Year 2021 face_with_colon_three
Xenobots, a type of programmable organism made from frog cells, can replicate by spontaneously sweeping up loose stem cells, researchers say. This could have implications for regenerative medicine.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,075
The effort is the first to show that a cancer vaccine using messenger RNA may be effective.
Could zebrafish’s ability to regenerate the heart work in mammals as well?
The processes by which zebrafish repair injury to their hearts were combined with viral vectors used in human gene therapy, according a study published today (Dec .13) in Cell Stem Cell.
Repairing-related genes that can be ‘shut-off’.
Artisteer/iStock.
The findings mark a crucial step toward precisely managing at least one component of the regenerative mechanism, and according to a press release, could bring us one step closer to tapping into the activity of repair-related genes also concealed in humans.
Detect and kill oral cancer quickly; otherwise, it’d be too late.
In January 2022, a report from the American Cancer Society predicted 54,000 new oral cancer cases in the US. The same report also suggested 11,230 deaths.
This is why early diagnosis is critical for patients suffering from oral cancer. A team of researchers realized this and developed a point-of-care bio-sensor that could allow easy, quick, and accurate detection of oral cancer in humans. Commons.
Tel Aviv-based D-ID released today the first multimodal generative AI video platform to combine text, image and animation in one interface. The self-service video platform integrates D-ID’s proprietary generative AI technology with GPT-3 from Open AI and Stable Diffusion from Stability AI, allowing users to generate digital composite faces and speech in 119 languages based on their text prompts.
“This is a game changer for creators,” says Gil Perry, D-ID co-founder and CEO. “It’s the bleeding edge of generative AI,” he asserts, touting the startup’s expertise in deep learning and computer vision. When I talked to Perry last year, he said that the company’s long-term vision is “to lead the next disruption in the video entertainment space by creating AI-generated synthetic media in a responsible way.”
In the rapidly evolving generative AI space, “long-term” means “next year,” so now Perry talks about providing “digital humans” to enterprises, “transforming the way we communicate with machines and elevating our capabilities as humans.” He hopes that sometime next year, we could chat with the digital humans we will create with D-ID’s help.
Hitting two targets at the same time may be the key to stopping the spread of aggressive cancers, according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the Quadram Institute.
Researchers have found that tumor growth in mice could be stopped by simultaneously targeting two signaling switches that trigger growth of new blood vessels.
Their study, published in the journal Cancer Research Communications, points to new approaches for treating cancer in humans.
The research has shown that people with shorter genes age faster, die sooner and are more prone to disease New research has determined that a “single concise” phenomenon that will be able to tell you how long you will live, The Mirror reports. It has shown that people with shorter genes age faster, die sooner and more prone to disease.
The BACE1 enzyme has a rate-limiting role in the amyloidogenic pathway (see Glossary) and has been extensively studied for its neuronal functions[1]. Since 2000, intensive efforts have focused on developing small-molecule BACE1 inhibitors to reduce amyloid β (Aβ) production in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) brains. However, human clinical trials involving most BACE1 inhibitors were stopped at Phase 2/3 due to limited therapeutic benefits[2]. BACE1 inhibitors act by reducing Aβ-related pathologies in AD brains, that is, they are used to treat the symptoms rather than the underlying disease.
Huntington’s disease (HD) is a neurological disorder that causes progressive loss of movement, coordination and cognitive function. It is caused by a mutation in a single gene called huntingtin (HTT). More than 200,000 people worldwide live with the genetic condition, approximately 30,000 in the United States. More than a quarter of a million Americans are at risk of inheriting HD from an affected parent. There is no cure.
But in a new study, published December 12, 2022 in Nature Neuroscience, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues elsewhere, describe using RNA-targeting CRISPR/Cas13D technology to develop a new therapeutic strategy that specifically eliminates toxic RNA that causes HD.
CRISPR is known as a genome-editing tool that allows scientists to add, remove or alter genetic material at specific locations in the genome. It is based on a naturally occurring immune defense system used by bacteria. However, current strategies run the risk of off-target edits at unintended sites that may cause permanent and inheritable chromosomal insertions or genome alterations. Because of this, significant efforts have focused on identifying CRISPR systems that target RNA directly without altering the genome.
An international research team led by Dr. Ana Guadaño at the Alberto Sols Biomedical Research Institute (IIBM, a combined CSIC-UAM center) and involving the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), used CRISPR gene editing techniques to incorporate into mice a mutation of the MCT8 protein responsible for transporting thyroid hormones to the interior of the cell.
Patients with mutations in this protein suffer from Allan-Herndon-Dudley syndrome, a rare disease that takes the form of serious neurological alterations, in which each patient may reveal a different mutation of MCT8.
This study, published in Neurobiology of Disease, describes the first avatar model for the disease—in other words, the first animal model with the same genetic alteration as various patients.