancers are able to evade detection by the immune system, essentially becoming invisible. This allows the cancer to grow and become more aggressive.
By targeting the Menin protein using drug therapies, the researchers believe they can reactivate these genes, making the cancer cells once again visible and allowing the immune system to seek out and destroy them.
The findings, published in Nature Cell Biology, could lead to new and more effective treatments for lymphoma and lung cancer.
Professor Mark Dawson, from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, said the findings help scientists learn more about how cells function.
“Our research discovery has major implications for many different fields of research because we need to understand how cells make decisions and change the way they act in order to find new ways to treat cancer,” Professor Dawson said.
Source: https://www.anu.edu.au/
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| Tags: ANU, Australian National University, cancer cells, genes, immune system, invisible, lung cancer, lymphoma, Menin, protein
January 16, 2023
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The best Band-Aids could be sprouting from your scalp, a new study suggests. British researchers say hair follicles may have wound-healing properties, with the potential to avoid lifelong scars that can be damaging to one’s confidence.
The study out of Imperial College London reports that scars treated with hair follicle transplants began to act similarly to uninjured skin, generating new cells, blood vessels, gene expression, and even restoring itself through collagen.
“Around 100 million people per year acquire scars in high-income countries alone, primarily as a result of surgeries. The global incidence of scars is much higher and includes extensive scarring formed after burn and traumatic injuries. Our work opens new avenues for treating scars and could even change our approach to preventing them,” says Dr Francisco Jiménez, lead hair transplant surgeon at the Mediteknia Clinic and Associate Research Professor at University Fernando Pessoa Canarias, in Gran Canaria, Spain, in a statement.
Scar tissue in the skin lacks hair, sweat glands, blood vessels and nerves, which are all needed for proper regulation of body temperature, as well as pain and overall sensory detection. Scarring can also disrupt movement ability, thus inducing stress and discomfort for someone.
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| Tags: : Blood vessels, cell, cells, collagen, follicules, gene expression, hair, hair transplants, Imperial College London, Mediteknia Clinic, nerves, normotrophic scars, pain, scalp, scars, sensory detection, skin, sweat glands, temperature, transplants, University Fernando Pessoa Canarias, wounds
January 13, 2023
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As of January 10, 2022, over 13 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered — including hundreds of millions of mRNA vaccines by companies like Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. Following the surge in mRNA vaccine research for COVID-19, researchers are now seeking to apply their experience to cancer vaccines. Recently, BioNTech announced a strategic partnership with the government of the United Kingdom to provide up to 10,000 patients with personalized mRNA cancer immunotherapies by 2030.
“Our goal is to accelerate the development of immunotherapies and vaccines using technologies we have been researching for over 20 years,” says Prof. Ugur Sahin, CEO and cofounder of BioNTech, in a press release.
“The collaboration will cover various cancer types and infectious diseases affecting collectively hundreds of millions of people worldwide. If successful, this collaboration has the potential to improve outcomes for patients and provide early access to our suite of cancer immunotherapies as well as to innovative vaccines against infectious diseases – in the U.K. and worldwide,” he adds.
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| Tags: BionTech, cancer immunotherapies, cancer vaccine, COVID-19, Moderna, mRNA vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech
January 12, 2023
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Retinal cells grown from stem cells can reach out and connect with neighbors, according to a new study, completing a “handshake” that may show the cells are ready for trials in humans with degenerative eye disorders.
Over a decade ago, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison developed a way to grow organized clusters of cells, called organoids, that resemble the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye. They coaxed human skin cells reprogrammed to act as stem cells to develop into layers of several types of retinal cells that sense light and ultimately transmit what we see to the brain.
Proof of synapses connecting pairs of retinal cells derived from human pluripotent stem cells comes from the red coloring of infection by a modified rabies virus passed from one cell with a yellow nucleus across the synapse to a cell that glows only red
“We wanted to use the cells from those organoids as replacement parts for the same types of cells that have been lost in the course of retinal diseases,” says David Gamm, the UW–Madison ophthalmology professor and director of the McPherson Eye Research Institute whose lab developed the organoids. “But after being grown in a laboratory dish for months as compact clusters, the question remained — will the cells behave appropriately after we tease them apart? Because that is key to introducing them into a patient’s eye.”
During 2022, Gamm and UW–Madison collaborators published studies showing that dish-grown retinal cells called photoreceptors respond like those in a healthy retina to different wavelengths and intensities of light, and that once they are separated from adjacent cells in their organoid, they can reach out toward new neighbors with characteristic biological cords called axons. “The last piece of the puzzle was to see if these cords had the ability to plug into, or shake hands with, other retinal cell types in order to communicate,” says Gamm, whose new results on successful connections between the cells was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: https://news.wisc.edu/
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| Tags: axons, degenerative eye diseases, glaucoma, neurons, photoreceptors, retina, Retinal cells, retinal organoid, stem cells, synapses, University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-Madison
January 11, 2023
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According to The Economist, improved algorithms, powerful computers, and an increase in digitized data have fueled a revolution in machine learning, with new techniques in the 2010s resulting in "rapid improvements in tasks" including manipulating language. Software models are trained to learn by using thousands or millions of examples in a "structure ... loosely based on the neural architecture of the brain". One architecture used in natural language processing (NLP) is a neural network based on a deep learning model that was first introduced in 2017—the Transformer. GPT-n models are based on this Transformer-based deep learning neural network architecture. There are a number of NLP systems capable of processing, mining, organizing, connecting and contrasting textual input, as well as correctly answering questions.
On June 11, 2018, OpenAI researchers and engineers posted their original paper on generative models—language models—artificial intelligence systems—that could be pre-trained with an enormous and diverse corpus of text via datasets, in a process they called generative pre-training (GP). The authors described how language understanding performances in natural language processing (NLP) were improved in GPT-n through a process of "generative pre-training of a language model on a diverse corpus of unlabeled text, followed by discriminative fine-tuning on each specific task." This eliminated the need for human supervision and for time-intensive hand-labeling.
In February 2020, Microsoft introduced its Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG), which was claimed to be the "largest language model ever published at 17 billion parameters." It performed better than any other language model at a variety of tasks which included summarizing texts and answering questions.
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| Tags: algorithms, arXiv, brain, Common Crawl, contrasting textual input, data, deep learning, generative models, generative pre-training, Google Search Engine, GP, GPT-3, machine-learning, Microsoft, Natural Language Processing, neural architecture, neural network, NLP, OpenAI, T-NLG, Turing Natural Language Generation, WebText2
January 10, 2023
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In November 2022, Swiss scientists opened an eagerly awaited package from rural Ethiopia. It was full of shit. For two months, public health researcher Abdifatah Muhummed had been collecting stool samples from children in a remote, pastoralist community in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, as part of a global effort to catalog and preserve the diversity of human gut bacteria. He split each sample into four tubes, froze them at –80 degrees Celsius, and shipped two of them to Europe.
Trillions of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes live in the digestive tract. Many of them are beneficial to human health—influencing our metabolism and immune system, for example. But their diversity is under threat from industrialization, urbanization, and environmental changes. When Muhummed analyzed some of the samples he’d collected—culturing them in petri dishes and adding a dye to make them visible under a microscope—he was astounded to find signs of antibiotic resistance, even in samples taken from children who had never been exposed to modern antibiotics.
That’s one of the reasons scientists want to create a global biobank—a Noah’s ark of microbes, so to speak—and permanently store samples from around the world, before it’s too late. “Of course, it is difficult to concretely say what we are losing,” says microbiologist Adrian Egli, who is based in Zurich and is part of the launch team for the Microbiota Vault project.
Source: https://www.microbiotavault.org/
AND
https://www.wired.co.uk/
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| Tags: bacteria, digestive tract, diversity, fungi, global biobank, GUT, immune system, mass extinction, Microbiota Vault project, microbus, shit, stool
January 9, 2023
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Because we cannot currently predict which subtype of the influenza virus will cause the next pandemic, researchers have made various attempts to produce a “universal” vaccine that could protect people from a wide swathe of subtypes.
Although most of these efforts have focused on a limited set of antigens that are shared by many subtypes, an alternate approach has been to generate a multivalent vaccine that would encode all known subtypes. Arevalo et al. took advantage of recent advances in nucleic acid–based vaccine platforms to develop a nucleoside-modified messenger RNA–lipid nanoparticle vaccine encoding hemagglutinin antigens from all 20 known influenza A and B virus subtypes (see the Perspective by Kelvin and Falzarano). This vaccine elicited high levels of cross-reactive and subtype-specific antibodies in both mice and ferrets, which protected these animals from matched and mismatched influenza virus strains.
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January 6, 2023
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Scientists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found a way to fight cancer with cancer. The team genetically engineered cancer cells to release anti-cancer drugs at the site of established tumors, as well as stimulating the immune system against the disease. Tests in mice proved promising as both a therapy and a preventative vaccine.
Cancer vaccines are an emerging area of research, where patients are often administered inactive tumor cells or proteins expressed at high levels by cancer cells. This trains the immune system to recognize existing tumors and mount an assault on them, and can prevent the spread or appearance of new tumors. For the new study, the BWH team took a new approach, using living tumor cells instead.
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| Tags: Brigham and Women's Hospital, BWH, cancer, cancer vaccines, CRISPR, drugs, Glioblastoma, immune system, inactive tumor cells, living tumor cells, metastatic cancer, proteins, therapeutic tumor cells, ThTC, tumors, vaccine
January 5, 2023
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According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about one in five adults have a health condition that might be related to having previously been infected with COVID-19. In addition to cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, blood clots and vascular issues, kidney failure, and musculoskeletal conditions, these individuals may also experience changes in their neurological and mental health conditions.
Researchers shared how their use of a special type of MRI revealed brain changes in patients up to 6 months after they have recovered from COVID-19 at the 2022 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting.
For their study, a team led by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology used susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) to analyze the effects that COVID-19 has on the brain. Magnetic susceptibility “denotes how much certain materials, such as blood, iron and calcium, will become magnetized in an applied magnetic field,” the authors noted in an RSNA statement summarizing the findings. “This ability aids in the detection and monitoring of a host of neurologic conditions including microbleeds, vascular malformations, brain tumors, and stroke.”
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| Tags: brain, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19, Indian Institute of Technology, long COVID, MRI, Radiological Society of North America, RSNA, susceptibility-weighted imaging, SWI
January 4, 2023
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New research in the journal Nature Aging takes a page from the field of renewable energy and shows that genetically engineered mitochondria can convert light energy into chemical energy that cells can use, ultimately extending the life of the roundworm C. elegans. While the prospect of sunlight-charged cells in humans is more science fiction than science, the findings shed light on important mechanisms in the aging process.
Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) has been the source of major discoveries in molecular and cell biology
“We know that mitochondrial dysfunction is a consequence of aging,” said Andrew Wojtovich, Ph.D., associate professor of Pharmacology & Physiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center and senior author of the study. “This study found that simply boosting metabolism using light-powered mitochondria gave laboratory worms longer, healthier lives. These findings and new research tools will enable us to further study mitochondria and identify new ways to treat age-related diseases and age healthier.”
Mitochondria are organelles found in most cells in the body. Often referred to as cellular power plants, mitochondria use glucose to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the compound that provides energy for key functions in the cell, such as muscle contraction and the electrical impulses that help nerve cells communicate with each other.
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| Tags: adenosine triphosphate, aging, ATP, cells, cellular power plants, genetically engineered, light energy, membrane, membrane potential, mitochondria, muscle contraction, nerve cells, organelles, protons, renewable energy, solar panels, University of Rochester Medical Center
January 3, 2023
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Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the need for prosthetic hands has increased sharply. In Netherlands TU Delft researcher Gerwin Smit has designed a prosthetic hand that can be made through a combination of 3-D printing and laser-cutting, which means that they be produced easily and relatively cheaply in countries that have little money to spend on such things.
These prosthetic hands are already being used in India and now, the Indian technology company Vispala has donated 350 of Smit’s 3D-printed prosthetic hands to war victims in Ukraine, sponsored by the American IT-company, Cisco. Biomechanical engineer Gerwin Smit is the designer of the so-called ‘Hundred Dollar Hand’ which is easy and inexpensive to produce using a combination of 3-D printing and laser-cutting. 80% of people needing a prosthetic hand live in countries which have little money for such things so Smit’s robust and artificial hand offers a robust and reliable solution. Last year, the social enterprise, Vispala made the Hundred Dollar Hand design ready for production and already, several hundred have been made and distributed around India since 2021.
Meanwhile, Gerwin Smit and his team are monitoring the use of these prosthetic hands and are gathering feedback to see how the design can be made even better.
Source: https://www.tudelft.nl/
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| Tags: 3-D-printing, Cisco, iNDIA, laser-cutting, prosthetic hand, TU Delft, Ukraine, Vispala
January 2, 2023
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Shenzhen SpinQ Technology Co., Ltd. has come out with three models
The year 2022 has witnessed many momentous moments: multiple moon missions, fusion power, JWST’s new but ancient galaxies, ChatGPT, quantum leaps in quantum computing etc. Yet, what 2022 might one day end up being largely remembered for, is as the year when the first affordable retail quantum computer went on sale.
