Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine suggest accelerated biological aging may be driving early-onset cancer rates in young people.
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative movement disorder that progresses relentlessly. It gradually impairs a person’s ability to function until they ultimately become immobile and often develop dementia. In the U.S. alone, over a million people are afflicted with Parkinson’s, and new cases and overall numbers are steadily increasing.
There is currently no treatment to slow or halt Parkinson’s disease. Available drugs don’t slow disease progression and can treat only certain symptoms. Medications that work early in the disease, however, such as Levodopa, generally become ineffective over the years, necessitating increased doses that can lead to disabling side effects.
Continue reading “Breakthrough Parkinson’s Gene Discovery Sheds Light on Evolutionary Origin” »
The next innovation in cancer treatment could be to test all possible drugs on thousands of miniature versions of a person’s tumour, grown in the lab, to see which works the best. The technique, sometimes called drug sensitivity testing, may have already helped a few children with advanced cancer live for longer than the standard approach.
It could eventually become routinely used for everyone with cancer, says Diana Azzam at Florida International University in Miami. “I would say it will help guide treatments in any [cancer], whether it’s aggressive or not.”
An Israeli medtech company is using artificial intelligence to help oncologists decide the best and most effective course of treatment for their cancer patients.
OncoHost’s main focus is on treatments for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). According to the World Cancer Research Fund, lung cancer is the second most common cancer (after breast cancer) and responsible for 12.2 percent of new cases of the disease.
In fact, OncoHost CEO Ofer Sharon tells NoCamels, lung cancer “is the number one killer” among patients with this form of the disease.
Researchers have developed a functional precision medicine approach that targets cancer by combining genetic testing with a new way to test individual drugs on tumor samples. The results of the clinical study were published in Nature Medicine.
Launches within 12 hours of one another, and more activity expected in industry over summer.
Surgeons at NYU Langone have performed the world’s first whole eye transplant. The recipient can’t see out of his new eye, but it’s still healthy more than five months after the operation — putting doctors a major step closer to restoring vision with donor eyes in the future.
The patient: Aaron James, a 46-year-old military vet living in Arkansas, was working as a high-voltage lineman in 2021 when he came in contact with a live wire. The accident caused severe burns that led to the loss of his left eye, his nose, his mouth, half of his face, and his left arm from just above the elbow.
Continue reading “Arkansas man receives world’s first eye transplant” »
A future quantum network of optical fibers will likely maintain communication between distant quantum computers. Sending quantum information rapidly across long distances has proved difficult, in part because most photons don’t survive the trip. Now Viktor Krutyanskiy of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and his colleagues have more than doubled the success rate for sending photons that are quantum mechanically entangled with atoms to a distant site [1]. Instead of the previous approach of sending photons one at a time and waiting to see if each one arrives successfully, the researchers sent photons in groups of three. They believe that sending photons in larger numbers should be feasible in the future, allowing much faster transmission of quantum information.
Quantum networks require entanglement distribution, which involves sending a photon entangled with a local qubit to a distant location. The distribution system must check for the arrival and for the entanglement of each photon at the remote site before another attempt can be made, which can be time consuming. For a 100-km-long fiber, the light travel time combined with losses in the fiber and other inefficiencies limit the rate for this process to about one successful photon transfer per second using state-of-the-art equipment.
For faster distribution, Krutyanskiy and his colleagues trapped three calcium ions (qubits) in an optical cavity and performed repeated rounds of their protocol: in rapid sequence, each ion was triggered to emit an entangled photon that was sent down a 101-km-long, spooled optical fiber. In one experiment, the team performed nearly 900,000 of these “attempts,” detecting entangled photons at the far end 1906 times. The effective success rate came out to 2.9 per second. The team’s single-ion success rate was 1.2 per second.
Analysis of the most precise three-dimensional map of the Universe delivers hints of a tension with the standard model of cosmology.
