City College of New York’s new AI model will be able to predict accurately human response to novel drug compounds. Moreover, it is less costly and faster. Published in Nature Mature Intelligence.
According to research, the new CODE-AE model can screen brand-new medication molecules and reliably forecast their effectiveness in people. In tests, it was also able to find potentially more effective tailored medications for over 9,000 patients.
Luckystep/iStock.
Published in Nature Mature Intelligence on October 17, this technique might significantly speed up precision medicine and medication development.
Anosmia, or the inability to smell, can be caused not only by head injuries but also by exposure to certain toxins and by a variety of medical problems—including tumors, Alzheimer’s, and viral diseases, such as COVID. The sense of smell also commonly atrophies with age; in a 2012 study in which more than 1,200 adults were given olfactory exams, 39 percent of participants age 80 and above had olfactory dysfunction.
The loss of smell and taste have been dominant symptoms of COVID since the beginning of the pandemic. People with COVID-induced anosmia currently have only three options: Wait and see if the sense comes back on its own, ask for a steroid medication that reduces inflammation and may speed recovery, or begin smell rehab, in which they expose themselves to a few familiar scents each day to encourage the restoration of the nose-brain nerves. Patients typically do best if they seek out medication and rehab within a few weeks of experiencing symptoms, before scar tissue builds up. But even then, these interventions don’t work for everyone.
In April 2020, researchers at VCU’s smell and taste clinic launched a nationwide survey of adults who had been diagnosed with COVID to determine the prevalence and duration of smell-related symptoms. They’ve followed up with those people at regular intervals, and this past August they published results from people who were two years past their initial diagnosis. The findings were striking: Thirty-eight percent reported a full recovery of smell and taste, 54 percent reported a partial recovery, and 7.5 percent reported no recovery at all. “It’s a serious quality of life issue,” says Evan Reiter, director of the VCU clinic.
Researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Cape Town may have found a solution to the mystery of how phosphorus came to be an essential component of life on Earth by recreating prehistoric seawater containing the element in a laboratory.
Their findings, which were published in the journal Nature Communications.
Nature Communications is a peer-reviewed, open access, multidisciplinary, scientific journal published by Nature Research. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and earth sciences. It began publishing in 2010 and has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.
Vaccines that target cancer could be available before the end of the decade, according to the husband and wife team behind one of the most successful Covid vaccines of the pandemic.
Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, who co-founded BioNTech, the German firm that partnered with Pfizer to manufacture a revolutionary mRNA Covid vaccine, said they had made breakthroughs that fuelled their optimism for cancer vaccines in the coming years.
Tumors escape killing by the immune system through generating transient spatial cell-in-cell structures that are impenetrable to cytotoxic compounds including lytic granules and chemotherapy.
The GSA is an independent agency of the United States government established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of various federal agencies, supplying products and communications for U.S. government offices, providing transportation and office space to federal employees, and developing government-wide cost-minimizing policies and other management tasks.
The GSA employs about 12,000 federal workers. It has an annual operating budget of roughly $33 billion and oversees $66 billion of procurement annually. It contributes to the management of about $500 billion in U.S. federal property, divided chiefly among 8,700 owned and leased buildings and a 215,000 vehicle motor pool. Among the real estate assets it manages are the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C., which is the largest U.S. federal building after the Pentagon.
Dr. Meador leads the crowdsourcing, citizen science and prize competition open innovation portfolio at GSA that includes Challenge. Gov and CitizenScience.gov. Previously, she led the innovation sourcing program at the Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Innovation and this portfolio included prize competitions, broad agency announcements, and pay for success/social impact financing. The AAAS Science and Policy Technology Fellowship brought her to the federal government at the U.S. Agency for International Development ten years ago where she led a large-scale desalination technology development prize competition.
Dr. Meador earned a Master’s degree in Biology from Texas State University, a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and is an Air Force Veteran.
The recently identified, globally predominant SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1) is highly transmissible, even in fully vaccinated individuals, and causes attenuated disease compared with other major viral variants recognized to date1 – 7. The Omicron spike (S) protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is considered the major driver of these phenotypes3,8. We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor-binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.
The husband-and-wife team who co-founded BioNTech, the biotechnology company that partnered with Pfizer to develop an effective messenger-RNA (mRNA) shot against COVID-19, has predicted that a cancer vaccine could be widely available within the next decade.
“Yes, we feel that a cure for cancer, or to changing cancer patients’ lives, is in our grasp,” said Professor Ozlem Tureci during an interview on BBC’s ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’.
The cancer vaccine, which would build upon breakthroughs achieved by the scientists during the development of the COVID-19 shot, may be widely available within just eight years, said Professor Ugur Sahin.
Summary: Proteins associated with motor neuron disease, or ALS are present in the gut many years before disease pathologies can be found in the brain. A stool sample or gut biopsy could help identify the presence of MND-associated proteins years before symptoms appear.
Source: University of Aberdeen.
The same proteins thought to contribute to motor neuron disease can be found in the gut many years before any brain symptoms occur, a new study by the University of Aberdeen has found.
