Articles from February 2022

Airbus just moved one step closer to launching the world’s first zero-emission commercial aircraft by 2035. The French aircraft maker has announced plans to test hydrogen fuel technology using a modified version of one of its A380 jetliners, which were discontinued last year. Airbus has partnered with CFM International, a joint venture between GE and Safran Aircraft Engines, on the hugely significant hydrogen demonstration program.

The plane manufacturer will use an “A380 flying testbed fitted with liquid hydrogen tanks” to trial propulsion technology for its future hydrogen aircraft.
According to Llewellyn, the aim of the “flight laboratory” is to learn more about hydrogen propulsion systems in real ground and flight conditions, thus enabling Airbus to press on with its plans for a zero-emission aircraft in just over a decade.
Test flights are currently estimated to take place in 2026, provided everything goes to plan. The news comes over a year after Airbus unveiled three hydrogen-based concepts under the ZEROe banner.
“This is the most significant step undertaken at Airbus to usher in a new era of hydrogen-powered flight since the unveiling of our ZEROe concepts back in September 2020,” Sabine Klauke, chief technical officer for Airbus, said in a statement.
“By leveraging the expertise of American and European engine manufacturers to make progress on hydrogen combustion technology, this international partnership sends a clear message that our industry is committed to making zero-emission flight a reality.”
Aviation generates 2.8% of global CO2 emissions the global fuel consumption by commercial airlines reached 95 billion gallons in 2019.
The global aviation industry has pledged to slash emissions to half their 2005 levels by 2050.
A number of air carriers are moving towards sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in order to help reduce the environmental impact of flying, with British Airways‘ parent company IAG revealing plans to power 10% of its flights with SAF by 2030 and United Airlines completing its first successful flight by 100% sustainable fuel last year.
However, Airbus is hedging its bets on hydrogen, which can potentially reduce aviation’s carbon emissions by up to 50%, according to the airplane manufacturer.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/

Scientists suspect that one element of the obesity epidemic is that the brains of obese people respond differently to images of delicious, calorically dense foods. Obese individuals’ brains seem to light up at the sight of donuts, pizza, and other calorie bombs, even when they’re no longer hungry. Some studies have suggested that this heightened activity might predispose people to overeating. Today, nearly 40 percent of American adults are obese, and obesity is predicted to become the leading cause of cancer among Americans, replacing smoking, within five or 10 years. (It’s still not clear yet which comes first—the obesity or the overactive brain activity.)

“Part of the reason for the obesity epidemic is that people eat when they’re not hungry,” says Elizabeth Lawson, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a neuroendocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

A remedy for this over-activation in the brain might come from an unexpected source: oxytocin, the brain chemical often associated with love and social relationships. Oxytocin is sometimes called the “love hormone” because it’s released during sex, childbirth, and breastfeeding. People who are in the early stages of falling in love have higher levels of oxytocin than normal. The drug ecstasy also increases concentrations of the hormone in the blood. Oxytocin has a variety of other surprising functions. A form of the chemical, Pitocin, induces labor, and another form might help treat stomach pain. Early studies have suggested that the hormone might boost social skills among kids with autism. Now Lawson and other researchers are investigating whether oxytocin might also prevent overeating.

Lawson and her colleagues recently showed images of high-calorie foods to 10 overweight and obese men. She found that the regions of the brain involved in eating for pleasure lit up when the men viewed the images. A dose of oxytocin, compared with a placebo, weakened the activity in those regions, and it also reduced the activity between them. Meanwhile, oxytocin didn’t have that effect when the men viewed images of low-calorie foods or household items. Lawson’s colleagues presented the research, which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, last month at Endo 2019, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting.

“One of the key ways oxytocin works in limiting the amount of food that we eat is that it speeds up the satiety process, or reaching fullness,” says Pawel Olszewski, an associate professor of physiology at the University of Waikato, in New Zealand, who was not involved with Lawson’s study. “Then, oxytocin works through brain areas that are associated with the pleasure of eating, and it decreases our eating for pleasure.”

Source: https://www.thebrighterside.news/

Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the pharma giants that stumbled in the race to develop a Covid-19 shot, found their vaccine protects against severe disease and hospitalization and will submit data to regulators for clearance. The duo said data from a trial shows that two doses of the Sanofi-GSK vaccine have 100% efficacy against severe Covid-19 and hospitalizations and 58% efficacy against any symptomatic Covid-19 disease. They said the safety of the vaccine was favorable too.

