Articles from April 2022

MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin loudspeaker that can turn any surface into an active audio source. This thin-film loudspeaker produces sound with minimal distortion while using a fraction of the energy required by a traditional loudspeaker. The hand-sized loudspeaker the team demonstrated, which weighs about as much as a dime, can generate high-quality sound no matter what surface the film is bonded to.

To achieve these properties, the researchers pioneered a deceptively simple fabrication technique, which requires only three basic steps and can be scaled up to produce ultrathin loudspeakers large enough to cover the inside of an automobile or to wallpaper a room. Used this way, the thin-film loudspeaker could provide active noise cancellation in clamorous environments, such as an airplane cockpit, by generating sound of the same amplitude but opposite phase; the two sounds cancel each other out. The flexible device could also be used for immersive entertainment, perhaps by providing three-dimensional audio in a theater or theme park ride. And because it is lightweight and requires such a small amount of power to operate, the device is well-suited for applications on smart devices where battery life is limited.

MIT researchers have developed an ultrathin loudspeaker that can turn any rigid surface into a high-quality, active audio source. The straightforward fabrication process they introduced can enable the thin-film devices to be produced at scale.

“It feels remarkable to take what looks like a slender sheet of paper, attach two clips to it, plug it into the headphone port of your computer, and start hearing sounds emanating from it. It can be used anywhere. One just needs a smidgeon of electrical power to run it,” says Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology, leader of the Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory (ONE Lab), director of MIT.nano, and senior author of the paper.

Bulović wrote the paper with lead author Jinchi Han, a ONE Lab postdoc, and co-senior author Jeffrey Lang, the Vitesse Professor of Electrical Engineering.
The research has been published in IEEE Transactions of Industrial Electronics.

Source: https://news.mit.edu

A gel that’s injected into the ear could reverse hearing loss. Called FX-322, the one-off jab works by encouraging dormant stem cells inside the ear to grow into healthy new auditory cells capable of transmitting sounds to the brain. Stem cells are immature cells found throughout the body, and many have the capacity to grow into virtually any type of tissue. The new drug prompts these dormant cells to grow into cilia. These tiny hair-like cells pick up sounds and turn them into electrical impulses that are sent along the auditory nerve to the brain for processing. Short-term hearing loss can occur as a result of ear infections or wax build-up.

Hearing loss due to damage to the cilia — for example, from repeated exposure to loud noise or changes in the inner ear as we age — is largely untreatable because the cells cannot repair themselves. Hearing loss is also linked with tinnitus (constant ringing or buzzing noise in the ears) and with an increased risk of dementia, possibly because the brain has to direct more energy towards understanding speech.

Hearing aids can help by amplifying sound, but the hope is that the new drug could do away with the need for them by restoring healthy hearing. Developed by Frequency Therapeutics, a company linked to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., the gel contains a mixture of drugs that, in laboratory tests, helped new hair cells form from a type of stem cell called progenitor cells. One of the drugs included is valproic acid, a readily available and relatively cheap drug already used as an anti-convulsant for epilepsy. Unlike other types of stem cell, progenitor cells cannot develop into any form of body tissue. Instead they are more likely to develop into cells near where they are found in the body.

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/

In a lab in Boston, a startup has spent the last few months cultivating mammary cells from a cow—and recently succeeded in finding the perfect conditions to get those cells to produce real cow milk without an animal.  “We spend a lot of time trying to understand how the biology works in a cow, and then trying to do that,” says Sohail Gupta, CEO and cofounder of the startup, called Brown Foods, which makes a product that it calls UnReal Milk.

The startup, which operates in India and the U.S., just completed a stint at the tech accelerator Y Combinator. Alternative-dairy sales keep growing: In 2020, according to the most recent data available, sales of oat, soy, almond, and other alt-milk products made up 15% of all milk sales in the U.S., a 27% growth over the previous two years. But Brown Foods, like others in the space, recognized that plant-based milk still can’t replicate traditional dairy.

“They’re not yet there in terms of taste and texture,” Gupta says. They also often have less protein and other nutrients. He argues that other new milk alternatives, including those that use precision fermentation to make animal-free dairy proteins, also can’t perfectly match dairy since they still use plant ingredients for fat and other components. There are multiple reasons to move away from traditional dairy, including the fact that cows raised for milk and meat are responsible for around 30% of the world’s emissions of methane,a potent greenhouse gas. But Gupta thinks that it makes sense to stay as close to the natural process as possible. Mammary cells “have evolved naturally over centuries to produce milk in mammals,” he says. “So these cells have the entire genetic architecture to produce the fats, the carbs, the proteins.”