Shenzhen SpinQ Technology Co., Ltd. has come out with three models – Gemini, Gemini Mini and Triangulum that are ‘portable’ quantum computer models anyone can buy. While the first two are “2 qubits desktop NMR quantum computer”, Triangulum is a “3 qubits desktop NMR quantum computer”. Though the Chinese company had begun shipping their quantum computers earlier and the first ‘real’ quantum computer – IBM’s Quantum System One was installed in Germany on June 15 2021, what is unique about these models is weight and cost: at 14 kilograms and $5,000 Gemini Mini is the lightest and most affordable quantum computer in a market where the average low price is still a few hundred thousand with the high-end models selling for millions of dollars.
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| Tags: ChatGPT, fusion power, Gemini, Gemini Mini, IBM, QUANTUM COMPUTER, quantum computing, Quantum System One, qubit carrier, qubits, Shenzhen SpinQ Technology Co., spin, Triangulum
December 30, 2022
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BioNtech (22UAy.DE) has dosed the first patient with its BNT163 herpes vaccine candidate designed to prevent genital lesions as part of a first-in-human Phase 1 clinical research study, the German vaccine maker said on Wednesday.
The vaccine candidate is meant to prevent HSV-2, the herpes simplex virus that causes genital herpes, and potentially HSV-1, which causes oral herpes and can lead to genital herpes.
It is the first result of the research collaboration established in 2018 between the University of Pennsylvania and BioNtech aimed at developing novel mRNA vaccine candidates for the prevention and treatment of various infectious diseases.
The World Health Organization estimates the number of people aged 15-49 suffering from HSV-2 infection at around 491 million.
BioNTech expects to enrol 100 people between ages 18 and 55 for its Phase 1 trial of the drug, the firm added.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/
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| Tags: BionTech, BNT163 herpes vaccine, genital herpes, herpes virus, HSV-1, HSV-2, mRNA vaccine, oral herpes, University of Pennsylvania, World Health Organization
December 29, 2022
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MIT engineers have developed ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly and easily turn any surface into a power source.
These durable, flexible solar cells, which are much thinner than a human hair, are glued to a strong, lightweight fabric, making them easy to install on a fixed surface. They can provide energy on the go as a wearable power fabric or be transported and rapidly deployed in remote locations for assistance in emergencies. They are one-hundredth the weight of conventional solar panels, generate 18 times more power-per-kilogram, and are made from semiconducting inks using printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing.
Because they are so thin and lightweight, these solar cells can be laminated onto many different surfaces. For instance, they could be integrated onto the sails of a boat to provide power while at sea, adhered onto tents and tarps that are deployed in disaster recovery operations, or applied onto the wings of drones to extend their flying range. This lightweight solar technology can be easily integrated into built environments with minimal installation needs.
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| Tags: drone, e Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory, energy, MIT, MIT.nano, ONE Lab, sail, semiconducting inks, solar cell
December 28, 2022
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People in lab coats may soon be replacing farm animals. Upside Foods has developed a version of “slaughter-free,” lab-grown meat, which can be made without a single real animal. And now the FDA has approved this chickenless chicken for consumer consumption, meaning we may soon see it in restaurants and grocery stores.
Cultivating meat in a lab is a high-tech process, which involves taking cell samples from an animal and then nurturing them in a “cultivator,” where they grow and multiply into tissue.
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| Tags: cell samples, chickenless chicken, FDA, Good Food Institute, Lab-grown Meat, seafood, slaughter-free, tissue, Upside Foods
December 27, 2022
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To the general public, it may sound like something out of a science fiction movie: diagnosing serious diseases such as cancer by listening to someone’s voice. But in fact, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are now investigating whether changes in a person’s voice could serve as a new biomarker in clinical care for detecting illnesses early.
The project, called Voice as a Biomarker of Health, will include 12 research institutions and is being funded by the Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) program out of the NIH Common Fund. The project will use machine learning to build a database of vocal biomarkers, and then use the science of acoustic analysis to identify changes—such as pitch, amplitude, cadence, and words per minute—that could become a low-cost diagnostic tool, alongside other clinical tests.
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| Tags: AI, amplitude, biomarker, Bridge to Artificial Intelligence, Bridge2AI, cadence, cancer, database, diagnostic, laryngeal cancer, machine-learning, National Institutes of Health, NIH, pitch, University of South Florida, USF, voice, Voice as a Biomarker of Health, words
December 26, 2022
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In a bit of “reverse engineering” research using brain tissues from five people who died with Alzheimer’s disease, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they discovered that a special sugar molecule could play a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. If further research confirms the finding, the molecule, known as a glycan, could serve as a new target for early diagnostic tests, treatments and perhaps prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, say the researchers. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia in the United States. Affecting an estimated 5.8 million Americans, the progressive disorder occurs when nerve cells in the brain die due to the buildup of harmful forms of proteins called amyloid and tau.
Cleaning up the disease-causing forms of amyloid and tau is the job of the brain’s immune cells, called microglia. Earlier studies found that when cleanup is impaired, Alzheimer’s disease is more likely to occur. In some people, this is caused by an overabundance of a receptor on the microglia cells, called CD33.
“Receptors are not active on their own. Something needs to connect with them to block microglia from cleaning up these toxic proteins in the brain", says Ronald Schnaar, Professor of Pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the laboratory that led the study. Past studies by the researchers showed that for CD33, these “connector” molecules are special sugars. Known to scientists as glycans, these molecules are ferried around the cell by specialized proteins that help them find their appropriate receptors. The protein-glycan combination is called a glycoprotein.
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| Tags: Alzheimer’s disease, amyloid, brain tissues, CD33, dementia, glycan, glycoprotein., immune cells, Johns Hopkins Medicine, microglia, molecule, nerve cells, proteins, receptors, RPTP zeta S3L, sialylated keratan sulfate, sugar, tau
December 23, 2022
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Scientists used patient stem cells and 3D bioprinting to produce eye tissue that will advance understanding of the mechanisms of blinding diseases. The research team from the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health, printed a combination of cells that form the outer blood-retina barrier—eye tissue that supports the retina’s light-sensing photoreceptors.
The outer blood-retina barrier is the interface of the retina and the choroid, including Bruch’s membrane and the choriocapillaris
The technique provides a theoretically unlimited supply of patient-derived tissue to study degenerative retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
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| Tags: 3D bioprinting, age-related macular degeneration, AMD, blinding diseases, Bruch’s membrane, cell, choriocapillaris, dedegenerative retinal diseases, eye tissue, macular degeneration, National Eye Institute, NEI, outer blood-retina barrier, retinal pigment epithelium, stem cells, tissue, vision loss
December 22, 2022
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As any weekend warrior understands, cartilage injuries to joints such as knees, shoulders, and hips can prove extremely painful and debilitating. In addition, conditions that cause cartilage degeneration, like arthritis and temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ), affect 350 million people in the world and cost the US public health system more than $303 billion every year. Patients suffering from these conditions experience increased pain and discomfort over time.
However, an exciting study led by faculty at The Forsyth Institute suggests new strategies for making cartilage cells with huge implications in regenerative medicine for future cartilage injuries and degeneration treatments. In a paper, entitled “GATA3 mediates nonclassical β-catenin signaling in skeletal cell fate determination and ectopic chondrogenesis,” co-first authors Takamitsu Maruyama and Daigaku Hasegawa, and senior author Wei Hsu, describe two breakthrough discoveries, including a new understanding of a multifaced protein called β-catenin. Dr. Hsu is a senior scientist at the Forsyth Insitute and a Professor of Developmental Biology at Harvard University. He is also an affiliate faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
“The goal of this study,” said Dr. Maruyama of Forsyth, “was to figure out how to regenerate cartilage. We wanted to determine how to control cell fate, to cause the somatic cell to become cartilage instead of bone.”
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| Tags: arthritis, bone, cartilage, cartilage degeneration, cells, Forsyth Insitute, Harvard University, hips, injuries, joints, knees, multifaced protein, pain, regenerative medicine, shoulders, temporomandibular joint disorder, TMJ, Wnt, β-catenin
December 21, 2022
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To help surgeons with the exacting task of finding and removing lung cancer cells, and sparing healthy tissue, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a fluorescent imaging agent that "lights up" lung cancer cells for easier detection. The prescription medication, Cytalux, or pafolacianine, was first approved by the FDA in November 2021 to help detect ovarian cancer during surgery. It received permission for the additional use on Friday.
Purdue ‘Light Up’ Cancer Technology Earns FDA Approval
Now, researchers cite its potential to improve the outcomes of thousands of lung cancer patients. Cytalux, which is given as an intravenous injection to adults prior to surgery, is designed to improve the ability to locate cancerous lung tissue that is normally difficult to detect during surgery, the FDA said. In a study of safety and effectiveness, of the 110 non-small cell lung cancer patients who received a dose of Cytalux and were evaluated under both normal light and fluorescent light during surgery. The FDA said 24% had at least one cancerous lesion detected that was not observed by standard visual inspection or by touch.
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| Tags: cells, Cytalux, FDA, fluorescent, folate, lung cancer, On Target Laboratories, ovarian cancer, pafolacianine, Purdue University, tissue, vomiting
December 20, 2022
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A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego has developed an electronic patch that can monitor biomolecules in deep tissues, including hemoglobin. This gives medical professionals unprecedented access to crucial information that could help spot life-threatening conditions such as malignant tumors, organ dysfunction, cerebral or gut hemorrhages and more.
A photoacoustic sensor could help clinicians diagnose tumors, organ malfunctions and more
“The amount and location of hemoglobin in the body provide critical information about blood perfusion or accumulation in specific locations. Our device shows great potential in close monitoring of high-risk groups, enabling timely interventions at urgent moments,” said Sheng Xu, a professor of nanoengineering at UC San Diego and corresponding author of the study.
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| Tags: biomolecules, blood, brain, cerebral hemorrhages, deep tissues, electronic patch, gut hemorrhages, hemoglobin, hemorrhage, Low blood perfusion, magnetic resonance imaging, malignant tumors, monitoring, MRI, organ dysfunction, sensor, UC San Diego, University of California San Diego, X-ray-computed tomography
December 19, 2022
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Immune checkpoint inhibitors such as Keytruda and Opdivo work by unleashing the immune system’s T cells to attack tumor cells. Their introduction a decade ago marked a major advance in cancer therapy, but only 10% to 30% of treated patients experience long-term improvement. In a paper published online today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI), scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine describe findings that could bolster the effectiveness of immune-checkpoint therapy. Rather than rally T cells against cancer, the Einstein research team used different human immune cells known as natural killer (NK) cells—with dramatic results.
“We believe the novel immunotherapy we’ve developed has great potential to move into clinical trials involving various types of cancer,” said study leader Xingxing Zang, M.Med., Ph.D., Professor of microbiology at Einstein and a member of the Cancer Therapeutics Program of the Montefiore Einstein Cancer Center.
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| Tags: Albert Einstein College of Medicine, cancer, cancer-cell protein, Einstein, Immune checkpoint inhibitors, immune system, immune-checkpoint therapy, Keytruda, KIR2DL5, monoclonal antibodies, natural killer, NK, NK cells, Opdivo, proteins, PVR, T-cells, TIGIT, tissue, tumor cells
December 16, 2022
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Teaching the body’s immune cells to recognize and fight cancer is one of the holy grails in medicine. Over the past two decades, researchers have developed new immunotherapy drugs that stimulate a patient’s immune cells to significantly shrink or even eliminate tumors. These treatments often focus on increasing the cancer-killing ability of cytotoxic T cells. However, these treatments appear to only work for the small group of patients who already have T cells within their tumors. One 2019 study estimated that under 13% of cancer patients responded to immunotherapy.
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| Tags: cancer, CAR-T cells, chimeric antigen receptor T cells, cytotoxic T cells, immune cells, immunotherapy drugs, nature, protein, receptor, San Francisco, solid tumors, synNotch, synthetic biology, synthetic Notch receptor, tumors, University of California
December 15, 2022
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Israeli researchers have built an artificial intelligence tool that analyzes ECG tests and predicts heart failure with high accuracy weeks before it happens.The new technology is for sufferers of myositis — muscle inflammation — which elevates the risk of heart failure. The physician who led the research, Dr. Shahar Shelly of Rambam Healthcare Campus, told The Times of Israel that it is the first AI tool built especially for this population. It analyzes heart patterns that are unique to them, and can bring about earlier detection than is currently possible, he said.
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| Tags: AI, algorithm, Artificial Intelligence, ECG test, heart failure, Mayo Clinic Medical Center, muscle inflammation, myositis, patterns, Rambam Healthcare Campus
December 14, 2022
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For the first time ever, scientists have achieved a net energy gain in fusion tests. According to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment, US government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless, zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time.
The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years.
The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analyzed.