Meanwhile, a separate study showed it could increase neutralizing antibody levels 18- to 30-fold when used as a booster in people who’ve received other types of shots first. Shares in Sanofi rose as much as 1.7% in Paris on Wednesday, while GSK rose as much as 1.6% in London.

The data should allow the vaccine giants to finally play a big role in the pandemic fight, after repeated development delays allowed nimbler competitors like Moderna Inc. and the BioNTech SE–Pfizer Inc. alliance to rush ahead with messenger-RNA products. Those companies, along with AstraZeneca Plc and Johnson & Johnson, steered highly effective products rapidly to market, helping save millions of lives and earning tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

While the Sanofi-Glaxo product appears to be on par with the mRNA shots when it comes to preventing severe disease and hospitalization, the efficacy may trail somewhat in terms of symptomatic disease, Sam Fazeli, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said in a note.

“The vaccine will find a place among people reticent to take mRNA vaccines and in lower-income countries, making for a modest commercial impact on Sanofi and Glaxo,” Fazeli said.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/

Researchers have used sound waves to turn stem cells into bone cells, in a tissue engineering advance that could one day help patients regrow bone lost to cancer or degenerative disease. The innovative stem cell treatment from RMIT researchers in Australia offers a smart way forward for overcoming some of the field’s biggest challenges, through the precision power of high-frequency sound waves.

Tissue engineering is an emerging field that aims to rebuild bone and muscle by harnessing the human body’s natural ability to heal itself. A key challenge in regrowing bone is the need for large amounts of bone cells that will thrive and flourish once implanted in the target area. To date, experimental processes to change adult stem cells into bone cells have used complicated and expensive equipment and have struggled with mass production, making widespread clinical application unrealistic. Additionally, the few clinical trials attempting to regrow bone have largely used stem cells extracted from a patient’s bone marrow – a highly painful procedure.

In a new study published in the journal Small, the RMIT research team showed stem cells treated with high-frequency sound waves turned into bone cells quickly and efficiently. Importantly, the treatment was effective on multiple types of cells including fat-derived stem cells, which are far less painful to extract from a patient. Co-lead researcher Dr Amy Gelmi said the new approach was faster and simpler than other methods.

A magnified image showing adult stem cells in the process of turning into bone cells after treatment with high-frequency sound waves. Green colouring shows the presence of collagen, which the cells produce as they become bone cells

“The sound waves cut the treatment time usually required to get stem cells to begin to turn into bone cells by several days,” said Gelmi, a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at RMIT. “This method also doesn’t require any special ‘bone-inducing’ drugs and it’s very easy to apply to the stem cells. “Our study found this new approach has strong potential to be used for treating the stem cells, before we either coat them onto an implant or inject them directly into the body for tissue engineering.”

The high-frequency sound waves used in the stem cell treatment were generated on a low-cost microchip device developed by RMIT. Co-lead researcher Distinguished Professor Leslie Yeo and his team have spent over a decade researching the interaction of sound waves at frequencies above 10 MHz with different materials. The sound wave-generating device they developed can be used to precisely manipulate cells, fluids or materials. “We can use the sound waves to apply just the right amount of pressure in the right places to the stem cells, to trigger the change process,” Yeo said. “Our device is cheap and simple to use, so could easily be upscaled for treating large numbers of cells simultaneously – vital for effective tissue engineering.”

Source: https://www.rmit.edu.au/

Researchers out of San Diego’s Salk Institute have gotten mice to move their limbs by stimulating brain cells using ultrasound. When mice were engineered to have their brain cells produce a special protein, the researchers found that hitting them with ultrasound “turned on” the cells, causing small, but perceptible, movements in their limbs. The technique, called “sonogenetics,” is the latest in a line of methods that look to stimulate and alter neurons directly, without using drugs.

“We’ve spent so much time over the last few decades focusing on pharmacologic therapies,” said Colleen Hanlon, a biologist at Wake Forest not involved with the study. “This paper is another really important piece to this puzzle of developing neural circuit-based therapeutics for disease.”

