Category Archives: Uncategorized
Covid-19 : Close Contact With Someone To Include Cumulative Exposure
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated its definition of a close contact with a Covid-19 patient to include multiple, brief exposures, director Dr. Robert Redfield said Wednesday.
The new definition includes exposures adding up to a total of 15 minutes spent six feet or closer to an infected person. Previously, the CDC defined a close contact as 15 minutes of continuous exposure to an infected individual.
The agency changed the definition after a report from Vermont of a corrections officer who became infected after several brief interactions with coronavirus-positive inmates – none of them lasting 15 minutes, but adding up over time.
“As we get more data and understand the science of Covid, we are going to incorporate that in our recommendations,” Redfield said at a news conference held at CDC headquarters in Atlanta. “Originally, contact that was considered to be high risk for potential exposure to Covid was someone within six feet for more than 15 minutes.”
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/
How To Bring Hydrogen Into Your Home
Australian-based venture LAVO, a university spin-off that has developed an innovative hydrogen-based energy storage system for homes and businesses, is one step closer to commercialisation, announcing that the technology is now ‘commercially-ready’ and will soon start taking orders for the first systems.
The LAVO system has been developed by researchers at the University of New South Wales, and uses compressed hydrogen as the main medium for energy storage. The company says that by using hydrogen, the LAVO device can offer three times the amount of energy storage compared to other devices of similar size, and offers double the operational life.
The LAVO system utilises a metal hydride material, which absorbs hydrogen that provides a safe and stable medium for storing hydrogen over the long-term.
LAVO said the system would be available for advanced purchase in November, with the first systems ready for installation in June 2021.
Source: https://lavo.com.au/
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https://reneweconomy.com.au/
All-Terrain NanoRobot Flips Through A Live Colon
A rectangular robot as tiny as a few human hairs can travel throughout a colon by doing back flips, Purdue University engineers have demonstrated in live animal models. Why the back flips? Because the goal is to use these robots to transport drugs in humans, whose colons and other organs have rough terrain. Side flips work, too. Why a back-flipping robot to transport drugs? Getting a drug directly to its target site could remove side effects, such as hair loss or stomach bleeding, that the drug may otherwise cause by interacting with other organs along the way.
The study, published in the journal Micromachines, is the first demonstration of a microrobot tumbling through a biological system in vivo. Since it is too small to carry a battery, the microrobot is powered and wirelessly controlled from the outside by a magnetic field.
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“When we apply a rotating external magnetic field to these robots, they rotate just like a car tire would to go over rough terrain,” said David Cappelleri, a Purdue associate professor of mechanical engineering. “The magnetic field also safely penetrates different types of mediums, which is important for using these robots in the human body.”
The researchers chose the colon for in vivo experiments because it has an easy point of entry – and it’s very messy. “Moving a robot around the colon is like using the people-walker at an airport to get to a terminal faster. Not only is the floor moving, but also the people around you,” said Luis Solorio, an assistant professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. “In the colon, you have all these fluids and materials that are following along the path, but the robot is moving in the opposite direction. It’s just not an easy voyage.”
But this magnetic microrobot can successfully tumble throughout the colon despite these rough conditions, the researchers’ experiments showed. The team conducted the in vivo experiments in the colons of live mice under anesthesia, inserting the microrobot in a saline solution through the rectum. They used ultrasound equipment to observe in real time how well the microrobot moved around.
Source: https://www.purdue.edu/
Covid-19: Type O blood Divides By 2 The Risk Of Intubation
Research is coalescing around the idea that people with Type O blood may have a slight advantage during this pandemic. Two studies published this week suggest that people with Type O have a lower risk of getting the coronavirus, as well as a reduced likelihood of getting severely sick if they do get infected. One of the new studies specifically found that COVID-19 patients with Type O or B blood spent less time in an intensive-care unit than their counterparts with Type A or AB. They were also less likely to require ventilation and less likely to experience kidney failure.
These new findings echo similar findings about Type O blood seen in previous research, creating a clearer picture of one particular coronavirus risk factor. Both new studies came out Wednesday in the journal Blood Advances. One looked at 95 critically ill COVID-19 patients at hospitals in Vancouver, Canada, between February and April. They found that patients with Type O or B blood spent, on average, 4.5 fewer days in the intensive-care unit than those with Type A or AB blood. The latter group stayed, on average, 13.5 days in the ICU. The researchers did not see any link between blood type and the patient’s total hospital stay, however. They did, however, find that only 61 percent of the patients with Type O or B blood required a ventilator, compared to 84 percent of patients with Type A or AB.
Patients with Type A or AB, meanwhile, were also more likely to need dialysis, a procedure that helps the kidneys filter toxins from the blood.