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| Tags: clean power, fusion ignition, hydrogen plasma, inertial confinement fusion, laser, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, LLNL, National Ignition Facility, National Nuclear Security Administration, net-zero carbon economy, NIF, NNSA, pellet, zero-carbon power
December 13, 2022
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New data from an ongoing Phase 1/2 clinical trial has revealed an experimental immunotherapy led to successful response rates in 73% of patients suffering from multiple myeloma, a deadly form of blood cancer. Based on this promising data, an application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been filed to bring the drug to market.
The technology has been in development for decades but it has only been in the last few years that bispecific antibodies have finally reached clinical uses. There are currently three FDA-approved bispecfiic antibody therapies on the market (primarily targeting cancers), and more than 100 prospective antibodies in clinical trials (aimed at everything from Alzheimer's to diabetes).
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| Tags: Alzheimer's, antigens, bispecific antibodies, blood cancer, cancerous plasma cells, cancers, CD3, diabetes, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, GPRC5D, immune T cell, immunotherapy, Johnson & Johnson, monoclonal antibodie, multiple myeloma, myeloma, receptor, talquetamab
December 12, 2022
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A highly efficient LED that is deadly to microbes and viruses but safe for people has been engineered in Japan by three RIKEN physicists. It could one day help countries emerge from the shadows of pandemics by killing pathogens in rooms full of people.
Most LEDs emit visible light, but RIKEN physicists have created an LED that emits in a narrow region in the far ultraviolet that is safe for humans but deadly for viruses and bacteria.
Ultraviolet germicidal lamps are extremely effective at exterminating bacteria and viruses, and they are routinely used in hospitals to sterilize surfaces and medical instruments.
Such lamps can be made with LEDs, making them energy efficient. But these LEDs use ultraviolet light in a range that damages DNA and thus cannot be used around people. The hunt is on to develop efficient LEDs that shine light within a narrow band of far-ultraviolet light that appears to be both good at disinfecting and safe for people.
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| Tags: aluminum, bacteria, COVID-19 pandemic, DNA, Far-ultraviolet LED, gallium, layer, magnesium, microbes, nitrogen, output power, pandemics, RIKEN, RIKEN Quantum Optodevice Laboratory, silicon, Ultraviolet germicidal lamps, ultraviolet light., viruses
December 9, 2022
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Rice University researchers have engineered a key light-activated nanomaterial for the hydrogen economy. Using only inexpensive raw materials, a team from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc. and Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment created a scalable catalyst that needs only the power of light to convert ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen fuel.
The research follows government and industry investment to create infrastructure and markets for carbon-free liquid ammonia fuel that will not contribute to greenhouse warming. Liquid ammonia is easy to transport and packs a lot of energy, with one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms per molecule. The new catalyst breaks those molecules into hydrogen gas, a clean-burning fuel, and nitrogen gas, the largest component of Earth’s atmosphere. And unlike traditional catalysts, it doesn’t require heat. Instead, it harvests energy from light, either sunlight or energy-stingy LEDs.
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| Tags: ammonia, carbon-free liquid ammonia fuel, clean-burning fuel, greenhouse warming, hydrogen, LED PHOTONS, light, molecule, nanotechnology, nitrogen, Princeton University, Rice University, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc
December 8, 2022
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Engineers at the University of Minnesota have developed a new system that can move objects without making physical contact. The technique involves ultrasound waves acting on specialized surfaces to push or even pull objects in different directions, which could help in manufacturing and robotics.
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| Tags: light, metamaterial physics, sound, ultrasound, University of Minnesota, waves
December 6, 2022
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Researchers have developed a unique batteryless and wireless device that can detect within no time coronavirus in the air, if your surroundings contain Covid-19 particles or droplets the moment they enter the vicinity.
The device, which requires no batteries, employs a magnetostrictive clad plate composed of iron, cobalt and nickel, generating power via alternative magnetisation caused by vibration.
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| Tags: alternative magnetisation, batteries, batteryless, CD13 protein, cells, cobalt, coronavirus, COVID, droplets, Fe-Co/Ni, iron, magnetostrictive clad plate, nickel, receptor protein, Tohoku University, vibration, vibration resonance frequency, wireless
December 5, 2022
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The Tesla Semi could make a great electric motorhome based on the specs Tesla released this week and what these great electric truck offerings look like as a motorhome. There is just something about the idea of an all-electric, solar-powered mobile home that is so appealing to a lot of people.
During the day, you drive with zero emissions and can power your life from the same battery pack that powers you. At night, you can charge to do it again the next day. With solar energy, you can also take the whole experience off the grid.
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| Tags: electric truck, motor home, solar energy, solar-powered mobile home, Tesla Semi
December 2, 2022
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Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp expects to start inserting its wireless brain chip into human patients within six months, the US-based company said at an event yesterday.
Neuralink is developing a brain chip implant that it says could enable disabled patients to move and communicate again, which it demonstrated with a video of a monkey typing on a keyboard to order snacks using ‘telepathic typing’ with the chip communicating messages from its brain to a computer. It needs approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before it can start clinical trials on people.
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| Tags: brain, brain chip implant, chip, computer, Elon Musk, FDA, Food and Drug Administrat, Neuralink, telepathic typing, wireless brain chip
December 1, 2022
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Rolls-Royce and easyJet today confirmed they have set a new aviation milestone with the world’s first run of a modern aero engine on hydrogen.
The ground test was conducted on an early concept demonstrator using green hydrogen created by wind and tidal power. It marks a major step towards proving that hydrogen could be a zero carbon aviation fuel of the future and is a key proof point in the decarbonisation strategies of both Rolls-Royce and easyJet. Both companies have set out to prove that hydrogen can safely and efficiently deliver power for civil aero engines and are already planning a second set of tests, with a longer-term ambition to carry out flight tests.
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| Tags: aero engine, aviation fuel, easyJet, green hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen-powered jet, Pearl 15, Rolls-Royce, tidal power, wind power, zero carbon
November 30, 2022
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An experimental therapeutic cancer vaccine induced two distinct and desirable immune system responses that led to significant tumor regression in mice. This is according to a new research study published in the journal Cell, reported by investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
According to the research findings, intravenous (IV) administration of the vaccine boosted the number of cytotoxic T cells capable of infiltrating and attacking tumor cells and engaged the innate immune system by inducing type I interferon. The innate immune response modified the tumor microenvironment, counteracting suppressive forces that otherwise would tamp down T-cell action. Modification of the tumor microenvironment was not found in mice that received the vaccine via subcutaneous administration (i.e. a needle injection into the skin).
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| Tags: cancer, cells, cytotoxic T cells, HPV, immune system, immunotherapeutic vaccines, IV, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, NIAID, NIH, papillomavirus, SNAPvax, tumor, type I interferon, Vaccine Research Center, Vaccitech North America, vax-innate, VRC
November 29, 2022
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A large study led by Lund University in Sweden has shown that people with Alzheimer's disease can now be identified before they experience any symptoms. It is now also possible to predict who will deteriorate within the next few years. The study is published in Nature Medicine, and is very timely in light of the recent development of new drugs for Alzheimer's disease.
It has long been known that there are two proteins linked to Alzheimer’s – beta-amyloid, which forms plaques in the brain, and tau, which at a later stage accumulates inside brain cells. Elevated levels of these proteins in combination with cognitive impairment have previously formed the basis for diagnosing Alzheimer's.
“Changes occur in the brain between ten and twenty years before the patient experiences any clear symptoms, and it is only when tau begins to spread that the nerve cells die and the person in question experiences the first cognitive problems. This is why Alzheimer's is so difficult to diagnose in its early stages”, explains Oskar Hansson, senior physician in neurology at Skåne University Hospital and professor at Lund University.
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| Tags: Alzheimer's, Amsterdam University Medical Center, brain, cells, lecanemab, Lund University, PET scans, plaques, proteins, Skåne University Hospital, tau
November 28, 2022
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With the help of an AI, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have succeeded in designing synthetic DNA that controls the cells’ protein production. The technology can contribute to the development and production of vaccines, drugs for severe diseases, as well as alternative food proteins much faster and at significantly lower costs than today.
How our genes are expressed is a process that is fundamental to the functionality of cells in all living organisms. Simply put, the genetic code in DNA is transcribed to the molecule messenger RNA (mRNA), which tells the cell’s factory which protein to produce and in which quantities.
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| Tags: AI, cancer, cell, cell's protein, cell’s factory, Chalmers University of Technology, COVID-19, DNA, drugs, food proteins, gene expression, genes, genetic code, immune system, mRNA, mRNA vaccine, protein, protein-based drugs, RNA, severe diseases, synthetic DNA, vaccines, virus
November 25, 2022
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Millions of people dealing with diseases and suppressed immune systems are often forced to deal with chronic wounds—often minor injuries that nonetheless take much longer to heal because of compromised health. In addition to vastly varying degrees of recovery, issues like diabetic ulcers are also incredibly expensive, with treatment for a single incident costing as much as $50,000. Overall, chronic injuries cost Americans $25 billion a year, but a remarkable new device could soon offer a much more effective and cost-efficient way to not only help patients heal, but do so better than ever before.
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| Tags: biosensors, blood flow, chronic wounds, data, diabetic ulcers, electrical stimulator, galvanotaxis, hydrogel, immune systems, radio antenna, scar, skin-like polymer, smart bandage, smart phone program, Stanford University, tissue
November 24, 2022
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Scientists in Israel have created the first nano-robot antibodies designed to fight cancer. The first human trial for the new nano-robots will start soon, and it will determine just how effective the antibodies are. What is special about these particular antibodies, too, is that they are programmed to decide whether cells surrounding tumors are “bad” or “good.”
The trial is currently underway in Australia and if it goes according to plan, the nano-robot antibodies will be able to fight cells around tumors that can help the tumor while also boosting the capability of the cells inhibiting the growth of the cancerous cells. The antibodies were invented by Professor Yanay Ofran and are based on human and animal antibodies.
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| Tags: ancer-killing viruses, cancer, cancerous cells, nano-robot antibodies, programmability
November 23, 2022
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UK has successfully test-fired its first high-powered, long-range laser weapon — putting its military one step closer to dramatically improving its defense against incoming threats.
“[This] is the culmination of five years worth of effort … To get to a position where we’ve proven that the technology is effective is fantastically exciting,” said Ben Maddison, technical partner at the UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).
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| Tags: ammunition, beam, Dstl, kinetic energy, laser weapon, liight, speed of light
November 22, 2022
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Researchers at The University of Toledo have developed an experimental vaccine that shows significant promise in preventing rheumatoid arthritis, a painful autoimmune disease that cannot currently be cured. The findings, detailed in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represent a major breakthrough in the study of rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune diseases in general.
One of the most common autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis occurs when the body’s immune system attacks and breaks down healthy tissue — most notably the lining of joints in the hands, wrists, ankles and knees. Some estimates suggest rheumatoid arthritis affects as much as 1% of the global population.
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| Tags: 14-3-3 zeta, aneurysms, arthritis, autoimmune disease, autoimmune diseases, bone, cytokine, gene-editing technology, immune pathologies, interleukin-17, protein, rheumatoid arthritis, University of Toledo, UToledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences, vaccine
November 21, 2022
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A University of Houston professor is reporting on a new type of solar energy harvesting system called thermophotovoltaics (STPV) that breaks the efficiency record of all existing technologies. And no less important, it clears the way to use solar power 24/7.
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| Tags: conversion efficiency, daylight, efficiency record, energy, Photovoltaic cells, solar energy, solar energy harvesting system, solar power, STPV, sunlight, thermodynamic limit, thermophotovoltaics, University of Houston
November 18, 2022
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A major milestone is currently underway in the realm of cultivated meat. Food scientists have spent decades of research and development crafting new meat to tackle the increasing demand for this produce, reduce environmental degradation, and support animal welfare (via CNN). Now, one company is swiftly on its way to producing some of the country's first cultured protein. Following its first pre-market consultation, the FDA has evaluated the safety of cultivated chicken created by Upside Foods and confirmed that there are no further questions at this time.
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| Tags: biopsy, bioreactor, cells, cultivated chicken, cultivated meat, cultured protein, FDA, micronutrients, Upside Foods
November 17, 2022
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Back pain is a common condition with numerous causes, including poor posture, overexertion, constant stress at work or at home, lack of exercise, and poor posture. For a considerable number of patients, the symptoms are chronic, meaning they last a long period or reoccur repeatedly. However, port and exercise therapy, when done properly, can provide alleviation.
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| Tags: andomized controlled trials, back, chronic back pain, Goethe University Frankfurt, pain, personal coaching, port, RCT
November 16, 2022
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The blood-brain barrier is an important aspect of the brain’s blood vessels that prevents poisons, viruses, and bacteria in blood from infiltrating the brain—but it inadvertently blocks most therapeutic substances. Nanoparticles, focused ultrasound, clever chemistry, and other innovative ideas are being tried to overcome the barrier and deliver treatments to the brain. Now, neurosurgeons at Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian are taking a more direct approach: a fully implantable pump that continuously delivers chemo through a tube inserted directly into the brain.
