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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,040

A Solar cell you can Bend and Soak in, Water

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have developed an organic photovoltaic film that is both waterproof and flexible, allowing a solar cell to be put onto slothes and still function correctly after being rained on or even washed.

One of the potential uses of organic photovoltaics is to create wearable electronics — devices that can be attached to clothing that can monitor medical devices, for example, without requiring battery changes.

However, researchers have found it challenging to achieve waterproofing without the use of extra layers that end up decreasing the flexibility of the film.

Researchers Turn Sack the Clock on Cancer Cells to offer New Treatment Paradigm

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists reversed an aggressive cancer, reverting malignant cells towards a more normal state. Rhabdoid tumors are an aggressive cancer which is missing a key tumor suppressor protein. Findings showed that with the missing tumor suppressor, deleting or degrading the quality control protein DCAF5 reversed the cancer cell state. These results suggest a new approach to curing cancer — returning cancerous cells to an earlier, more normal state rather than killing cancer cells with toxic therapies — may be possible. The results were published today in Nature.

“Rather than making a toxic event that kills rhabdoid cancer, we were able to reverse the cancer state by returning the cells toward normal,” said senior author Charles W.M. Roberts, MD, PhD, Executive Vice President and St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center director. “This approach would be ideal, especially if this paradigm could also be applied to other cancers.”

“We found a dependency which actually reverses the cancer state,” said first author Sandi Radko-Juettner, PhD, a former St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences student, now a Research Program Manager for the Hematological Malignancies Program at St. Jude. “Standard cancer therapies work by causing toxicities that also damage healthy cells in the body. Here, it appears that we’re instead fixing the problem caused by the loss of a tumor suppressor in this rhabdoid cancer.”

Stanford researchers make critical COVID-19 discovery

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Fresh Mitochondria as a Parkinson’s Treatment

Scientists have tested a novel method of providing cells with healthy mitochondria to fight Parkinson’s disease [1].

Parkinson’s disease is the second-most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder, and it affects 10 million people worldwide. The disease is age-related, as its prevalence rises rapidly in people older than 65, although some people are diagnosed much earlier. Parkinson’s disease is characterized by both motor and mental problems: tremor, rigidity (stiffness), and slowness of movement along with memory and thinking deficits.

Parkinson’s disease is caused by the loss of dopamine-producing (dopaminergic) neurons in a brain region called the substantia nigra. Therapeutic options are limited, and some of the existing ones cause nasty side effects.

Rice team demonstrates miniature brain stimulator in humans

Rice University engineers have developed the smallest implantable brain stimulator demonstrated in a human patient. Thanks to pioneering magnetoelectric power transfer technology, the pea-sized device developed in the Rice lab of Jacob Robinson in collaboration with Motif Neurotech and clinicians Dr. Sameer Sheth and Dr. Sunil Sheth can be powered wirelessly via an external transmitter and used to stimulate the brain through the dura ⎯ the protective membrane attached to the bottom of the skull.

The device, known as the Digitally programmable Over-brain Therapeutic (DOT), could revolutionize treatment for drug-resistant depression and other psychiatric or neurological disorders by providing a therapeutic alternative that offers greater patient autonomy and accessibility than current neurostimulation-based therapies and is less invasive than other brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).

“In this paper we show that our device, the size of a pea, can activate the motor cortex, which results in the patient moving their hand,” said Robinson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and of bioengineering at Rice. “In the future, we can place the implant above other parts of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, where we expect to improve executive functioning in people with depression or other disorders.”

Large NIH Grant Supports CRISPR-based Gene Therapy Development for Brain Diseases

If we can prove the concept of this technology in the two diseases we’re studying, we can then apply it to hundreds or thousands of diseases of the brain.

Yong-Hui Jiang, MD, PhD

Yes, please. Huntington disease hopefully.

The two-phase grant will support research into a novel CRISPR-based gene-editing technology and delivery platform for targeting neurogenetic diseases.

Mum who couldn’t sleep due to ‘funny noise’ could hear symptoms of hidden cancer

A MUM who couldn’t sleep due to a “funny” whirring sound in her ear realised she had been hearing symptoms of her cancer after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.

Denise Wingfield, 55, was initially told dull noise in her right ear keeping her up at night was tinnitus, having been referred to an ear, nose and throat specialist.

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