The company’s biochemical engineers have been studying how the cells behave, what they need nutritionally to survive, and what triggers lactation. “We’re trying to emulate nature and understand what kind of chemical signals are released in a mammal to trigger the cells to lactate and start secreting milk and get into the lactation phase,” he says. Now that they’ve shown that it can work at the small scale in the lab, they’re beginning to prepare for commercial production in larger bioreactors. The company believes that it can eventually reach price parity with conventional milk. In early calculations, it says that it could cut the greenhouse gas emissions from milk by 90%. (Unlike lab-grown meat, which requires an energy-intensive process of growing cells, producing milk just requires keeping cells alive, and has a far smaller footprint.)

Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/

In a new study, scientists have reported findings that show a blood test can be used to predict Cardiac Vascular Disease (CVD). The research, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, opens the door to more individualized treatment plans for CVD. It may also improve the speed at which new CVD drugs can be identified and developed. When a new drug is developed, scientists have to make sure that it is both effective and safe. This is a rigorous process that can often take many years. While important, this significantly slows down the speed at which new drugs can be developed, and also increases the costs.

One way of increasing the speed and reducing the cost of drug development without sacrificing efficacy or safety is to use a surrogate biomarker as a predictor of risk. If a surrogate can reliably predict risk, then some stages of clinical trials can be streamlined. Finding a surrogate that can accurately predict the risk of certain diseases can also benefit patients directly. If a clinician can measure a reliable surrogate they can potentially prevent a disease before it has developed, reducing the risks to the patient.

“For situations where clinical cardiovascular outcomes studies are required today, a surrogate enables unsafe or ineffective candidate drugs to be terminated early and cheaply and supports the acceleration of safe and effective drugs. Participants in the trials do not have to have events or die in order to contribute to the signal.” said Dr. Stephen Williams — Chief Medical Officer at SomaLogic, and the corresponding author of the present study. “In personalized medicine, a surrogate enables cost-effective allocation of treatments to the people who need them the most, and potentially increases the uptake of newer more effective drugs so that outcomes are improved,” said Dr. Williams.

In 2004 the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a report Trusted Source recommending that researchers identify biomarker surrogates that could help in CVD drug development and improve individualized patient care.

The Israeli company Biolojic Design will conduct a trial for cancer patients in Australia with a new type of drug.  Aulos Biosciences is now recruiting cancer patients to try it’s world’s first antibody drug designed by a computer. The computationally designed antibody, known as AU-007, was planned by the artificial intelligence platform of Israeli biotech company Biolojic Design from Rehovot, in a way that would target a protein in the human body known as interleukin-2 (IL-2). The goal is for the IL-2 pathway to activate the body’s immune system and attack the tumors.

The clinical trial will be conducted on patients with final stage solid tumors and will last about a year – but the company hopes to present interim results during 2022. The trial has raised great hopes because if it is successful, it will pave the way for the development of a new type of drug using computational biology and “big data.” Aulos presented pre-clinical data from a study on 19 mice – and they all responded positively to the treatment. In the 17-day trial period of the study, the antibody led to the complete elimination of the tumors in 10 of the mice – and to a significant delay in the development of the tumors in the other nine mice.

Aulos was founded in Boston as a spin-off of Biolojic and venture capital firm Apple Tree Partners, which invested $40 million in the company to advance the antibody project and prove its clinical feasibility. Drugs based on antibodies are considered to be one of the greatest hopes for anti-cancer solutions. Among the best-known in the field are Keytruda, mostly used to treat melanomas and lung cancer; and Herceptin for breast cancer. But the antibodies given today to cancer patients are created by a method that also has disadvantages – most are produced by the immune system in mice, and then are replicated to enable mass production.