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| Tags: : Blood vessels, bacteria, blood brain barrier, brain cancer, cells, chemo, Columbia University, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Glioblastoma, implantable pump, nanoparticles, NewYork-Presbyterian, pump, ultrasound
November 15, 2022
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Germany company Sono Motors says it will bring a solar-powered electric vehicle to market in Europe in mid-2023. Sono has brought the car, called the Sion, on a tour throughout the U.S., in anticipation of its eventual domestic release. Priced at $25,000, the car is more affordable than most EVs on the U.S. market. It features 465 integrated solar half-cells throughout the exterior of the car — roof, doors, fenders, hood and all. The company estimates that solar power alone can fuel about 70 miles (113 km) of driving per week. For longer trips though, the Sion has a lithium iron phosphate battery with a 190-mile (306 km) range, made by Chinese electric vehicle and battery giant BYD.
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| Tags: battery, BYD, ev, lithium iron phosphate, Sion, solar, solar power, Sono Motors, Valmet Automotive
November 14, 2022
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Brain stimulators, a form of brain implant, can be a life changing treatment for those suffering from neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease.
And now, researchers claim in a study published last month in the journal Cells Report Physical Sciences that they've developed a way to charge the implants solely through breathing movements — potentially freeing them from the messy mechanics of charging an object inside a human body.
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| Tags: brain stimulator, chest wall, electric power, exhaling, Inhaling, supercapacitor, triboelectric nanogenerator, UConn, University of Connecticut
November 11, 2022
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A new study by scientists at the .NeuroRestore research center has identified the type of neuron that is activated and remodeled by spinal cord stimulation, allowing patients to stand up, walk and rebuild their muscles – thus improving their quality of life. This discovery, made in nine patients, marks a fundamental, clinical breakthrough.
In a multi-year research program coordinated by the two directors of .NeuroRestore – Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscience professor at EPFL, and Jocelyne Bloch, a neurosurgeon at Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) – patients who had been paralyzed by a spinal cord injury and who underwent targeted epidural electrical stimulation of the area that controls leg movement were able to regain some motor function.
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| Tags: .NeuroRestore, CHUV, EPFL, epidural implants, Lausanne University Hospital, nerve fibers, neuron, spinal cord, Vsx2 gene
November 10, 2022
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A new report claims Apple’s new AR/VR headset has its exclusive manufacturing partner locked in, with production to begin in Q1 of 2023. Apple’s “extended reality” (XR) headset “will be exclusively assembled by Pegatron” according to Digitimes and that production could begin as early as January.
Continue Reading »
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| Tags: aluminum, Apple, AR, biometric security, extented reality, hand controls, iPhones, legs, Macs, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Quest Pro, Metaverse, Pegatron, scanning technology, VR Headset, XR
November 9, 2022
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An experimental vaccine against breast cancer safely generated a strong immune response to a key tumor protein, researchers from the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine in Seattle report in a paper published by the journal JAMA Oncology. The findings suggest the vaccine may be able to treat different types of breast cancer.
“Because this was not a randomized clinical trial, the results should be considered preliminary, but the findings are promising enough that the vaccine will now be evaluated in a larger, randomized clinical trial,” said lead author Dr. Mary “Nora” L. Disis, a UW professor of medicine, Division of Medical Oncology, and director of the Cancer Vaccine Institute.
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| Tags: breast cancer, Cancer Vaccine Institute, cell-killing, cells, cytotoxic, DNA vaccine, HER2, HER2-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, immune response, recurrence, remission, tumor protein, University of Washington, UW, vaccine
November 8, 2022
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Would you take a simple brain health test to learn about your risk of developing a brain disease if you could? According to the global brain health survey, 91% of those questioned would.
This question was asked to more than 27,500 people in the global brain health survey conducted by the Lifebrain project. The survey is led by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in collaboration with the University of Oslo.
The main findings were:
- 91% of respondents would definitely or probably take a simple test to learn about the risk of developing a brain disease.
- 86% would do so even if the disease could not be prevented or treated.
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| Tags: Alzheimer's, blood tests, brain disease, brain health test, brain scans, cognitive tests, gene tests, Huntington’s disease, Lifebrain, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, risk, test, University of Oslo
November 7, 2022
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A new mechanism that slows down and may even prevent the natural ageing of immune cells – one of the nine ‘hallmarks of ageing’* – has been identified by an international team led by UCL scientists.
Published in Nature Cell Biology, researchers say the discovery in-vitro (cells) and validated in mice was ‘unexpected’ and believe harnessing the mechanism could extend the life of the immune system, allowing people to live healthier and longer, and would also have clinical utility for diseases such as cancer and dementia.
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| Tags: ageing clock, antigen presenting cell, antigen-, APC, B cells, cancer, cells, chromosones, dementia, Dendritic cells, division, DNA sequence, extracellular vesicles, immune cell, immune system, macrophage, replication, T lymphocyte, T lymphocytes, T-cells, telomere, UCL, white blood
November 4, 2022
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Researchers have figured out how to deliver cancer-killing compounds (called enterotoxins) to tumors using bionic bacteria that are steered by a magnetic field. These “micro-robots” can hunt down and converge on a specific tumor, then shrink it by releasing the bacteria's own naturally produced anti-cancer chemicals. The results were recently published in the journal Science.
“Cancer is such a complex disease, it’s hard to combat it with one weapon,” says , a micro-roboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland and the first author of the new study.
She and her lab hope that these magnetic, bacteria-riding little robots will offer a precise and powerful addition to the cancer treatment toolbox.
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| Tags: aquatic bacteria, bacteria, bacterial cyborgs, bacterial proteins, bionic bacteria, chemotherapy, CRISPR, crystals, enterotoxins, ETH, genetically engineered bacteria, magnetic, magnetic field, magnetotactic bacteria, magnets, micro-robots, radiation, tumors
November 3, 2022
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A little over 15 years ago, scientists at Kyoto University in Japan made a remarkable discovery. When they added just four proteins to a skin cell and waited about two weeks, some of the cells underwent an unexpected and astounding transformation: they became young again. They turned into stem cells almost identical to the kind found in a days-old embryo, just beginning life’s journey.
At least in a petri dish, researchers using the procedure can take withered skin cells from a 101-year-old and rewind them so they act as if they’d never aged at all.
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| Tags: age reversal, aging, Altos Labs, cancer, cell, DNA, epigeniome, Kyoto University, proteins, Rejuvenation, rejuvenation programming
November 2, 2022
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Imagine a structure, 24 times longer than the Hoover Dam, stretching out into the sea. Its 9-kilometer wall curves towards the horizon before returning to rejoin the coast, creating a giant artificial lagoon. Under the water line, a channel fitted with 16 turbines connects the lagoon to the ocean. As the tide goes in and out, the lagoon fills and drains, spinning the turbines to generate more than 530 gigawatt-hours of clean electricity each year—enough to power 155,000 homes.
If this sounds like an engineering challenge too far, it’s not. The Swansea Bay tidal lagoon in South Wales might have taken as little as three years to start generating power if approved. Yet it was never built. The issue? Money. The UK government turned down the £1.3 billion ($1.46 billion) project in 2018 on the grounds that it was too expensive.
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| Tags: clean electricity, green energy, lagoon, LCOE, levelized cost of energy, maintenance, tidal power, turbiones, University of Plymouth
November 1, 2022
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Aging involves complicated plot twists and a large cast of characters: inflammation, stress, metabolism changes, and many others.
Now, a team of Salk Institute and UC San Diego scientists reveal another factor implicated in the aging process—a class of lipids called SGDGs (3-sulfogalactosyl diacylglycerols) that decline in the brain with age and may have anti-inflammatory effects.
The research, published in Nature Chemical Biology, helps unravel the molecular basis of brain aging, reveals new mechanisms underlying age-related neurological diseases, and offers future opportunities for therapeutic intervention.
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| Tags: 3-sulfogalactosyl diacylglycerols, aging, Anti-inflammatory, brain, fats, genes, lipidomics, lipids, metabolism, neurological diseases, proteins, Salk Institute, SGDGs, UC San Diego
October 31, 2022
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Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated the most effective treatment for pancreatic cancer ever recorded in mouse models. While most mouse trials consider simply halting growth a success, the new treatment completely eliminated tumors in 80 percent of mice across several model types, including those considered the most difficult to treat. 
The approach combines traditional chemotherapy drugs with a new method for irradiating the tumor. Rather than delivering radiation from an external beam that travels through healthy tissue, the treatment implants radioactive iodine-131 directly into the tumor within a gel-like depot that protects healthy tissue and is absorbed by the body after the radiation fades away.
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| Tags: beam, Cereius, chemotherapy, chemotherapy drugs, drug, Duke University, gel, irradiation, mutations, pancreatic cancer, radioactive iodine-131, titanium, tumors
October 28, 2022
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Scientists with the University of Chicago have discovered a way to create a material that can be made like a plastic, but conducts electricity more like a metal. The research, published Oct. 26 in Nature, shows how to make a kind of material in which the molecular fragments are jumbled and disordered, but can still conduct electricity extremely well.
This goes against all of the rules we know about for conductivity—to a scientist, it’s kind of seeing a car driving on water and still going 70 mph. But the finding could also be extraordinarily useful; if you want to invent something revolutionary, the process often first starts with discovering a completely new material.
“In principle, this opens up the design of a whole new class of materials that conduct electricity, are easy to shape, and are very robust in everyday conditions,” said John Anderson, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago and the senior author on the study. “Essentially, it suggests new possibilities for an extremely important technological group of materials,” said Jiaze Xie (PhD’22, now at Princeton), the first author on the paper.
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| Tags: aluminum, atoms, conductivity, conductors, copper, doping, gold, material, metal, moisture, plastic, Princeton, smartphone, solar panel, television, temperature, University of Chicago
October 27, 2022
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A topical gel that blocks the receptor for a metabolic byproduct called succinate treats gum disease by suppressing inflammation and changing the makeup of bacteria in the mouth, according to a new study led by researchers at NYU College of Dentistry and published in Cell Reports. The research, conducted in mice and using human cells and plaque samples, lays the groundwork for a non-invasive treatment for gum disease that people could apply to the gums at home to prevent or treat gum disease.
Gum disease (also known as periodontitis or periodontal disease) is one of the most prevalent inflammatory diseases, affecting nearly half of adults 30 and older. It is marked by three components: inflammation, an imbalance of unhealthy and healthy bacteria in the mouth, and destruction of the bones and structures that support the teeth. Uncontrolled gum disease can lead to painful and bleeding gums, difficulty chewing, and tooth loss.
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| Tags: bacteria, bone loss, dental plaque, gel, gum, human cells, inflammation, mouth, NYU College of Dentistry, NYU Dentistry, periodontitis, plaque, succinate
October 26, 2022
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We can add functional mouse hair follicles to body parts that scientists have successfully grown in the lab, outside the body. Using cells obtained from embryonic mice, for the first time researchers were able to produce hair follicle organoids – small, simple versions of an organ – that grew hair.
Moreover, they were able to influence the pigmentation of the hair; and, when the follicles were transplanted into living hairless mice, they continued to function across multiple hair growth cycles. This research, the team says, could help aid efforts to treat hair loss, as well as provide alternative models to animal testing and drug screening.
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| Tags: alopecia, baldness, cells, embryo, epidermis, hair, hair follicle organoids, hair follicles, hair loss, mesenchyme, morphogenesis, skin, stem cells, Yokohama National University
October 25, 2022
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Scientists have long wondered why cells lose their ability to repair themselves as they age. New research by scientists has uncovered two intriguing clues. DNA strands in human cells routinely break and repair themselves, Seluanov and Gorbunova from University of Rochester explained, but as cells age, the system for repair becomes less efficient and flaws in the process lead to a decline in the functionality of tissue and an increase in the incidence of tumors. Their team wanted to determine why this occurs, and establish whether the process could be slowed, or even reversed.
Seluanov and his colleagues found that the decline in a cell's ability to repair DNA during aging coincided with a global reduction in the levels of proteins involved in the repair process. Seluanov's group tried to reverse the age-related decline in DNA repair efficiency by restoring the proteins to their original levels and found only one protein, SIRT6, did the trick. Gorbunova said the results build on a paper by Haim Cohen, a staff scientist investigating aging at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and others published in the journal Nature this summer.
"That work showed that overexpressing the SIRT6 protein extended the lifespans of mice," said Gorbunova, "Our research looked at DNA repair and found a reason for the increased longevity, and that is SIRT6's role in promoting more efficient DNA repair."
The next step for Seluanov and his team is to study the factors that regulate SIRT6, in an effort to learn more about the early stages of the DNA repair process. Seluanov said that multiple groups are trying to develop drugs that activate SIRT6, and he hopes that this research will one day lead to therapies that help extend a person's lifespan and treat cancer.
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| Tags: aging, Bar-Ilan University, cells, DNA strands, protein, SIRT6, tissue, University of Rochester
October 24, 2022
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Brain tumors are among the most deadly and difficult-to-treat cancers. Glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive form, kills more than 10,000 Americans a year and has a median survival time of less than 15 months. For patients with brain tumors, treatment typically includes open-skull surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible followed by chemotherapy or radiation, which come with serious side effects and numerous hospital visits.
