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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,135

The number of syphilis cases in Japan this year has exceeded 10,000 for the first time since comparable data became available in 1999.

Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases says 10,141 cases were reported as of October 23. That is about 1.7 times the figure for the same period last year, which was a record high.

Syphilis is a bacterial infection transmitted mainly through sexual contact. Symptoms may quickly disappear, or not appear at all. So, infected people could spread the disease without knowing.

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There’s an age-old adage in biology: structure determines function. In order to understand the function of the myriad proteins that perform vital jobs in a healthy body—or malfunction in a diseased one—scientists have to first determine these proteins’ molecular structure. But this is no easy feat: protein molecules consist of long, twisty chains of up to thousands of amino acids, chemical compounds that can interact with one another in many ways to take on an enormous number of possible three-dimensional shapes. Figuring out a single protein’s structure, or solving the protein-folding problem, can take years of finicky experiments.

But earlier this year an artificial intelligence program called AlphaFold, developed by the Google-owned company DeepMind, predicted the 3D structures of almost every known protein —about 200 million in all. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior staff research scientist John Jumper were jointly awarded this year’s $3-million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for the achievement, which opens the door for applications that range from expanding our understanding of basic molecular biology to accelerating drug development.

DeepMind developed AlphaFold soon after its AlphaGo AI made headlines in 2016 by beating world Go champion Lee Sedol at the game. But the goal was always to develop AI that could tackle important problems in science, Hassabis says. DeepMind has made the structures of proteins from nearly every species for which amino acid sequences exist freely available in a public database.

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More affordable than the regular ones.

The Arm2u biomedical engineering team from the Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering (ETSEIB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya designed and constructed a configurable transradial prosthesis that responds to the user’s nerve impulses using 3D printing technology.

Arm2u is a prosthesis that can replace a missing arm below the elbow. It can be controlled with myoelectric control, which means that it is controlled by the natural electrical signals produced by muscle contraction.

UPC

As stated in the release, UPC bachelor’s and master’s degree students started off improving a prosthesis for people with disabilities using assistive technologies.

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Here is what the ECG reports of the first patient with the pig heart say.

In January this year, the heart of a genetically modified pig was transplanted into a human for the first time. The patient, David Bennett, managed to survive for two months with the pig heart, and this unique organ transplant operation led to various exciting findings and further research work.

One recently published research reveals that the electrical conduction system (network of cells, signals, and nodes in a heart that collectively controls heart functions and heartbeat) of the genetically modified pig heart differs from that of an ordinary pig’s heart.

David Bennett, the 57-year-old man who became globally known as the first human to receive a genetically modified pig’s heart as a transplant has died in the hospital where he underwent the transplant and was recovering, according to a press release.

Bennett was first admitted to the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) in October last year with arrhythmia — the irregular beating of the heart, which in his case had become life-threatening. The doctors placed him on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), commonly known as a heart-lung bypass machine to keep him alive.

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Times after the pandemic have not been good for tech giants.

The world’s 20 richest tech billionaires have lost close to half a trillion dollars in 2022 so far. Fears of a recession and increased interest rates have dipped revenues of tech companies in the U.S., and market valuations of their companies have tumbled thereafter, Wall Street Journal.

Mark Zuckerberg might be the poster boy for how falling revenues of tech companies also shrink the personal fortunes of the founders since most of their wealth is associated with stocks of the companies they have founded.

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Summary: A genetic form of frontotemporal dementia is associated with abnormal lipid accumulation in the brain fueled by disrupted cell metabolism. The findings could pave the way for new targeted therapies for FTD.

Source: Harvard.

Dementia encompasses a range of neurodegenerative conditions that lead to memory loss and cognitive deficiencies and affect some 55 million people worldwide. Yet despite its prevalence, there are few effective treatments, in part because scientists still don’t understand how exactly dementia arises on a cellular and molecular level.

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‘Like conductive Play-Doh’: breakthrough could point way to a new class of materials for electronic devices.

University of Chicago.

Founded in 1,890, the University of Chicago (UChicago, U of C, or Chicago) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Located on a 217-acre campus in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, near Lake Michigan, the school holds top-ten positions in various national and international rankings. UChicago is also well known for its professional schools: Pritzker School of Medicine, Booth School of Business, Law School, School of Social Service Administration, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Divinity School and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

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We all found our coping strategies for riding out the pandemic in 2020. Biomedical engineer Gough Lui likes to tinker with tech—particularly vintage tech—and decided he’d try to recreate what it was like to connect to the Internet via dialup back in the late 1990s. He recorded the entire process in agonizing real time, dotted with occasional commentary.

Those of a certain age (ahem) well remember what it used to be like: even just booting up the computer required patience, particularly in the earlier part of the decade, when one could shower and make coffee in the time it took to boot up one’s computer from a floppy disk. One needed a dedicated phone line for the Internet connection, because otherwise an incoming call could disrupt the connection, forcing one to repeat the whole dialup process.

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Matthew Cobb is a zoologist and author whose background is in insect genetics and the history of science. Over the past decade or so, as CRISPR was discovered and applied to genetic remodeling, he started to get concerned—afraid, actually—about three potential applications of the technology. He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and harnessing CRISPR, is afraid of the same things. So he decided to delve into these topics, and As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is the result.

Summing up fears

The first of his worries is the notion of introducing heritable mutations into the human genome. He Jianqui did this to three human female embryos in China in 2018, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their kids (if they’re allowed to have any) are about four now. Their identities are classified for their protection, but presumably their health is being monitored, and the poor girls have probably already been poked and prodded incessantly by every type of medical specialist there is.

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Chinese researchers have created the world’s first cloned Arctic wolf — an achievement that could help save other species from extinction and ensure the biodiversity of our planet.

Why it matters: Scottish scientists proved back in 1996 that it was possible to clone a mammal using a cell from an adult animal. Possible — but not easy. Dolly the sheep was the only successful clone in their 277 attempts.

Cloning is still a challenging process — fewer than 25 animal species have been cloned to date, so the first successful cloning of a species is still newsworthy 25+ years after Dolly’s birth.

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