Source: https://www.haaretz.com/

Synthetic neurons made of hydrogel could one day be used in sophisticated artificial tissues to repair organs such as the heart or the eyes. Hagan Bayley at the University of Oxford and his colleagues devised a synthetic material that can act in a similar way to a human neuron. Made from hydrogel, the artificial neurons are about 0.7 millimetres across ­– about 700 times wider than a human neuron, but similar to giant axons found in squid. They can also be made up to 25 millimetres long, which is similar in length to a human optic nerve running from the eye to the brain.
When a light is shone on the synthetic neuron, it activates proteins that pump hydrogen ions into the cell. These positively charged ions then move through the neuron, carrying an electrical signal. The speed of transmission was too fast to measure with the team’s equipment and is probably faster than the rate in natural neurons, says Bayley. When the positive charge reaches the tip of the neuron, it makes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) – a neurotransmitter chemical – move from one water droplet to another. In future work, the researchers hope to make the synthetic neuron interact with another via an ATP signal, just as neurons connect with each other at synapses.
The team bundled seven of the neurons together to work in parallel as a synthetic nerve. “This allows us to send multiple signals simultaneously,” says Bayley. “They can all have very different frequencies and so it’s a very versatile signal.” The main purpose is to send different pieces of information down the same pathway, he says.

However, the artificial neurons still have a long way to go. Unlike real neurons, there is no mechanism to recycle and create new neurotransmitters in the synthetic system. The neurons therefore only work for a few hours, says Bayley. “The more you do science, the more you find out how clever science is by virtue of evolution.” Alain Nogaret at the University of Bath in the UK says the innovation could play a major role in improving neuro-implants such as artificial retinas by the end of the decade. “The emulation of nervous activity in soft materials is a major step towards non-invasive brain-machine interfaces and solutions addressing neurodegenerative disease.”

Bayley hopes to eventually use these synthetic neurons to deliver different types of drugs simultaneously to treat wounds more quickly and precisely. “Using light, we could maybe release drug molecules in a patterned way,” he says.
Source: https://www.nature.com/ 
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https://www.scientiststudy.com/

When using a patient’s own cells to develop a personalized immunotherapy, scientists often struggle to engineer an adequate dose. To capture more T cells for such autologous cell therapy, City of Hope—one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the U.S.—plans to integrate the Curate CELL PROCESSING SYSTEM into its workflow to manufacture investigational CAR-T cell immunotherapy. This system takes a new approach to T-cell separation.

“The Curate technology has been evaluated by the Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope as part of a new process for production of genetically engineered immune cells,” says Angelo Cardoso, MD, PhD, director of the laboratory of cellular medicine at City of Hope. “High-cell viability, recovery of critical cell subsets, significant time savings, and potential for integration in a closed-system platform were specifications that were evaluated for the Curate system.”

According to Curate Biosciences, this system captures many of the cells of interest. “We get very good recovery of white blood cells,” says Joan Haab, PhD, senior vice president, manufacturing & supply chain operations at Curate Biosciences. “We typically recover above 90% of the white blood cells in a sample.”

To do that, this system uses microfluidics. Haab compares it to the Pachinko game, which includes many pathways for a ball—in this case, a cell—to follow. The microfluidic channels separate the cells by size. As Haab explains it: “This provides multiple opportunities to capture white blood cells.”

Most current methods of manufacturing an autologous immunotherapy collect the cells with chemical gradients and centrifugation. “You’re spinning cells around in chemicals and pelleting them, which is not the way to keep them the happiest,” Haab says. By relying on a gentler and non-chemical approach, Curate hopes to collect more T cells that are more fit for engineering a therapy.

Source: https://www.genengnews.com

One way in which scientists are studying how the human body grows and ages is by creating artificial organs in the laboratory. The most popular of these organs is currently the organoid, a miniaturized organ made from stem cells. Organoids have been used to model a variety of organs, but brain organoids are the most clouded by controversy.

Current brain organoids are different in size and maturity from normal brains. More importantly, they do not produce any behavioral output, demonstrating they are still aprimitive model of a real brain. However, as research generatesbrain organoids of higher complexity, they will eventually have the ability to feel and think. In response to this anticipation, Associate Professor Takuya Niikawa of Kobe University and Assistant Professor Tsutomu Sawai of Kyoto University’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology (WPI-ASHBi), in collaboration with other philosophers in Japan and Canada, have written a paper on the ethics of research using conscious brain organoids. The paper can be read in the academic journal Neuroethics.

Working regularly with both bioethicists and neuroscientists who have created brain organoids, the team has been writing extensively about the need to construct guidelines on ethical research. In the new paper, Niikawa, Sawai and their coauthors lay out an ethical framework that assumes brain organoids already have consciousness rather than waiting for the day when we can fully confirm that they do.

“We believe a precautionary principle should be taken,” Sawai said. “Neither science nor philosophy can agree on whether something has consciousness. Instead of arguing about whether brain organoids have consciousness, we decided they do as a precaution and for the consideration of moral implications.”