What if a patient’s brain tumor could be treated painlessly, without anesthesia, in the comfort of their home? Researchers at Stanford Medicine have developed, and tested in mice, a small wireless device that one day could do just that. The device is a remotely activated implant that can heat up nanoparticles injected into the tumor, gradually killing cancerous cells. In mice with brain tumors, 15 minutes of daily treatment over 15 days, as the animals went about their normal activities, was enough to significantly increase survival times. The researchers published their work in August in Nature Nanotechnology.
“The nanoparticles help us target the treatment to only the tumor, so the side effects will be relatively less compared with chemotherapy and radiation,” said Hamed Arami, PhD, co-lead author of the paper, a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Medicine who is now at Arizona State University.
Arami, trained as a bioengineer, came to focus on brain cancer as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of the late Sam Gambhir, MD, former chair of radiology at Stanford Medicine and a pioneer in molecular imaging and cancer diagnostics who died of cancer in 2020 . Five years prior, Gambhir’s teenage son, Milan, died of a glioblastoma.
Source: https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Arizona State University, brain tumors, cancerous cells, cancers, Glioblastoma, implant, nanoparticles, Stanford Medicine, wireless
October 21, 2022
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An international group of researchers from Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden have achieved dizzying data transmission speeds and are the first in the world to transmit more than 1 petabit per second (Pbit/s) using only a single laser and a single optical chip. 1 petabit corresponds to 1 million gigabits.
In the experiment, the researchers succeeded in transmitting 1.8 Pbit/s, which corresponds to twice the total global Internet traffic. And only carried by the light from one optical source. The light source is a custom-designed optical chip, which can use the light from a single infrared laser to create a rainbow spectrum of many colours, i.e. many frequencies. Thus, the one frequency (colour) of a single laser can be multiplied into hundreds of frequencies (colours) in a single chip.
All the colours are fixed at a specific frequency distance from each other – just like the teeth on a comb – which is why it is called a frequency comb. Each colour (or frequency) can then be isolated and used to imprint data. The frequencies can then be reassembled and sent over an optical fibre, thus transmitting data. Even a huge volume of data, as the researchers have discovered.
The experimental demonstration showed that a single chip could easily carry 1.8 Pbit/s, which—with contemporary state-of-the-art commercial equipment—would otherwise require more than 1,000 lasers. Victor Torres Company, professor at Chalmers University of Technology, is head of the research group that has developed and manufactured the chip.
“What is special about this chip is that it produces a frequency comb with ideal characteristics for fiber-optical communications – it has high optical power and covers a broad bandwidth within the spectral region that is interesting for advanced optical communications,” says Victor Torres Company.
Interestingly enough, the chip was not optimized for this particular application. “In fact, some of the characteristic parameters were achieved by coincidence and not by design,” adds Victor Torres Company. “However, with efforts in my team, we are now capable to reverse engineer the process and achieve with high reproducibility microcombs for target applications in telecommunications.”
In addition, the researchers created a computational model to examine theoretically the fundamental potential for data transmission with a single chip identical to the one used in the experiment. The calculations showed enormous potential for scaling up the solution.
Professor Leif Katsuo Oxenløwe, Head of the Centre of Excellence for Silicon Photonics for Optical Communications (SPOC) at DTU, explains:
“Our calculations show that—with the single chip made by Chalmers University of Technology, and a single laser—we will be able to transmit up to 100 Pbit/s. The reason for this is that our solution is scalable—both in terms of creating many frequencies and in terms of splitting the frequency comb into many spatial copies and then optically amplifying them, and using them as parallel sources with which we can transmit data. Although the comb copies must be amplified, we do not lose the qualities of the comb, which we utilize for spectrally efficient data transmission.”
Source: https://www.dtu.dk/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, colours, data, data transmission, DTU, frequencies, infrared laser, laser, optical chip, petabit, rainbow spectrum, SPOC, Technical University of Denmark
October 20, 2022
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Li-ion batteries (LIBs) are one of the most used batteries that support modern ITC society, including smartphones and EVs. LIBs are repeatedly charged and discharged by Li-ions passing back and forth between the positive and negative electrodes, with the Li-ion electrolyte acting as a passageway for the ions.
Normally, organic electrolytes such as liquid ethylene carbonate (EC) and their gels have been used as the Li-ion electrolyte due to their voltage resistance and ionic conductivity. However, as liquids and gels are flammable, a switch to safer polymeric solid electrolytes is preferable.
Polymeric solid electrolytes such as polyethylene glycol (PEG) have been proposed as impact-resistant Li-ion electrolytes. However, PEG-based polymer electrolytes crystallize near room temperature, resulting in a significant drop in Li-ion conductivity to around 10-6 S/cm at room temperature. To solve this problem, a research group has invented a new type of polymeric solid electrolyte by combining a porous polymer membrane with several micron pores and a photo-cross-linkable polyethylene glycol PEG-based polymer electrolyte.
This polymeric solid electrolyte not only shows high performance as an electrolyte but is also expected to be effective in deterring the formation of Li dendrites (dendritic crystals), which can cause ignition, due to the inclusion of a porous membrane. Through the realization of safe, high-performance LIBs, this achievement will contribute to the realization of a sustainable energy supply, which is the seventh goal of the SDGs.
Source: https://www.tohoku.ac.jp/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: electrodes, energy, ev, ionic conductivity, ions, Li-ion batteries, lib, liquid ethylene carbonate, polyethylene glycol, Polymeric solid electrolytes, smart-phone
October 19, 2022
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Two major pharmaceutical companies are testing a personalized vaccine that might prevent the recurrence of a specific type of skin cancer. Moderna, one of the companies behind the COVID-19 vaccine, and Merck, an enterprise focused largely on oncology and preventative medicines, are teaming up to see if they can reduce the public’s risk of re-developing the deadliest form of skin cancer: melanoma.
The vaccine essentially combines two medical technologies: the mRNA vaccine and Merck’s Keytruda. As with the COVID-19 vaccine, mRNA shots don’t require an actual virus. Instead, they use a disease’s genetic code to “teach” the immune system to recognize and fight that particular illness. This makes it relatively easy and inexpensive for scientists to develop mRNA vaccines and edit them if a new form of the disease emerges. Keytruda, meanwhile, is a prescription medication that helps prevent melanoma from coming back after known cancer cells have been surgically removed.
Moderna and Merck are testing the feasibility of not only creating a two-in-one drug with both technologies but also customizing individual vaccines to suit their respective patients. Each vaccine is engineered to activate the patient’s immune system, which in turn deploys T cells (a type of white blood cell known to fight cancer) that go after the specific mutations of a patient’s tumor. Keytruda assists this effort by barring certain cell proteins from getting in the way of T cells’ intervention.
The experimental drug is currently in its second clinical trial out of three. The trial involves 157 participants with high-risk melanoma who just successfully underwent surgical removal. Some of the participants were given the personalized vaccine, while others were given Keytruda alone. Moderna and Merck will observe whether the participants’ melanoma returns over the span of approximately one year, with primary data expected at the end of this year.
If a vaccine preventing the recurrence of melanoma does in fact become commercially available, it could prevent more than 7,000 deaths per year in the US alone.
Source: https://www.extremetech.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: cancer cells, genetic code, immune system, Keytruda, melanoma, Merck, Moderna, mRNA vaccine, oncology, personalized vaccine, proteins, skin cancer, T-cells, tumor, virus
October 18, 2022
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Textile engineers have developed a fabric woven out of ultra-fine nano-threads made in part of phase-change materials and other advanced substances that combine to produce a fabric that can respond to changing temperatures to heat up and cool down its wearer depending on need. The material that can store and release large amounts of heat when the material changes phase from liquid to solid. Combining the threads with electrothermal and photothermal coatings that enhance the effect, they have in essence developed a fabric that can both quickly cool the wearer down and warm them up as conditions change.
Such fabrics often make use of phase-change materials (PCMs) that can store and later release large amounts of heat when the material changes phase (or state of matter, for example, from solid to liquid). One such material is paraffin, which can in principle be incorporated into a textile material in different ways. When the temperature of the environment around the paraffin reaches its melting point, its physical state changes from solid to liquid, which involves an absorption of heat. Then heat is released when the temperature reaches paraffin’s freezing point.
“The problem here has been that the manufacturing methods for phase-change micro-capsules are complex and very costly,” said Hideaki Morikawa, corresponding author of the paper and an advanced textiles engineer with the Institute for Fiber Engineering at Shinshu University. “Worse still, this option offers insufficient flexibility for any realistically wearable application.”
So the researchers turned to an option called coaxial electrospinning. Electrospinning is a method of manufacturing extremely fine fibers with diameters on the order of nanometers. When a polymer solution contained in a bulk reservoir, typically a syringe tipped with a needle, is connected to a high-voltage power source, electric charge accumulates on the surface of the liquid.
A paper describing the manufacturing technique appeared in the American Chemical Society journal ACSNano.
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: coaxial electrospinning, cold, fabric, fiber, hot, nano-threads, paraffin, PCM, phase-change materials, Shinshu University, temperature, textile
October 17, 2022
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Vaccines that target cancer could be available before the end of the decade, according to the husband and wife team behind one of the most successful Covid vaccines of the pandemic. Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, who co-founded BioNTech, the German firm that partnered with Pfizer to manufacture a revolutionary mRNA Covid vaccine, said they had made breakthroughs that fuelled their optimism for cancer vaccines in the coming years. Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Prof Türeci described how the mRNA technology at the heart of BioNTech’s Covid vaccine could be repurposed so that it primed the immune system to attack cancer cells instead of invading coronaviruses.
Asked when cancer vaccines based on mRNA might be ready to use in patients, Prof Sahin said they could be available “before 2030”.
An mRNA Covid vaccine works by ferrying the genetic instructions for harmless spike proteins on the Covid virus into the body. The instructions are taken up by cells which churn out the spike protein. These proteins, or antigens, are then used as “wanted posters” – telling the immune system’s antibodies and other defences what to search for and attack. The same approach can be taken to prime the immune system to seek out and destroy cancer cells, said Türeci, BioNTech’s chief medical officer. Rather than carrying code that identifies viruses, the vaccine contains genetic instructions for cancer antigens – proteins that stud the surfaces of tumour cells.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: antigens, BionTech, cancer, cells, mRNA Covid vaccine, Pfizer, spike proteins, vaccine
October 14, 2022
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Human neurons transplanted into a rat’s brain continue to grow, forming connections with the animals’ own brain cells and helping guide their behavior, new research has shown. In a study published in the journal Nature today, lab-grown clumps of human brain cells were transplanted into the brains of newborn rats. They grew and integrated with the rodents’ own neural circuits, eventually making up around one-sixth of their brains. These animals could be used to learn more about human neuropsychiatric disorders, say the researchers behind the work.
“It’s an important step forward in progress into [understanding and treating] brain diseases,” says Julian Savulescu, a bioethicist at the National University of Singapore, who was not involved in the study. But the development also raises ethical questions, he says, particularly surrounding what it means to “humanize” animals.
Sergiu Pașca at the University of Stanford has been working for more than a decade with neural organoids—small clumps of neurons, grown in a dish, that resemble specific brain regions. These organoids are often created from human skin cells, which are first made into stem cells. The stem cells can then be encouraged to form neurons in the lab, under the right conditions. The resulting organoids can be used to study how brain cells fire and communicate—and how they malfunction in some disorders.
But there’s only so much a clump of cells in the lab can tell you. When it comes down to it, these cells don’t really replicate what is happening in our brains—which is why Pașca and many others in the field avoid the commonly used term “mini-brains”. The organoid cells can’t form the same complex connections. They don’t fire in the same way, either. And they aren’t as big as the cells in our brains. “Even when we kept human neurons for hundreds of days … we noticed that human neurons don’t grow to the size to which a human neuron in a human brain would grow,” says Pașca.
It is also impossible to tell how changes to neurons in the lab might lead to symptoms of a neuropsychiatric disorder. If cells in a dish show a change in their shape, the way they fire, or the proteins they make, what does that mean for a person’s memory or behavior, for example? To get around these issues, Pașca and his colleagues transplanted organoids into the brains of living rats—specifically, newborn rats. The brains of very young animals undergo extensive growth and rewiring as they develop. Neurons transplanted at such an early stage should have the best chance of being integrated with the rats’ own brain circuits, Pașca reasoned.
The team used organoids made from skin cells. These cells were made into stem cells in the lab before being encouraged to form layers of cells that resemble those in the human cortex, the folded outer part of the brain that contains regions responsible for thought, vision, hearing, memory, and sensing the environment, among other things. This process took around two months in the lab. The resulting three-dimensional organoids were then injected into the brains of days-old rats through an incision in the skull. The organoids were transplanted into the sensory cortex, a region that plays a role in helping animals sense their environment.
Within four months, brain scans showed that the organoids had grown to around nine times their original volume—and made up around a third of one brain hemisphere. The cells appeared to have formed connections with rat brain cells and been incorporated into brain circuits.