“Patients in these two blood groups may have an increased risk of organ dysfunction or failure due to COVID-19 than people with blood types O or B,” the study authors concluded.
A June study found a similar link: Patients in Italy and Spain with Type O blood had a 50 percent reduced risk of severe coronavirus infection (meaning they needed intubation or supplemental oxygen) compared to patients with other blood types.
The second new study found that people with Type O blood may be at a lower risk of getting he coronavirus in the first place relative to people with other blood types. The team examined nearly half a million people in the Netherlands who were tested for COVID-19 between late February and late July. Of the roughly 4,600 people who tested positive and reported their blood type, 38.4 percent had Type O blood. That’s lower than the prevalence of Type O in a population of 2.2 million Danish people, 41.7 percent, so the researchers determined that people with Type O blood had disproportionately avoided infection. “Blood group O is significantly associated with reduced susceptibility,” the authors wrote.
In general, your blood type depends on the presence or absence of proteins called A and B antigens on the surface of red blood cells – a genetic trait inherited from your parents. People with O blood have neither antigen. It’s the most common blood type: About 48 percent of Americans have Type O blood, according to the Oklahoma Blood Institute.
The new studies about blood type and coronavirus risk align with prior research on the topic. A study published in July found that people with Type O were less likely to test positive for COVID-19 than those with other blood types. An April study, too, (though it has yet to be peer-reviewed) found that among 1,559 coronavirus patients in New York City, a lower proportion than would be expected had Type O blood.
And in March, a study of more than 2,100 coronavirus patients in the Chinese cities of Wuhan and Shenzhen also found that people with Type O blood had a lower risk of infection.
Past research has also suggested that people with Type O blood were less susceptible to SARS, which shares 80 percent of its genetic code with the new coronavirus. A 2005 study in Hong Kong found that most individuals infected with SARS had non-O blood types. Despite this growing body of evidence, however, Mypinder Sekhon, a co-author of the Vancouver study, said the link is still tenuous.
“I don’t think this supersedes other risk factors of severity like age and comorbidities and so forth,” he told CNN, adding, “if one is blood group A, you don’t need to start panicking. And if you’re blood group O, you’re not free to go to the pubs and bars.”
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/
COVID-19 Thirty Seconds Test Has Successful Results
Rapid detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, in about 30 seconds following the test, has had successful preliminary results in Mano Misra’s lab at the University of Nevada, Reno. The test uses a nanotube-based electrochemical biosensor, a similar technology that Misra has used in the past for detecting tuberculosis and colorectal cancer as well as detection of biomarkers for food safety.
Professor Misra, in the University’s College of Engineering Chemical and Materials Department, has been working on nano-sensors for 10 years. He has expertise in detecting a specific biomarker in tuberculosis patients’ breath using a metal functionalized nano sensor.
Testing a nanotube-based electrochemical biosensor
“I thought that similar technology can be used to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is a folded protein,” Misra said. “
This is Point of Care testing to assess the exposure to COVID-19. We do not need a laboratory setting or trained health care workers to administer the test. Electrochemical biosensors are advantageous for sensing purposes as they are sensitive, accurate and simple.”
The test does not require a blood sample, it is run using a nasal swab or even exhaled breath, which has biomarkers of COVID-19. Misra and his team have successfully demonstrated a simple, inexpensive, rapid and non-invasive diagnostic platform that has the potential to effectively detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The team includes Associate Professor Subhash Verma, virologist, and Research Scientist Timsy Uppal at the University’s School of Medicine, and Misra’s post-doctoral researcher Bhaskar Vadlamani.
“Our role on this project is to provide viral material to be used for detection by the nanomaterial sensor developed by Mano,” Verma said. “Mano contacted me back in April or May and asked whether we can collaborate to develop a test to detect SARS-CoV-2 infection by analyzing patients’ breath. That’s where we came in, to provide biological material and started with providing the surface protein of the virus, which can be used for detecting the presence of the virus.”
Source: https://www.unr.edu
How To Protect Cells From Premature Aging
Molecules that accumulate at the tip of chromosomes are known to play a key role in preventing damage to our DNA. Now, researchers at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland) have unraveled how these molecules home in on specific sections of chromosomes—a finding that could help to better understand the processes that regulate cell survival in aging and cancer.
Much like an aglet of a shoelace prevents the end of the lace from fraying, stretches of DNA called telomeres form protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. But as cells divide, telomeres become shorter, making the protective cap less effective. Once telomeres get too short, the cell stops dividing. Telomere shortening and malfunction have been linked to cell aging and age-related diseases, including cancer.
