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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1053

An Israeli company has launched a clinical trial to determine if its innovative microbiome-based therapeutic could increase the responsiveness of some cancer patients to immunotherapy.

The microbiome is gut bacteria – trillions of microorganisms that live in the intestinal tract and play a role in digestion, immunity and many other aspects of health.

Rehovot-based Biomica, a subsidiary of Evogene, dosed its first patients in a Phase I clinical trial at Rambam Health Care Campus last month with a new drug – BMC128 – that is expected to help patients who do not respond to immunotherapy. Specifically, the company hopes the trial will demonstrate the safety, tolerability and preliminary clinical effectiveness of its BMC128 microbiome-based immuno-oncology drug candidate in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) immunotherapy.

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In a new study published in Nature, researchers have developed a breakthrough technique called spatial transcriptomics, which allows scientists to map tumors non-invasively and at an unprecedented resolution depth. For the first time, researchers have created a three-dimensional map of a whole prostate to an unprecedented resolution, including areas of healthy and cancerous cells. Surprisingly, the study revealed that individual prostate tumors contain a range of genetic variations, which until this point were unknown.

“We have never had this level of resolution available before, and this new approach revealed some surprising results,” said Alastair Lamb of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, who jointly led the study.

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Being bilingual slows down the negative effects of aging on the brain.

Our brains start slowing down in their once-magical abilities after a certain age.

Scientists have been finding out is that there are methods that can slow down the aging of the brain.

An experimental study has shown that being bilingual slows down the brain’s aging process.

Many of us know from personal experience that our brains start slowing down in their once-magical abilities after a certain point. You can’t remember certain things quite as well, and some calculations start taking longer. It’s a normal part of the “cognitive aging” that scientists have observed in humans. This aging happens at different rates in different people, based on each person’s so-called Cognitive Reserve. Some people may see few changes late in their years, while others may develop serious illnesses that affect their brain’s functions. As some areas of the brain experience changes in grey and white matter, cases of dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases tend to grow with age.

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https://www.istockphoto.com/tr/foto%C4%9Fraf/human-respirato…hrase=COPD

As might be expected, it’s vice versa for insufficient or interrupted sleep. A new study conducted by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) shows that poor sleep quality may have significant negative effects on progressive lung disease, even more so than smoking.

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Topology and entanglement are two powerful principles for characterizing the structure of complex quantum states. In a new paper in the journal Physical Review X, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania establish a relationship between the two.

“Our work ties two big ideas together,” says Charles Kane, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences. “It’s a conceptual link between , which is a way of characterizing the universal features that quantum states have, and entanglement, which is a way in which quantum states can exhibit non-local correlations, where something that happens in one point in space is correlated with something that happens in another part in space. What we’ve found is a situation where those concepts are tightly intertwined.”

The seed for exploring this connection came during the long hours Kane spent in his home office during the pandemic, pondering new ideas. One train of thought had him envisioning the classic textbook image of the Fermi surface of copper, which represents the metal’s potential electron energies. It’s a picture every physics student sees, and one with which Kane was highly familiar.

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In recent years, ribonucleic acid (RNA) has emerged as a powerful tool for the development of novel therapies. RNA is used to copy genetic information contained in our hereditary material, the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and then serves as a template for building proteins, the building blocks of life. Delivery of RNA into cells remains a major challenge for the development of novel therapies across a broad range of diseases. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden together with researchers from the global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca have investigated where and how mRNA is delivered inside the cell. They found that mRNA uses an unexpected entry door. Their results provide novel insights into the development of RNA therapeutics towards efficient delivery and lower dosages.

DNA () contains the required for the development and maintenance of life. This information is communicated by messenger (mRNA) to make proteins. mRNA-based therapeutics have the potential to address unmet needs for a wide variety of diseases, including cancer and cardiovascular disease. mRNA can be delivered to cells to trigger the production, degradation or modification of a target protein, something impossible with other approaches. A key challenge with this modality is being able to deliver the mRNA inside the cell so that it can be translated to make a protein. mRNA can be packed into lipid nanoparticles (LNPs)—small bubbles of fat—that protect the mRNA and shuttle it into cells. However, this process is not simple, because the mRNA has to pass the membrane before it can reach its site of action in the cell interior, the cytoplasm.

Researchers in the team of MPI-CBG director Marino Zerial are experts in visualizing the cellular entry routes of molecules in the cell, such as mRNA with high-resolution microscopes. They teamed up with scientists from AstraZeneca who provided the researchers with lipid nanoparticle prototypes that they had developed for therapeutic approaches to follow the mRNA inside the cell. The study is published in the Journal of Cell Biology.

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