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: brain cells, National University of Singapore, neural organoids, neurons, neuropsychiatric disorders, proteins, skin cell, stem cells, University of Stanford
October 13, 2022
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Scientists from NTU Singapore, led by Professor Yang Yaowen, Associate Chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, have developed a low-cost device that can harness energy from wind as gentle as a light breeze and store it as electricity. When exposed to winds with a velocity as low as two metres per second (m/s), the device can produce a voltage of three volts and generate electricity power of up to 290 microwatts, which is sufficient to power a commercial sensor device and for it to also send the data to a mobile phone or a computer.
The light and durable device, called a wind harvester, also diverts any electricity that is not in use to a battery, where it can be stored to power devices in the absence of wind. The scientists say their invention has the potential to replace batteries in powering light emitting diode (LED) lights and structural health monitoring sensors. Those are used on urban structures, such as bridges and skyscrapers, to monitor their structural health, alerting engineers to issues such as instabilities or physical damage.
Measuring only 15 centimetres by 20 centimetres, the device can easily be mounted on the sides of buildings, and would be ideal for urban environments, such as Singaporean suburbs, where average wind speeds are less than 2.5 m/s, outside of thunderstorms.
Source: https://www.ntu.edu.sg/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: battery, breeze, electricity, energy, LED, light emitting diode, NTU Singapore, velocity, wind, wind harvester
October 12, 2022
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Two weeks ago, the asteroid Dimorphos was minding its own business, quietly orbiting around its partner Didymos, when suddenly NASA’s DART spacecraft plowed into it at 14,000 miles per hour.
The space agency and its partners planned that collision to see whether such an impact could alter an asteroid or comet’s trajectory—should humanity ever need to defend the planet from an oncoming space rock. Before the crash on September 26, Dimorphos circled its neighbor like clockwork: one lap every 11 hours and 55 minutes. If the DART test was successful, the proof would be a change in that orbital period, showing that the refrigerator-sized spacecraft had nudged the asteroid onto a different path. Now the DART team has an answer: It worked—even better than expected.
“For the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary body,” said Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters in Washington, at a press conference today revealing the result.
The team would have considered a 10-minute difference a success, said NASA chief Bill Nelson. But DART actually shortened the asteroid’s orbit by a whopping 32 minutes. Dimorphos now takes only about 11 hours and 23 minutes to circle its partner, he said—a significant change, meaning that it is indeed possible to deflect a small asteroid’s path.
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: asteroid, collision, DART, Didymos, Dimorphos, impact, NASA, orbit, Planetary Science Division, space rock
October 11, 2022
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Voices offer lots of information. Turns out, they can even help diagnose an illness — and researchers are working on an app for that. The National Institutes of Health is funding a massive research project to collect voice data and develop an AI that could diagnose people based on their speech. Everything from your vocal cord vibrations to breathing patterns when you speak offers potential information about your health, says laryngologist Dr. Yael Bensoussan, the director of the University of South Florida’s Health Voice Center and a leader on the study.
“We asked experts: Well, if you close your eyes when a patient comes in, just by listening to their voice, can you have an idea of the diagnosis they have?” Bensoussan says. “And that’s where we got all our information.”
Someone who speaks low and slowly might have Parkinson’s disease. Slurring is a sign of a stroke. Scientists could even diagnose depression or cancer. The team will start by collecting the voices of people with conditions in five areas: neurological disorders, voice disorders, mood disorders, respiratory disorders and pediatric disorders like autism and speech delays. The project is part of the NIH‘s Bridge to AI program, which launched over a year ago with more than $100 million in funding from the federal government, with the goal of creating large-scale health care databases for precision medicine.
“We were really lacking large what we call open source databases,” Bensoussan says. “Every institution kind of has their own database of data. But to create these networks and these infrastructures was really important to then allow researchers from other generations to use this data.” This isn’t the first time researchers have used AI to study human voices, but it’s the first time data will be collected on this level — the project is a collaboration between USF, Cornell and 10 other institutions. “We saw that everybody was kind of doing very similar work but always at a smaller level,” Bensoussan says. “We needed to do something as a team and build a network.”
The ultimate goal is an app that could help bridge access to rural or underserved communities, by helping general practitioners refer patients to specialists. Long term, iPhones or Alexa could detect changes in your voice, such as a cough, and advise you to seek medical attention.
Source: https://www.npr.org/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Atificial Intelligence, autism, breathing, cancer, Cornell, depression, illness, mood disorders, neurological disorders, Parkinson's, pediatric disorders, precision medicine, respiratory disorders, slurring, sound, speech, speech delays, stroke, University of South Florida, USF, vocal cord vibrations, voice, voice disorders
October 10, 2022
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According to the Cleveland Clinic, up until some 10,000 years ago, it’s believed everyone in the world had brown eyes. Now, an estimated 8-10% of people in the world have blue eyes. How did that come to be? As it turns out, researchers now believe blue eyes all started with a single person who passed on a genetic mutation that spread across the world. In other words, everyone with blue eyes shares a single, common ancestor.
Back in 2008, researchers with the University of Copenhagen examined the exact genetic mutation that resulted in blue eyes all those years ago. Their research was published in the The Journal of Human Genetics. According to Science Daily, the study’s lead author, Professor Hans Eiberg, explained that humans originally had brown eyes, and a gene mutation “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes – resulting in some people having blue eyes. The press release elaborated that the affected gene, the OCA2 gene, regulates brown pigment in the eyes. If the OCA2 gene had been completely destroyed or “turned off” then the affected humans would be without any melanin in their hair, eyes, or skin color (a condition known as albinism). But with the specific mutation, the body has a limited ability to produce melanin in the iris, resulting in a blue iris, rather than a brown iris. The genetic mutation isn’t a positive or negative trait.
“Mutations can affect things like freckles, balding patterns, hair color, and more“. “It simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so,” explained Eiberg.
According to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, researchers studied the mitochondrial DNA of individuals with blue eyes from various countries, such as Jordan, Denmark, and Turkey. The researchers found that over 97% of the blue-eyed people in the study shared a single haplotype – a grouping of genomic variants that are usually inherited. Because of this, researchers believe that the mutation is passed on genetically, meaning that everyone with blue eyes is related.
“From this, we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor. They inherited the same switch at the same spot in their DNA,” said Eidberg in a press release, shared in EurekaAlerta!,
Source: https://blog.thebreastcancersite.greatergood.com
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: albinism, blue eyes, brown eyes, Cleveland Clinic, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, gene mutation, genetic mutation, genomic variants, hair, haplotype, iris, melanin, mitochondrial DNA, OCA2 gene, pigment, skin color, University of Copenhagen
October 7, 2022
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New research from the University of Cincinnati (UC) bolsters a hypothesis that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a decline in levels of a specific protein, contrary to a prevailing theory that has been recently called into question.
The prevailing narrative in the field has stated Alzheimer’s is caused by amyloid plaques in the brain, but Alberto Espay, MD, Andrea Sturchio, MD, and their colleagues hypothesized that plaques are simply a consequence of the levels of soluble amyloid-beta in the brain decreasing. These levels decrease because the normal protein, under situations of biological, metabolic or infectious stress, transform into the abnormal amyloid plaques.
In the current study, the team analyzed the levels of amyloid-beta in a subset of patients with mutations that predict an overexpression of amyloid plaques in the brain, which is thought to make them more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
“What we found was that individuals already accumulating plaques in their brains who are able to generate high levels of soluble amyloid-beta have a lower risk of evolving into dementia over a three-year span,” said Espay, professor of neurology in the UC College of Medicine.
Source: https://www.uc.edu/
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https://www.eurasiareview.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Alzheimer's, amyloid plaques, brain, dementia, mutations, overexpression, protein, University of Cincinnati
October 6, 2022
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For generations, scientists argued over whether there was truly an objective, predictable reality for even quantum particles, or whether quantum “weirdness” was inherent to physical systems. In the 1960s, John Stewart Bell developed an inequality describing the maximum possible statistical correlation between two entangled particles: Bell’s inequality. But certain experiments could violate Bell’s inequality, and these three pioneers — John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger — helped make quantum information systems a bona fide science.
There’s a simple but profound question that physicists, despite all we’ve learned about the Universe, cannot fundamentally answer: “What is real?” We know that particles exist, and we know that particles have certain properties when you measure them. But we also know that the very act of measuring a quantum state — or even allowing two quanta to interact with one another — can fundamentally alter or determine what you measure. An objective reality, devoid of the actions of an observer, does not appear to exist in any sort of fundamental way.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t rules that nature must obey. Those rules exist, even if they’re difficult and counterintuitive to understand. Instead of arguing over one philosophical approach versus another to uncover the true quantum nature of reality, we can turn to properly-designed experiments. Even two entangled quantum states must obey certain rules, and that’s leading to the development of quantum information sciences: an emerging field with potentially revolutionary applications. 2022’s Nobel Prize in Physics was just announced, and it’s awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger for the pioneering development of quantum information systems, entangled photons, and the violation of Bell’s inequalities. It’s a Nobel Prize that’s long overdue, and the science behind it is particularly mind-bending.
There are all sorts of experiments we can perform that illustrate the indeterminate nature of our quantum reality.
Place a number of radioactive atoms in a container and wait a specific amount of time. You can predict, on average, how many atoms will remain versus how many will have decayed, but you have no way of predicting which atoms will and won’t survive. We can only derive statistical probabilities.
Fire a series of particles through a narrowly spaced double slit and you’ll be able to predict what sort of interference pattern will arise on the screen behind it. However, for each individual particle, even when sent through the slits one at a time, you cannot predict where it will land.
Pass a series of particles (that possess quantum spin) through a magnetic field and half will deflect “up” while half deflect “down” along the direction of the field. If you don’t pass them through another, perpendicular magnet, they’ll maintain their spin orientation in that direction; if you do, however, their spin orientation will once again become randomized.
Certain aspects of quantum physics appear to be totally random. But are they really random, or do they only appear random because our information about these systems are limited, insufficient to reveal an underlying, deterministic reality? Ever since the dawn of quantum mechanics, physicists have argued over this, from Einstein to Bohr and beyond.
Source: https://bigthink.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: atoms, Bell’s inequalities, Bohr, Einstein, entangled photons, Nobel Prize, particles, predictable reality, quanta, Quantum Entanglement, quantum mechanics, Quantum Physics, quantum states, random
October 5, 2022
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A simple eye test that predicts death from cardiovascular disease has been developed by British scientists. It combines artificial intelligence (AI) with scans of the retina – a membrane at the back of peepers that contains light sensitive cells. The technique could lead to a screening programme – enabling drugs and lifestyle changes to be prescribed decades before symptoms emerge. Lead author Professor Alicja Regina Rudnicka, of St George’s University of London, said the test is inexpensive, accessible and non-invasive. People at risk of stroke, heart attack and other circulatory conditions could undergo RV (artificial intelligence enabled retinal vasculometry) during routine visits to the optician.
Prof Rudnicka said: “It has the potential for reaching a higher proportion of the population in the community because of ‘high street’ availability. “RV offers an alternative predictive biomarker to traditional risk-scores for vascular health – without the need for blood sampling or blood pressure measurement. “It is highly likely to help prolong disease-free status in an ever-aging population with increasing comorbidities, and assist with minimising healthcare costs associated with lifelong vascular diseases.”
An algorithm called QUARTZ was developed based on retinal images from tens of thousands of Britons aged 40 to 69. It focused on the width, area and curvature, or tortuosity, of tiny blood vessels called arterioles and venules. The performance of QUARTZ was compared with the widely used Framingham Risk Scores framework – both separately and jointly.
The health of all the participants was tracked for an average of seven to nine years, during which time there were 327 and 201 circulatory disease deaths among 64,144 UK Biobank and 5,862 EPIC-Norfolk participants respectively. In men, arteriolar and venular width, tortuosity, and width variation emerged as important predictors of death from circulatory disease. In women, arteriolar and venular area and width and venular tortuosity and width variation contributed to risk prediction.
The predictive impact of retinal vasculature on circulatory disease death interacted with smoking, drugs to treat high blood pressure, and previous heart attacks. Overall, these predictive models, based on age, smoking, medical history and retinal vasculature, captured between half and two-thirds of circulatory disease deaths in those most at risk.
Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: : Blood vessels, AI, algorithm, arterioles, Artificial Intelligence, Biobank, blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, death, drugs, eye test, Framingham Risk Scores, heart attack, light-sensitive cells, QUARTZ, retina, retinal vasculature, retinal vasculometry, RV, smoking, St George's University of London, stroke, venules
October 4, 2022
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Northwestern University researchers have developed a new injectable therapy that harnesses “dancing molecules” to reverse paralysis and repair tissue after severe spinal cord injuries. In a new study, researchers administered a single injection to tissues surrounding the spinal cords of paralyzed mice. Just four weeks later, the animals regained the ability to walk.
By sending bioactive signals to trigger cells to repair and regenerate, the breakthrough therapy dramatically improved severely injured spinal cords in five key ways: The severed extensions of neurons, called axons, regenerated. Scar tissue, which can create a physical barrier to regeneration and repair, significantly diminished. Myelin, the insulating layer of axons that is important in transmitting electrical signals efficiently, reformed around cells. Functional blood vessels formed to deliver nutrients to cells at the injury site. More motor neurons survived.