To justify this assumption, the paper explains what brain organoids are and examines what different theories of consciousness suggest about brain organoids, inferring that some of the popular theories of consciousness permit them to possess consciousness.

Ultimately, the framework proposed by the study recommends that research on human brain organoids follows the ethical principles similar to those for animal experiments. Therefore, recommendations include using the minimum number of organoids possible and doing the upmost to prevent pain and suffering while considering the interests of the public and patients.

Source: https://www.eurasiareview.com/

Noninvasive sound technology developed at the University of Michigan (U-M) breaks down liver tumors in rats, kills cancer cells and spurs the immune system to prevent further spread—an advance that could lead to improved cancer outcomes in humans. By destroying only 50% to 75% of liver tumor volume, the rats’ immune systems were able to clear away the rest, with no evidence of recurrence or metastases in more than 80% of animals.

The 700kHz, 260-element histotripsy ultrasound array transducer used in Prof. Xu’s lab

“Even if we don’t target the entire tumor, we can still cause the tumor to regress and also reduce the risk of future metastasis,” said Zhen Xu, professor of biomedical engineering at U-M and corresponding author of the study in Cancers. Results also showed the treatment stimulated the rats’ immune responses, possibly contributing to the eventual regression of the untargeted portion of the tumor and preventing further spread of the cancer.

The treatment, called histotripsy, noninvasively focuses ultrasound waves to mechanically destroy target tissue with millimeter precision. The relatively new technique is currently being used in a human liver cancer trial in the United States and Europe. In many clinical situations, the entirety of a cancerous tumor cannot be targeted directly in treatments for reasons that include the mass’ size, location or stage. To investigate the effects of partially destroying tumors with sound, this latest study targeted only a portion of each mass, leaving behind a viable intact tumor. It also allowed the team, including researchers at Michigan Medicine and the Ann Arbor VA Hospital, to show the approach’s effectiveness under less than optimal conditions.

“Histotripsy is a promising option that can overcome the limitations of currently available ablation modalities and provide safe and effective noninvasive liver tumor ablation,” said Tejaswi Worlikar, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering. “We hope that our learnings from this study will motivate future preclinical and clinical histotripsy investigations toward the ultimate goal of clinical adoption of histotripsy treatment for liver cancer patients.”

Liver cancer ranks among the top 10 causes of cancer related deaths worldwide and in the U.S. Even with multiple treatment options, the prognosis remains poor with five-year survival rates less than 18% in the U.S. The high prevalence of tumor recurrence and metastasis after initial treatment highlights the clinical need for improving outcomes of liver cancer. Where a typical ultrasound uses sound waves to produce images of the body’s interior, U-M engineers have pioneered the use of those waves for treatment. And their technique works without the harmful side effects of current approaches such as radiation and chemotherapy.

“Our transducer, designed and built at U-M, delivers high amplitude microsecond-length ultrasound pulses—acoustic cavitation—to focus on the tumor specifically to break it up,” Xu said. “Traditional ultrasound devices use lower amplitude pulses for imaging.”

Source: https://news.umich.edu/

In a time when flaunting your best self on social media has become a norm, narcissistic traits seem to be everywhere. In today’s slang, off-putting behaviors like entitlement, superiority, and self-congratulating are known as ‘flexing‘. Such traits might be more common these days, but being narcissistic is still seen as a pathological personality trait, akin to being sadistic, manipulative, or even psychopathic. However, a 2021 study of 270 people with a median age of 20 lends more credit to the notion that narcissistic behaviors are not always driven by the same things as psychopathy.

“For a long time, it was unclear why narcissists engage in unpleasant behaviors, such as self-congratulation, as it actually makes others think less of them. Our work reveals that these narcissists are not grandiose, but rather insecure,” said clinical psychologist Pascal Wallisch from New York University (NYU). “More specifically, the results suggest that narcissism is better understood as a compensatory adaptation to overcome and cover up low self-worth,” added clinical psychologist Mary Kowalchyk, also from NYU.

Psychologists do already distinguish between two rather different types of narcissists: ‘vulnerable narcissists‘ who have low self-esteem, attachment anxiety, and are highly sensitive to criticism; and ‘grandiose narcissists‘, who have high self-esteem and self-aggrandizement. This latest research helps to further disentangle the two. Kowalchyk and team used a series of measures to assess the levels of different traits including narcissism, self-esteem, and psychopathy for each of their participants, and found that flexing behavior is strongly associated with individuals who also have high insecurities and sense of guilt. Those exhibiting psychopathy showed relatively low levels of guilt.

Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/