 Sonogenetics is just one of the ways researchers have begun controlling neurons in the brain, turning them off or on at will. Perhaps the most well-known method is using electrical stimulation. In deep brain stimulation, researchers surgically implant electrodes into specific areas of the brain. When these electrodes fire off at the right time and with the right frequency, they can make tremors disappear, improve memory, and even treat depression.

Taking a step up on the wildness scale, scientists can also activate, or turn off, neurons using light, a technique called optogenetics. Optogenetics works by genetically engineering brain cells to produce light-sensitive proteins, which can be hit with a laser, causing the neuron to fire or not. A similar mechanism is behind sonogenetics, except the protein reacts to ultrasound. Ultrasound is appealing because of its well-understood safety profile and the fact that it is already used to target locations deep within the body. “Ultrasound is safe, noninvasive, and can be easily focused through thin bone and tissue to volumes of a few cubic millimeters,” the researchers wrote in their study, published in Nature Communications.

In optogenetics, by contrast, because skin and bone are opaque, even powerful lights will have a hard time reaching neurons deeper than the outer layer of the brain. Salk neuroscientist Sreekanth Chalasani and his colleagues pioneered sonogenetics several years ago in a tiny worm called a nematode. In the worms, they used an ultrasound-reacting protein called TRP-4. But when they put it into mammalian cells, well … nada. And thus began a six-year quest to find an ultrasound-reactive protein that works in mammals. They found it — a protein called TRPA1. The researchers first tested the protein in mouse neurons in the lab. When those cells reacted to ultrasound by producing electrical signals, they engineered it into living mice. When the TRPA1-producing mice were exposed to ultrasound, electrical signals coursed through their limbs — and a little bit of movement, too.

“It’s a very exciting contribution and an important step,” adds Caltech sonogenetics researcher Mikhail Shapiro, who was uninvolved with the work.  “This is one of the papers that’s come out over the last several years that shows that it’s a real possibility that you can use ultrasound to directly modulate the activity of specific neurons.”

Source: https://www.freethink.com/

In 2010, three patients received an experimental form of immunotherapy for leukemia through a clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Two of the patients went into complete remission—and stayed that way.  The treatment, known as CAR T-cell therapy, is now FDA-approved to treat certain blood cancers. It involves engineering a patient’s own white blood cells to attack cancerous cells and then returning them to the body. Since clinical trials and FDA approval, CAR T-cell therapy has already been used to successfully treat and clear certain cancers. However, CAR T-cell therapy doesn’t lead to lasting remissions for every patient, and it can cause serious side effects. A new report offers clues about why the treatment is sometimes remarkably effective.

The two patients who responded well to CAR T-cell therapy in 2010 remained disease free for over a decade. One of the men, a Californian named Doug Olson, is now 75. The other, William Ludwig, died early last year of COVID-19. Researchers were able to detect CAR T-cells lingering in Olson and Ludwig’s bloodstreams long after their cancers disappeared, although the types of immune cells that persisted were slightly different than anticipated, the team reported in Nature.

Two T-cells (red) attack an oral squamous cancer cell (white)—a fight that’s part of the natural immune response. Clinical researchers are developing a new type of therapy that modifies a patient’s T-cells to better attack cancer

“Now we can finally say the word ‘cure’ with CAR T-cells,” Carl June, the principal investigator for the University of Pennsylvania trial, told The New York Times.

Olson and Ludwig were among the earliest recipients of CAR T-cell therapy, allowing clinicians a chance to track the patients’ cells and condition over the past decade. “To use the word ‘cure,’ you really need a long time to follow up to make sure people don’t relapse,” says David Maloney, the medical director of cellular immunotherapy at the Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “When we get these people out to 10 and 11 years post-treatment, that encourages us to be a little more forceful in saying that perhaps patients are cured in some cases.”

Source: https://www.popsci.com/

The rapidly advancing field of bone tissue engineering is focused on growing bone cells in the lab on materials called scaffolds, then transferring these structures into a person’s body to repair bone damage. Like the bone it mimics, scaffolds need an interconnected network of small and large pores that allow cells and nutrients to spread and help generate new bone tissue.

The McGill team’s promising process works by modifying the internal structure of a material, called graphene oxide, to make it more conducive to regenerating bone tissue. Graphene oxide is an ultrathin, extra strong compound that is being used increasingly in electronics, optics, chemistry, energy storage, and biology. One of its unique properties is that when stem cells are placed on it, they tend to transform into bone-generating cells called osteoblasts.