After the therapy performs its function, the materials biodegrade into nutrients for the cells within 12 weeks and then completely disappear from the body without noticeable side effects. This is the first study in which researchers controlled the collective motion of molecules through changes in chemical structure to increase a therapeutic’s efficacy.
“Our research aims to find a therapy that can prevent individuals from becoming paralyzed after major trauma or disease,” said Northwestern’s Samuel I. Stupp, who led the study. “For decades, this has remained a major challenge for scientists because our body’s central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord, does not have any significant capacity to repair itself after injury or after the onset of a degenerative disease. We are going straight to the FDA to start the process of getting this new therapy approved for use in human patients, who currently have very few treatment options.”
Stupp is Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern, where he is founding director of the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology (SQI) and its affiliated research center, the Center for Regenerative Nanomedicine.
Source: https://news.northwestern.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: : Blood vessels, axons, bioactive signals, cells, Center for Regenerative Nanomedicine, dancing molecules, electrical signals, motor neurons, myelin, neurons, Northwestern, Northwestern University, paralysis, paralyzed mice, regeneration, scar tissue, Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology, spinal cord, SQI, tissues
October 3, 2022
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Rice University engineers say they’ve solved a long-standing conundrum in making stable, efficient solar panels out of halide perovskites. It took finding the right solvent design to apply a 2D top layer of desired composition and thickness without destroying the 3D bottom one (or vice versa). Such a cell would turn more sunlight into electricity than either layer on its own, with better stability. Chemical and biomolecular engineer Aditya Mohite and his lab at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering reported in Science their success at building thin 3D/2D solar cells that deliver a power conversion efficiency of 24.5%. That’s as efficient as most commercially available solar cells, Mohite said.
A discovery by Rice University engineers brings efficient, stable bilayer perovskite solar cells closer to commercialization. The cells are about a micron thick, with 2D and 3D layers
“This is really good for flexible, bifacial cells where light comes in from both sides and also for back-contacted cells,” the scientist said. “The 2D perovskites absorb blue and visible photons, and the 3D side absorbs near-infrared.”
Perovskites are crystals with cubelike lattices known to be efficient light harvesters, but the materials tend to be stressed by light, humidity and heat. Mohite and many others have worked for years to make perovskite solar cells practical. The new advance, he said, largely removes the last major roadblock to commercial production.
Source: https://news.rice.edu/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: 3D/2D solar cells, electricity, perovskite, Rice University, solar cells, solvent, sunlight
September 30, 2022
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A decade ago, biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a landmark paper describing a natural immune system found in bacteria and its potential as a tool for editing the genes of living organisms. A year later, in 2013, Feng Zhang and his colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard reported that they’d harnessed that system, known as Crispr, to edit human and animal cells in the lab. The work by both teams led to an explosion of interest in using Crispr to treat genetic diseases, as well as a 2020 Nobel Prize for Doudna and Charpentier.
Many diseases arise from gene mutations, so if Crispr could just snip out or replace an abnormal gene, it could in theory correct the disease. But one of the challenges of turning test tube Crispr discoveries into cures for patients has been figuring out how to get the gene-editing components to the place in the body that needs treatment.
One biotech company, Crispr Therapeutics, has gotten around that issue by editing patients’ cells outside the body. Scientists there have used the tool to treat dozens of people with sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia—two common blood disorders. In those trials, investigators extract patients’ red blood cells, edit them to correct a disease-causing mutation, then infuse them back into the body.
But this “ex vivo” approach has downsides. It’s complex to administer, expensive, and has limited uses. Most diseases occur in cells and tissues that can’t be easily taken out of the body, treated, and put back in. So the next wave of Crispr research is focused on editing “in vivo”—that is, directly inside a patient’s body. Last year, Intellia Therapeutics was the first to demonstrate that this was possible for a disease called transthyretin amyloidosis. And last week, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech company showed in-the-body editing in a second disease.
Source: https://www.intelliatx.com/
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https://www.wired.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: beta thalassemia, blood, cells, CRISPR, CRISPR Therapeutics, Emmanuelle Charpentier, gene mutations, Gene-editing, genetic diseases, Harvard, immune system, Intellia Therapeutics, Jennifer Douda, MIT, mutation, sickle cell anemia, tissues, transthyretin amyloidosis
September 29, 2022
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Alice, the commuter aircraft designed by the start-up Eviation, has soared to 3,500 feet in successful test in US. The plane was built to carry nine passengers and two pilots and took off from Moses Lake, Washington, at 7:10 a.m. Tuesday. The plane reached an altitude of 3,500 feet (1,066 meters) and landed eight minutes later. The company’s goal is to show such electric planes are viable as commuter aircraft for regional travel, flying at an altitude of about 15,000 feet (4,572 meters).
The plane, designed by engineers in Israel and Washington state, is powered by 21,500 small Tesla-style battery cells that weigh over 4 tons. Eviation founder Omer Bar-Yohav hailed the plane as a “new age of aviation” in an interview with The Times of Israel last year.
https://www.timesofisrael.com
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Previous post with detailed tech informations
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: Alice, aviation, battery cells, commuter aircraft, electric airplane, Eviation
September 28, 2022
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A new Alzheimer’s drug from Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai and US drugmaker Biogen has shown promising results in a large-scale clinical trial. The companies announced the trial’s success in a press release, saying their drug — called lecanemab — was observed to have slowed cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients by 27% over 18 months.
The companies said 1,795 patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s were randomly selected to receive a placebo treatment or doses of lecanemab every two weeks. Their cognitive decline was then measured on six fronts, including “memory, orientation, judgment and problem solving, community affairs, home and hobbies, and personal care.” According to the statement, lecanemab significantly “reduced clinical decline” over the 18-month timeframe.
Lecanemab, per Eisai, is a monoclonal antibody treatment, which targets toxic amyloid plaques — protein clumps that researchers proposed were the cause of the neurodegeneration seen in Alzheimer’s.
The companies noted that around 21% of the patients who received the lecanemab treatment experienced brain swelling that was visible on PET scans.
“Today’s announcement gives patients and their families hope that lecanemab, if approved, can potentially slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, and provide a clinically meaningful impact on cognition and function,” said Michel Vounatsos, Biogen‘s chief executive officer in the companies’ joint press release.
Eisai’s chief executive Haruo Naito said in the company’s press release that the lecanemab study’s success was “an important milestone for Eisai in fulfilling our mission to meet the expectations of the Alzheimer’s disease community.”
Source: https://investors.biogen.com/
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https://www.businessinsider.com/
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| Tags: Alzheimer's, Biogen, Eisai, lecanemab, monoclonal antibody
September 27, 2022
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Tiny robots made of algae are swimming through the lung fluids of mice, delivering antibiotics straight to the bacteria that cause a deadly form of pneumonia. It’s happening now in UC San Diego ( UCSD) labs and it shows the tremendous potential of microrobotics. Nanoparticles, loaded with medicine, are attached to the microrobots and introduced into the lungs.
Microscopic and colorized view of an algae robot covered with drug-carrying particles
“They can actively swim in the body fluid, dip into the thick part of the tissue and carry a lot of these therapeutic payloads to the disease site, and then very effectively kill the bacteria,” said professor of nanoengineering Liangfang Zhang, one of the lead researchers.
Zhang said the results of the experiment were dramatic. The mice treated with drugs in a conventional way died within days.
“But when we loaded the drugs into our formulation — the nanoparticle and the algae system — we found that all the animals survived,” he said. “We achieved a remarkable 100% survival rate from the study.”
Anyone who has swallowed an aspirin knows one very conventional way of delivering drugs. The medication is ingested and is carried throughout the body. “You take the pill and it’s all passive. The drug goes slowly by diffusion,” explained Joseph Wang, a distinguished professor of nanoengineering at UC San Diego. “By having dynamic active delivery, we are accelerating targeted delivery to the right location.”
Wang’s lab at UCSD shows many examples of microrobots, designed to navigate the body’s channels and cavities. The algae robot is organic, and swims with its flagella. Another robot, made from zinc, reacts with gastric fluid and generates hydrogen gas, which propels it like a true rocket.
Wang points out the algae robot is not attracted to the bacteria, but they move so effectively through the fluids of the lung that it greatly improves the dispersion of the drug. Wang has actually loaded robots into pills, including aspirin. “This we showed with pigs, actually, and showed that when you have the active delivery there is much better uptake by the blood,” Wang said.
The purpose of the research, of course, is not to treat pigs or mice, but humans. Zhang said the study of algae robots in the lungs is very innovative and experimental, and human trials are still a ways away.
“We demonstrated the feasibility of the technology and what I foresee is, we need to study more to demonstrate the efficacy in large animal species,” he added, “before we can translate it to a human study.”
Source: https://www.kpbs.org/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: algae robot, aspirin, bacteria, lung fluids, lungs, microrobotics, microrobots, nanoparticles, UC San Diego, UCSD, zinc
September 26, 2022
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As the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications, and other options such as pumped hydro require specific topography that’s not always available. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials, that could help to fill that gap. The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
“I wanted to invent something that was better, much better, than lithium-ion batteries for small-scale stationary storage, and ultimately for automotive [uses],” explains Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry. In addition to being expensive, lithium-ion batteries contain a flammable electrolyte, making them less than ideal for transportation. So, Sadoway started studying the periodic table, looking for cheap, Earth-abundant metals that might be able to substitute for lithium. The commercially dominant metal, iron, doesn’t have the right electrochemical properties for an efficient battery, he says. But the second-most-abundant metal in the marketplace — and actually the most abundant metal on Earth — is aluminum. “So, I said, well, let’s just make that a bookend. It’s gonna be aluminum,” he says.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/
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| Tags: Air, aluminum, backup, batteries, electrode materials, energy, iron, MIT, molten salt electrolyte, periodic table, RENEWABLE, solar panel, sulfur, sun, wind power
September 23, 2022
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A new type of cancer therapy that uses a common virus to infect and destroy harmful cells is showing big promise in early human trials, say UK scientists. One patient’s cancer vanished, while others saw their tumours shrink. The drug is a weakened form of the cold sore virus – herpes simplex – that has been modified to kill tumours. Larger and longer studies will be needed, but experts say the injection might ultimately offer a lifeline to more people with advanced cancers.
Krzysztof Wojkowski, a 39-year-old builder from west London, is one of the patients who took part in the ongoing phase one safety trial, run by the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. He was diagnosed in 2017 with cancer of the salivary glands, near the mouth. Despite surgery and other treatments at the time, his cancer continued to grow.
“I was told there was no options left for me and I was receiving end-of-life care. It was devastating, so it was incredible to be given the chance to join the trial.” A short course of the virus therapy – which is a specially modified version of the herpes virus which normally causes cold sores – appears to have cleared his cancer. “I had injections every two weeks for five weeks which completely eradicated my cancer. I’ve been cancer-free for two years now.”
The injections, given directly into the tumour, attacks cancer in two ways – by invading the cancerous cells and making them burst, and by activating the immune system. About 40 patients have tried the treatment as part of the trial. Some were given the virus injection, called RP2, on its own. Others also received another cancer drug – called nivolumab – as well.
The findings, presented at a medical conference in Paris, France, show that three out of nine patients given RP2 only, which included Krzysztof, saw their tumours shrink.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: cancer, cells, cold sore virus, herpes simplex, Institute of Cancer Research, RP2, virus
September 22, 2022
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Scientists in Russia have perfected hydroxyapatite, a material for mineralizing bones and teeth. By adding a complex of amino acids to hydroxyapatite, they were able to form a dental coating that replicates the composition and microstructure of natural enamel. Improved composition of the material repeats the features of the surface of the tooth at the molecular and structural level, and in terms of strength surpasses the natural tissue. The new method of dental restoration can be used to reduce the sensitivity of teeth in case of abrasion of enamel or to restore it after erosion or improper diet.
Hydroxyapatite is a compound that is a major component of human bones and teeth. Scientists selected a complex of polyfunctional organic and polar amino acids, including, for example, lysine, arginine, and histidine, which are important for the formation and repair of bone and muscle structures. The chosen amino acids made it possible to obtain hydroxyapatite, which is morphologically completely similar to apatite (the main component of tissues) of dental enamel. The researchers also described the conditions of the environment in which the processes of binding of hydroxyapatite to the dental tissue should occur. Only if these conditions are met it is possible to fully reproduce the structure of natural enamel.
“Traditionally in dentistry, composite restorative materials are used in enamel restoration. To increase the bonding efficiency of enamel and composite, the restoration technique involves acid etching of the enamel beforehand. The etching products left behind may not always have a positive effect on the bonding of enamel and synthetic materials. To reproduce the enamel layers with biomimetic techniques, we neutralized the media and removed the etching products using calcium alkali. In this way we improved the binding of the new hydroxyapatite layers,” explains Pavel Seredin.