A new study by EPFL researchers shows how RNA species called TERRA muster at the tip of chromosomes, where they help to prevent telomere shortening and premature cell aging
Scientists have known that RNA species called TERRA help to regulate the length and function of telomeres. Discovered in 2007 by postdoc Claus Azzalin in the team of EPFL Professor Joachim Lingner, TERRA belongs to a class of molecules called noncoding RNAs, which are not translated into proteins but function as structural components of chromosomes. TERRA accumulates at chromosome ends, signaling that telomeres should be elongated or repaired.
However, it was unclear how TERRA got to the tip of chromosomes and remained there. “The telomere makes up only a tiny bit of the total chromosomal DNA, so the question is ‘how does this RNA find its home?’”, Lingner says. To address this question, postdoc Marianna Feretzaki and others in the teams of Joachim Lingner at EPFL and Lumir Krejci at Masaryk University set out to analyze the mechanism through which TERRA accumulates at telomeres, as well as the proteins involved in this process. The findings are published in Nature.
By visualizing TERRA molecules under a microscope, the researchers found that a short stretch of the RNA is crucial to bring it to telomeres. Further experiments showed that once TERRA reaches the tip of chromosomes, several proteins regulate its association with telomeres. Among these proteins, one called RAD51 plays a particularly important role, Lingner says.
RAD51 is a well-known enzyme that is involved in the repair of broken DNA molecules. The protein also seems to help TERRA stick to telomeric DNA to form a so-called “RNA-DNA hybrid molecule”. Scientists thought this type of reaction, which leads to the formation of a three-stranded nucleic acid structure, mainly happened during DNA repair. The new study shows that it can also happen at chromosome ends when TERRA binds to telomeres. “This is paradigm-shifting,” Lingner says.
The researchers also found that short telomeres recruit TERRA much more efficiently than long telomeres. Although the mechanism behind this phenomenon is unclear, the researchers hypothesize that when telomeres get too short, either due to DNA damage or because the cell has divided too many times, they recruit TERRA molecules. This recruitment is mediated by RAD51, which also promotes the elongation and repair of telomeres. “TERRA and RAD51 help to prevent accidental loss or shortening of telomeres,” Lingner says. “That’s an important function.”
Source: https://actu.epfl.ch/
Algorithms Boost Cell Therapy
Cellular therapy is a powerful strategy to produce patient-specific, personalised cells to treat many diseases, including heart disease and neurological disorders. But a major challenge for cell therapy applications is keeping cells alive and well in the lab.
That may soon change as researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, and Monash University, Australia, have devised an algorithm that can predict what molecules are needed to keep cells healthy in laboratory cultures. They developed a computational approach called EpiMogrify, that can predict the molecules needed to signal stem cells to change into specific tissue cells, which can help accelerate treatments that require growing patient cells in the lab.
“Computational biology is rapidly becoming a key enabler in cell therapy, providing a way to short-circuit otherwise expensive and time-consuming discovery approaches with cleverly designed algorithms,” said Assistant Professor Owen Rackham, a computational biologist at Duke-NUS, and a senior and corresponding author of the study, published today in the journal Cell Systems.
In the laboratory, cells are often grown and maintained in cell cultures, formed of a substance, called a medium, which contains nutrients and other molecules. It has been an ongoing challenge to identify the necessary molecules to maintain high-quality cells in culture, as well as finding molecules that can induce stem cells to convert to other cell types.
The research team developed a computer model called EpiMogrify that successfully identified molecules to add to cell culture media to maintain healthy nerve cells, called astrocytes, and heart cells, called cardiomyocytes. They also used their model to successfully predict molecules that trigger stem cells to turn into astrocytes and cardiomyocytes. “Research at Duke-NUS is paving the road for cell therapies and regenerative medicine to enter the clinic in Singapore and worldwide; this study leverages our expertise in computational and systems biology to facilitate the good manufacturing practice (GMP) production of high-quality cells for these much needed therapeutic applications,” said Associate Professor Enrico Petretto, who leads the Systems Genetics group at Duke-NUS, and is a senior and corresponding author of the study.
Source: https://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/
Machine Learning Predicts Heart Failure
Every year, roughly one out of eight U.S. deaths is caused at least in part by heart failure. One of acute heart failure’s most common warning signs is excess fluid in the lungs, a condition known as “pulmonary edema.” A patient’s exact level of excess fluid often dictates the doctor’s course of action, but making such determinations is difficult and requires clinicians to rely on subtle features in X-rays that sometimes lead to inconsistent diagnoses and treatment plans.
To better handle that kind of nuance, a group led by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has developed a machine learning model that can look at an X-ray to quantify how severe the edema is, on a four-level scale ranging from 0 (healthy) to 3 (very, very bad). The system determined the right level more than half of the time, and correctly diagnosed level 3 cases 90 percent of the time.
