Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 106

Metastatic cancer detection and management with artificial intelligence and augmented reality (Review)

Metastatic cancer remains a significant global health challenge, contributing to the majority of cancer-related mortality due to late detection, therapeutic resistance and the complexity of disseminated disease. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) are transforming the landscape of metastatic cancer detection and management. AI-driven tools, including radiomics, deep learning models, and predictive analytics, enhance early identification of metastatic lesions, improve diagnostic accuracy, and support personalized treatment strategies by integrating multimodal clinical, imaging and molecular data. At the same time, AR technologies are increasingly applied in image-guided surgery, real-time tumor visualization and patient education, enabling more precise interventions and improved clinical decision-making.

Common asthma drug may turn off tumor ‘switch’ tied to immunotherapy resistance

A drug widely used to treat asthma and allergies may also help fight aggressive cancers, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study that uncovered how tumors hijack common white blood cells to evade immunotherapy.

The findings in mice and human tissues point to a practical, new way to improve treatment for tough tumors, such as triple-negative breast cancer, where immunotherapy often fails.

The study is published in Nature Cancer.

Dietary fats shape pancreatic cancer risk via ferroptosis

For decades, the relationship between fat and cancer has been treated as a question of quantity: Eat less fat, reduce your risk of developing cancer. But new research published April 29 in Cancer Discovery shows that for pancreatic cancer, the type of fat you consume matters more than the amount.

“It’s really the type of fat that you’re consuming, not just total fat content,” says Christian Felipe Ruiz, Ph.D., an associate research scientist in YSM’s Department of Genetics and lead author of the study. “Depending on the type of fat that you consume, it can go completely different ways. We found that some fats promote cancer, as we would expect, while other fats are really good at suppressing cancer.”

One fat in particular—oleic acid, the primary fatty acid in olive oil—may be accelerating tumor growth in ways scientists never anticipated. The result was surprising given oleic acid’s reputation in medicine. “It’s traditionally been considered a healthy type of fat for cardiovascular health,” Ruiz says.

Age does not appear to drive cardiovascular risk in pregnancy

Underlying cardiovascular risk, rather than older age, drives complications such as venous thromboembolism, cardiomyopathy and heart failure during pregnancy, according to new Weill Cornell Medicine research. The findings may encourage doctors to more actively address cardiovascular health in patients before they become pregnant.

The study, published in Nature Communications, suggests that instead of pregnancy becoming inherently riskier as people get older, it amplifies a person’s baseline cardiovascular risk, regardless of age.

“Pregnancy seems to be a uniform stress test, so to speak,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Hooman Kamel, vice chair of clinical research and chief of neurocritical care in the Department of Neurology and the Helen and Albert Moon Professor of Neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine.

A new way to recharge aging muscle stem cells by restoring a key metabolic component

Losing muscle strength is a natural part of aging. At the core of this decline is a drop in the number of muscle stem cells (MuSCs), the specialized cells responsible for maintaining and regenerating muscle tissue throughout our lives. Loss of muscle strength can severely affect mobility, increasing the risk of falls, fractures and, most importantly, the loss of independence.

Published in Nature Aging, a recent study took a crucial first step toward restoring stem cell function in aging muscles—gaining a clearer understanding of how metabolism changes when stem cells are activated and how these critical processes weaken with age.

The researchers’ investigation led them to glutamine metabolism, the process by which cells use the amino acid glutamine to support essential functions. They found that for MuSCs, glutamine is more than just a nutrient. It provides the raw material needed to produce fatty acids that help cells grow, divide, and repair damaged muscles.

Bioengineers condense protein engineering and testing to a single day

Proteins are critical to life—and to industry. There are countless proteins that could be engineered to treat and even cure serious diseases and cellular dysfunctions. Industrial applications are similarly promising, with proteins increasingly used as enzymes in food manufacturing and in consumer detergents.

While AI can help suggest improvements, each novel protein must still be created in the real world and tested for performance. It is a labor-intensive process that involves constructing the DNA instructions for each protein in yeast or bacteria and growing individual clones for protein production and testing. This can take many days for a single protein of interest and even longer if the protein needs to be tested in mammalian cells, a process that requires retrieving DNA from microbes for transfer to the mammalian cells.

In a new paper, Michael Z. Lin, a professor of neurobiology and of bioengineering in the schools of Engineering and Medicine, and graduate students, Yan Wu in bioengineering and Pengli Wang in chemical engineering, say they have condensed the time-intensive protein building and testing process to just 24 hours.

How looking through static can help people with a common degenerative disease see better

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of irreversible blindness among aging people globally. Around one in seven Australians over the age of 50 have some signs of AMD.

The disease results in blurred and distorted vision, and often loss of function at the center of the eye’s visual field.

The best current treatment involves a series of injections to slow the progression of the disease, but this process can be expensive and difficult with potentially negative long-term effects.

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