The formation of a mineralized layer with properties resembling those of natural hard tissue was confirmed by field emission electron and atomic force microscopy as well as by chemical imaging of surface areas using Raman microspectroscopy. The study was conducted on healthy teeth to eliminate the influence of extraneous factors on the resulting layer and to be able to compare the results with healthy teeth. Next, the researchers will tackle the challenge of repairing larger defects, which can be of varying nature from the initial stages of caries to cracks and volumetric fractures.
The joint research was conducted by scientists from the Research and Education Center “Nanomaterials and Nanotechnologies” of Ural Federal University, Voronezh State University, Voronezh State Medical University, Al-Azhar University, and the National Research Center (Egypt).
The study and experimental results are published in Results in Engineering.
Source: https://urfu.ru/
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| Tags: Al-Azhar University, amino acids, apatite, arginine, atomic force microscopy, bones, dental coating, dental restoration, field emission electron, histidine, hydroxyapatite, lysine, natural enamel, Raman microspectroscopy, sensitivity, strength, teeth, tissue, tooth, Ural Federal University, Voronezh State University
September 21, 2022
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As the world gets warmer, the use of power-hungry air conditioning systems is projected to increase significantly, putting a strain on existing power grids and bypassing many locations with little or no reliable electric power. Now, an innovative system developed at MIT offers a way to use passive cooling to preserve food crops and supplement conventional air conditioners in buildings, with no need for power and only a small need for water. The system, which combines radiative cooling, evaporative cooling, and thermal insulation in a slim package that could resemble existing solar panels, can provide up to about 19 degrees Fahrenheit (9.3 degrees Celsius) of cooling from the ambient temperature, enough to permit safe food storage for about 40 percent longer under very humid conditions. It could triple the safe storage time under dryer conditions.
The findings are reported today in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, in a paper by MIT postdoc Zhengmao Lu, Arny Leroy PhD ’21, professors Jeffrey Grossman and Evelyn Wang, and two others. While more research is needed in order to bring down the cost of one key component of the system, the researchers say that eventually such a system could play a significant role in meeting the cooling needs of many parts of the world where a lack of electricity or water limits the use of conventional cooling systems.The system cleverly combines previous standalone cooling designs that each provide limited amounts of cooling power, in order to produce significantly more cooling overall — enough to help reduce food losses from spoilage in parts of the world that are already suffering from limited food supplies.
“This technology combines some of the good features of previous technologies such as evaporative cooling and radiative cooling,” Lu says. By using this combination, he explains, “we show that you can achieve significant food life extension, even in areas where you have high humidity,” which limits the capabilities of conventional evaporative or radiative cooling systems.
In places that do have existing air conditioning systems in buildings, the new system could be used to significantly reduce the load on these systems by sending cool water to the hottest part of the system, the condenser. “By lowering the condenser temperature, you can effectively increase the air conditioner efficiency, so that way you can potentially save energy,” Lu says. Other groups have also been pursuing passive cooling technologies, he adds, but “by combining those features in a synergistic way, we are now able to achieve high cooling performance, even in high-humidity areas where previous technology generally cannot perform well.”
The system consists of three layers of material, which together provide cooling as water and heat pass through the device. The only maintenance required is adding water for the evaporation, but the consumption is so low that this need only be done about once every four days in the hottest, driest areas, and only once a month in wetter areas.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/
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| Tags: air conditioner, condenser, electricity, evaporative cooling, food crops, MIT, passive cooling, power, radiative cooling, thermal insulation, water
September 20, 2022
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Russia has issued a veiled threat to “retaliate” against SpaceX’s satellite internet system Starlink for aiding the Ukrainian military.
A Russian representative named Konstantin Vorontsov issued the warning last week at a United Nations working group meeting on reducing space threats.
Vorontsov—who was reportedly a former acting Deputy Director of Russia’s Foreign Ministry Department—didn’t name SpaceX or Starlink by name. But he noted: “We would like to underline an extremely dangerous trend that goes beyond the harmless use of outer space technologies and has become apparent during the events in Ukraine. Namely, the use by the United States and its allies of the elements of civilian, including commercial, infrastructure in outer space for military purposes,” according to the unofficial translation of his statement.
Vorontsov then issued his veiled threat by saying: “It seems like our colleagues do not realize that such actions in fact constitute indirect involvement in military conflicts. Quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.”
https://www.pcmag.com/
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| Tags: Elon Musk, military conflict, outer space, Russia, SpaceX, Ukraine, United Nations, war
September 19, 2022
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A team of researchers led by Meenesh Singh at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) has discovered a way to convert 100% of carbon dioxide captured from industrial exhaust into ethylene, a key building block for plastic products. While researchers have been exploring the possibility of converting carbon dioxide to ethylene for more than a decade, the UIC team’s approach is the first to achieve nearly 100% utilization of carbon dioxide to produce hydrocarbons. Their system uses electrolysis to transform captured carbon dioxide gas into high purity ethylene, with other carbon-based fuels and oxygen as byproducts.
The process can convert up to 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide into 1 metric ton of ethylene, recycling almost all carbon dioxide captured. Because the system runs on electricity, the use of renewable energy can make the process carbon negative. According to Singh, his team’s approach surpasses the net-zero carbon goal of other carbon capture and conversion technologies by actually reducing the total carbon dioxide output from industry.
“It’s a net negative,” he said. “For every 1 ton of ethylene produced, you’re taking 6 tons of CO2 from point sources that otherwise would be released to the atmosphere.”
Previous attempts at converting carbon dioxide into ethylene have relied on reactors that produce ethylene within the source carbon dioxide emission stream. In these cases, as little as 10% of CO2 emissions typically converts to ethylene. The ethylene must later be separated from the carbon dioxide in an energy-intensive process often involving fossil fuels. In UIC’s approach, an electric current is passed through a cell, half of which is filled with captured carbon dioxide, the other half with a water-based solution. An electrified catalyst draws charged hydrogen atoms from the water molecules into the other half of the unit separated by a membrane, where they combine with charged carbon atoms from the carbon dioxide molecules to form ethylene.
Among manufactured chemicals worldwide, ethylene ranks third for carbon emissions after ammonia and cement. Ethylene is used not only to create plastic products for the packaging, agricultural and automotive industries, but also to produce chemicals used in antifreeze, medical sterilizers and vinyl siding for houses. Ethylene is usually made in a process called steam cracking that requires enormous amounts of heat. Cracking generates about 1.5 metric tons of carbon emissions per ton of ethylene created. On average, manufacturers produce around 160 million tons of ethylene each year, which results in more than 260 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.
In addition to ethylene, the UIC scientists were able to produce other carbon-rich products useful to industry with their electrolysis approach. They also achieved a very high solar energy conversion efficiency, converting 10% of energy from the solar panels directly to carbon product output. This is well above the state-of-the-art standard of 2%. For all the ethylene they produced, the solar energy conversion efficiency was around 4%, approximately the same rate as photosynthesis.
Their findings are published in Cell Reports Physical Science.
Source: https://today.uic.edu/
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| Tags: carbon dioxide, CO2, electrolysis, ethylene, photosynthesis, plastic, solar energy conversion efficiency, UIC, University of Illinois Chicago
September 16, 2022
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Laughter comes in many forms, from a polite chuckle to a contagious howl of mirth. Scientists are now developing an AI system that aims to recreate these nuances of humour by laughing in the right way at the right time. The team behind the laughing robot, which is called Erica, say that the system could improve natural conversations between people and AI systems.
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“We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy,” said Dr Koji Inoue, of Kyoto University, the lead author of the research, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. “So we decided that one way a robot can empathise with users is to share their laughter.”
Inoue and his colleagues have set out to teach their AI system the art of conversational laughter. They gathered training data from more than 80 speed-dating dialogues between male university students and the robot, who was initially teleoperated by four female amateur actors.
The dialogue data was annotated for solo laughs, social laughs (where humour isn’t involved, such as in polite or embarrassed laughter) and laughter of mirth. This data was then used to train a machine learning system to decide whether to laugh, and to choose the appropriate type. It might feel socially awkward to mimic a small chuckle, but empathetic to join in with a hearty laugh. Based on the audio files, the algorithm learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be more subdued, and mirthful laughs, with the aim of mirroring these in appropriate situations.
“Our biggest challenge in this work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter, which isn’t easy because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all,” said Inoue. “We had to carefully categorise exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and not just assume that any laugh can be responded to.”
The team tested out Erica’s “sense of humour” by creating four short dialogues for it to share with a person, integrating the new shared-laughter algorithm into existing conversation software. These were compared to scenarios where Erica didn’t laugh at all or emitted a social laugh every time she detected laughter.
The clips were played to 130 volunteers who rated the shared-laughter algorithm most favourably for empathy, naturalness, human-likeness and understanding. The team said laughter could help create robots with their own distinct character. “We think that they can show this through their conversational behaviours, such as laughing, eye gaze, gestures and speaking style,” said Inoue, although he added that it could take more than 20 years before it would be possible to have a “casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, conversational laughter, Erica, human-likeness, humour, laughing robot, laughter, machine-learning, naturalness, robot, shared-laughter algorithm, social laughs, solo laughs, understanding
September 15, 2022
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Korean physicists achieved a breakthrough in research for clean nuclear energy when they managed to create an “artificial sun” by igniting a nuclear reaction so powerful that it achieved temperatures seven times hotter than our star. The team of scientists from Seoul National University and the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy reported that the reactor at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reached temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius for some 30 seconds — the first time hitting that milestone. The real sun hits temperatures of around 15 million degrees at its core. The study, which aims to mimic the natural reactions of the sun, is considered a breakthrough in what researchers say is the ultimate in “unlimited clean energy” — nuclear fusion, which combines atomic nuclei found in stars through the self-heating of matter in a plasma state. Researchers hope that the technology can be developed to harness the vast amounts of energy produced by nuclear fusion into electricity without emitting greenhouse gases, or creating the radioactive waste that’s generated by fission-based nuclear reactors, according to New Scientist.
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“We usually say that fusion energy is a dream energy source – it is almost limitless, with low emission of greenhouse gases and no high-level radioactive waste – [but the latest breakthrough] means fusion is not a dream,” said Yoo Suk-jae, president of the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy. Korean researchers are aiming to achieve plasma temperatures of more than 100 million degrees for 50 seconds by the end of the year. Eventually, they hope to reach the same temperatures for 300 seconds by 2026. “This is not the end of the story, we must move on to 300 seconds – 300 is the minimum time frame to demonstrate steady-state operations, then this plasma can work forever,” said KSTAR director Yoon Si-woo. “If we can’t achieve that, we have to do something else.”
In January, Chinese researchers said that their “artificial sun” reached 70 million degrees Celsius for 20 minutes — or five times hotter than the sun. The same “artificial sun” ran a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees for 101 seconds in May of last year.
The KSTAR team’s research paper has been published in Nature.
Source: https://nypost.com/
Categories: Uncategorized
| Tags: artificial sun, clean nuclear energy, electricity, greenhouse gas, Korea, Korea Institute of Fusion Energy, Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research, KSTAR, nuclear fusion, plasma, Seoul National University, sun
September 14, 2022
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A team of researchers at the National Taiwan University has trained an AI system on hundreds of examples of tumours in the pancreas to teach it to recognise pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly types of the disease after lung and colorectal cancers. According to the American Cancer Society, pancreatic cancer could kill over 49,000 people in 2022. Significantly, annually, only about a fifth of patients live for a year after diagnosis. (Inverse.com)
A new study of this AI tool published in the journal Radiology says that the technology would prove superior to current imaging techniques using CT scans which miss about 40% of pancreatic tumours that are smaller than 2 cm – the size beyond which the tumour spreads rapidly to other organs in the body. Because these tumours usually do not have clear borders that demarcate them from the surrounding tissue they are hard to detect and many patients lose their chance at treatment before the tumour becomes rampant.
Once trained, the researchers tested the system on 546 scans of patients with pancreatic cancer, and 733 without, that is, a total of 1,279 patients. Significantly, the system was successful in detecting 90% of cancer cases. It also exhibited 96% efficiency at detecting the absence of cancer thus eliminating the chance of false positives. In another test, which sourced data from 1,473 people in hospitals across Taiwan, the AI model achieved a 90% sensitivity and 93% specificity. It was accurate 75% of the time at detecting tumours which were smaller than 2 cm, a much better performance compared to radiologists who were only able to achieve 60% accuracy.
“I think AI can do two things: the first is to help doctors do what they can, but with less time and energy,” says Wei-Chi Liao, professor of internal medicine at the National Taiwan University and one of the lead study authors. “And the second is to help doctors do what they cannot always do; for example, in our study, detect cancers that are not very visible to humans.”
Source: https://dailyalts.com/
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| Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, National Taiwan University, pancreatic cancer, tumours
September 13, 2022
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The onset of Alzheimer’s disease can be diagnosed by examining proteins in the retina instead of complicated and invasive PET scans or cerebrospinal fluid analysis. Alzheimer’s disease – the progressive neurological disorder that causes the brain to shrink and brain cells to die – is the most common cause of dementia. The disease causes a continuous decline in thinking, behavior and s
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