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Category: bioengineering

A dietary supplement may offer a novel way to enhance the effectiveness of CAR T cell therapy, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Although this method requires validation through clinical trials, early findings—recently presented during a press briefing at the 66th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition—suggest a potentially affordable and accessible strategy to improve CAR T cell functionality and cancer-fighting capabilities.

CAR T cell therapy, first developed at Penn Medicine, is a personalized cancer treatment that reprograms a patient’s immune cells to target and destroy cancer cells.

“Thousands of patients with blood cancers have been successfully treated with CAR T cell therapy, but it still doesn’t work for everyone,” said co-lead author Shan Liu, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow who presented the study at ASH. “We took an outside-the-box approach to improve CAR T cell therapy, by targeting T cells through diet rather than further genetic engineering.”

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Middlemen get a bad rap for adding cost and complications to an operation. So, eliminating the go-betweens can reduce expense and simplify a process, increasing efficiency and consumer happiness.

James Dahlman and his research team have been thinking along those same lines for . They’ve created a technique that eliminates noisome middlemen and could lead to new, less-invasive treatments for blood disorders and . It sidesteps the discomfort and risks of current treatments, making life easier for patients.

“This would be an alternative to invasive hematopoietic stem cell therapies—we could just give you an IV drip,” said Dahlman, McCamish Early Career Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “It simplifies the process and reduces the risks to patients. That’s why this work is important.”

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A research group led by Prof. Yao Baoli and Dr. Xu Xiaohao from Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics (XIOPM) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have revealed a full-gray optical trap in structured light, which is able to capture nanoparticles but appears at the region where the intensity is neither maximized nor minimized. The study is published in Physical Review A.

The optical trap is one of the greatest findings in optics and photonics. Since the pioneering work by Arthur Ashkin in the 1970s, the has been employed in a broad range of applications in life sciences, physics, and engineering. Akin to its thermal and acoustic counterparts, this trap is typically either bright or dark, located at the field intensity maxima or minima.

In this study, researchers developed a high-order multipole model for gradient forces based on multipole expansion theory. Through immersing the Si particles in the structured light with a petal-shaped field, they found that the high-order multipole gradient forces can trap Si particles at the optical intensity, which is neither maximized nor minimized.

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Andrew Cassy had spent his working life in a telecommunications research department until a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 2010 pushed him into early retirement. Curious about his illness, which he came to think of as an engineering problem, he decided to volunteer for clinical trials.

“I had time, something of value that I could give to the process of understanding the disease and finding good treatments,” he says.

In 2024, he was accepted into a radical trial. That October, surgeons in Lund, Sweden, placed neurons that were derived from human embryonic stem (ES) cells into his brain. The hope is that they will eventually replace some of his damaged tissue.

The study is one of more than 100 clinical trials exploring the potential of stem cells to replace or supplement tissues in debilitating or life-threatening diseases, including cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, heart failure and some eye diseases. It’s a different approach from the unapproved therapies peddled by many shady clinics, which use types of stem cell that do not turn into new tissue.

Continue reading “Stem cells head to the clinic: treatments for cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease could soon be here” | >

Sometimes pain is a necessary warning signal; for example, if we touch something very hot and it burns, we know to move our hand away. But chronic pain can destroy a person’s quality of life, and it can be extremely challenging to get relief. Some researchers have been searching for ways to deactivate pain receptors, so the body no longer feels the neural signals of chronic pain. Using mouse models of acute inflammatory pain, scientists have shown that it is possible to deactivate pain receptors with genetic engineering tools. The work has been reported in Cell.

“What we have developed is potentially a gene therapy approach for chronic pain,” said senior study author Bryan L. Roth, MD, PhD, a distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, among other appointments. “The idea is that we could deliver this chemogenetic tool through a virus to the neurons that sense the pain. Then, you could just take an inert pill and turn those neurons off, and the pain will literally disappear.”

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Bioconvergence — Bridging Science And Nature To Shape Tomorrow — Dr. Nina Siragusa Ph.D. — Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany

#NinaSiragusa #MerckGroup #Darmstadt.

Dr. Nina Siragusa, Ph.D., MBA, is the Strategy, Business, and Data & Digital Lead within the global R&D organization of Merck Healthcare KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. In this role, she leads strategic projects, manages business operations, and drives digital transformation.

Continue reading “Dr. Nina Siragusa — Merck KGaA Darmstadt, Germany — Bridging Science And Nature To Shape Tomorrow” | >

One used AI to dream up a universe of potential CRISPR gene editors. Inspired by large language models—like those that gave birth to ChatGPT—the AI model in the study eventually designed a gene editing system as accurate as existing CRISPR-based tools when tested on cells. Another AI designed circle-shaped proteins that reliably turned stem cells into different blood vessel cell types. Other AI-generated proteins directed protein “junk” into the lysosome, a waste treatment blob filled with acid inside cells that keeps them neat and tidy.

Outside of medicine, AI designed mineral-forming proteins that, if integrated into aquatic microbes, could potentially soak up excess carbon and transform it into limestone. While still early, the technology could tackle climate change with a carbon sink that lasts millions of years.

It seems imagination is the only limit to AI-based protein design. But there are still a few cases that AI can’t yet fully handle. Nature has a comprehensive list, but these stand out.

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Researchers at University of California San Diego have developed and tested a new software package, called Spatial Modeling Algorithms for Reactions and Transport (SMART), that can realistically simulate cell-signaling networks—the complex systems of molecular interactions that allow cells to respond to diverse cues from their environment.

Cell-signaling networks involve many distinct steps and are also greatly influenced by the complex, three-dimensional shapes of cells and subcellular components, making them difficult to simulate with existing tools. SMART offers a solution to this problem, which could help accelerate research in fields across the life sciences, such as , pharmacology and .

The researchers successfully tested the new software in biological systems at several different scales, from cell signaling in response to adhesive cues, to calcium release events in subcellular regions of neurons and , to the production of ATP (the energy currency in cells) within a detailed representation of a single mitochondrion.

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