The multidisciplinary group—comprising researchers from McGill‘s Departments of Mining and Materials Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Dentistry—found that adding an emulsion of oil and water to the graphene oxide, then freezing it at two different temperatures, yielded two different sizes of pores throughout the material.

Professor Marta Cerruti said that when they “seeded” the now-porous scaffolding with stem cells from mouse bone marrow, the cells multiplied and spread inside the network of pores, a promising sign the new approach could eventually be used to regenerate bone tissue in humans.

“We showed that the scaffolds are completely biocompatible, that the cells are happy when you put them in there, and that they’re able to penetrate all through the scaffold and colonize the whole scaffold,” she stated.

Source: https://phys.org/

DeepMind’s streak of applying its world-class AI to hard science problems continues. In collaboration with the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL—a university in Lausanne, Switzerland—the UK-based AI firm has now trained a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to control the superheated soup of matter inside a nuclear fusion reactor. The breakthrough, published in the journal Nature, could help physicists better understand how fusion works, and potentially speed up the arrival of an unlimited source of clean energy.

“This is one of the most challenging applications of reinforcement learning to a real-world system,” says Martin Riedmiller, a researcher at DeepMind.

An American research team reported that it has possibly cured HIV in a woman for the first time. Building on past successes, as well as failures, in the HIV-cure research field, these scientists used a cutting-edge stem cell transplant method that they expect will expand the pool of people who could receive similar treatment to several dozen annually.

Their patient stepped into a rarified club that includes three men whom scientists have cured, or very likely cured, of HIV. Researchers also know of two women whose own immune systems have, quite extraordinarily, apparently vanquished the virus. Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of multiple divisions of the National Institutes of Health that funds the research network behind the new case study, told NBC News that the accumulation of repeated apparent triumphs in curing HIV “continues to provide hope.”

“It’s important that there continues to be success along this line,” he said.

In the first case of what was ultimately deemed a successful HIV cure, investigators treated the American Timothy Ray Brown for acute myeloid leukemia, or AML. He received a stem cell transplant from a donor who had a rare genetic abnormality that grants the immune cells that HIV targets natural resistance to the virus. The strategy in Brown’s case, which was first made public in 2008, has since apparently cured HIV in two other people. But it has also failed in a string of others. This therapeutic process is meant to replace an individual’s immune system with another person’s, treating their cancer while also curing their HIV. First, physicians must destroy the original immune system with chemotherapy and sometimes irradiation. The hope is that this also destroys as many immune cells as possible that still quietly harbor HIV despite effective antiretroviral treatment. Then, provided the transplanted HIV-resistant stem cells engraft properly, new viral copies that might emerge from any remaining infected cells will be unable to infect any other immune cells.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/

A Merseyside man has become the first in the UK to receive a ‘vaccine’ that is hoped will stop his recurring head and neck cancer from returning, in a clinical research trial which may help bring further ground-breaking treatments for the disease. The clinical research team at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre has given patient Graham Booth an injection of a therapy tailor-made to his personal DNA and designed to help his own immune system ward off cancer permanently.

Graham first had head and neck cancer in 2011 and it then returned four times, each time meaning he needed gruelling treatment, including facial surgery, reconstruction and radiotherapy. He is now hoping this new treatment – part of the Transgene clinical research study – will mean it does not come back. Dad-of-five Graham, 54, will have a year-long course of immunotherapy injections in a bid to keep him cancer-free, part of a research project designed to reduce deaths and recurrence in head and neck cancers, including of the throat, neck, mouth and tongue. Graham, of West Kirkby, said he was not worried about being the first person in the UK to receive this pioneering treatment and that it “opened new doorways” which gave him hope that the cancer would not come back.

“When I had my first cancer treatment in 2011, I was under the impression that the cancer would not return. My biggest fear was realised in 2016 when it came back and then in 2019 and then two cases in 2021,” explains Graham. “Last year I had the feeling of the cancer progressing and there were not a lot of options left. This clinical trial has opened new doorways and gives me a bit of hope that my cancer won’t come back.”

“And this could open doorways for other people. I’m hopefully looking at a brighter future. A bit of hope that it never returns again – which would mean the world to my family and everyone around me.”

Source: https://www.cityam.com/