Working with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Philips, the team plans to integrate the model into BIDMC’s emergency-room workflow this fall.
“This project is meant to augment doctors’ workflow by providing additional information that can be used to inform their diagnoses as well as enable retrospective analyses,” says PhD student Ruizhi Liao, who was the co-lead author of a related paper with fellow PhD student Geeticka Chauhan and MIT professors Polina Golland and Peter Szolovits.
The team says that better edema diagnosis would help doctors manage not only acute heart issues, but other conditions like sepsis and kidney failure that are strongly associated with edema.
As part of a separate journal article, Liao and colleagues also took an existing public dataset of X-ray images and developed new annotations of severity labels that were agreed upon by a team of four radiologists. Liao’s hope is that these consensus labels can serve as a universal standard to benchmark future machine learning development.
An important aspect of the system is that it was trained not just on more than 300,000 X-ray images, but also on the corresponding text of reports about the X-rays that were written by radiologists. “By learning the association between images and their corresponding reports, the method has the potential for a new way of automatic report generation from the detection of image-driven findings,” says Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood, a researcher not involved in the project who serves as chief scientist for IBM’s Medical Sieve Radiology Grand Challenge. “Of course, further experiments would have to be done for this to be broadly applicable to other findings and their fine-grained descriptors.”
Chauhan, Golland, Liao and Szolovits co-wrote the paper with MIT Assistant Professor Jacob Andreas, Professor William Wells of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Xin Wang of Philips, and Seth Berkowitz and Steven Horng of BIDMC.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/
Coronavirus Vaccine: Moderna and Pfizer Final Test Results Imminent
Moderna should have enough data from its late-stage trial to know whether its coronavirus vaccine works in November, CEO Stephane Bancel said Thursday. The company could have enough data by October, but that’s unlikely, Bancel said during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“If the infection rate in the country were to slow down in the next weeks, it could potentially be pushed out in a worst-case scenario in December,” he added.
Moderna is one of three drugmakers backed by the U.S. in late-stage testing for a potential vaccine. The other two are companies Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
Moderna‘s experimental vaccine contains genetic material called messenger RNA, or mRNA, which scientists hope provokes the immune system to fight the virus. In July, the company released early-stage data that showed its potential vaccine generated a promising immune response in a small group of patients.
Bancel’s comment came four days after the CEO of Pfizer said its vaccine could be distributed to Americans before the end of the year. CEO Albert Bourla told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the company should have key data from its late-stage trial for the Food and Drug Administration by the end of October. If the FDA approves the vaccine, the company is prepared to distribute “hundreds of thousands of doses,” he said.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/
Nobel Chemistry Prize Awarded For CRISPR ‘NanoScissors’
A humbling lesson of science is that, even when it comes to many of humanity’s most brilliant inventions, nature got there first. The 2020 selection for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two scientists who share credit for identifying and developing a revolutionary method of genome editing — one that has allowed researchers to modify and investigate the genomes of microbial, plant and animal cells with an ease, precision and effectiveness that would have been unfathomable even a decade ago. Yet the technology that came out of their work, revolutionary as it is, springs from an innovation that first evolved in bacteria, probably more than a billion years ago, and went unnoticed until recently.
Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens Institute for Infection Biology and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley have been recognized for their work on CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing — a technique routinely called CRISPR for short and often referred to as “genetic scissors.” This award marks the first time that two women have been award a Nobel Prize for science.
In a seminal 2012 paper, Charpentier and Doudna showed that key components of the ancient immune system found in bacteria and archaea could be retooled to edit DNA, to essentially “rewrite the code of life,” as the Nobel committee put it this morning.
In the eight years since, the discovery has transformed the life sciences, making genome editing commonplace in laboratories around the world. It has enabled researchers to probe the functions of genes at will, pushing the field of molecular biology ahead by leaps and bounds; to innovate new methods of plant breeding; and to develop promising new gene therapies, some now in clinical trials, for conditions such as sickle cell disease.
The Nobel committee’s selection will undoubtedly be greeted as controversial because of well-publicized disputes about the intellectual property associated with CRISPR. Virginijus Šikšnys of Vilnius University in Lithuania independently developed the idea of using these genetic features of bacteria as a genome-editing tool at about the same time as Charpentier and Doudna, and he has sometimes been honored alongside them. Two other scientists, Feng Zhang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George Church of Harvard University, are also often credited as early co-discoverers and developers of CRISPR technology, and their exclusion will fuel arguments. However, no one in the scientific community would dispute that Charpentier and Doudna’s work laid the foundation for CRISPR’s prolific and game-changing use today.
Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/
