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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,150

This could help us understand diseases better.

Researchers at the University of Utah have developed seed-sized brain organoids that can not only organize themselves but also provide us insights into the causes of autism, a press release said.

Organoids, tiny clusters of tissue derived from stem cells, allow researchers to replicate the complex organs outside the body while also controlling conditions around them… More.

Yueqi Wang.

Studying the diseases of the brain is often challenging since it is difficult for scientists to study the organ’s inner workings. Although advances in technology allow us to image the brain to a certain degree, there is a lot that we still need to learn about how the brain develops.

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Discarded electronic devices, such as cell phones, are a fast-growing source of waste. One way to mitigate the problem could be to use components that are made with renewable resources and that are easy to dispose of responsibly. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have created a prototype circuit board that is made of a sheet paper with fully integrated electrical components, and that can be burned or left to degrade.

Most small electronic devices contain that are made from glass fibers, resins and metal wiring. These boards are not easy to recycle and are relatively bulky, making them undesirable for use in point-of-care , environmental monitors or personal wearable devices.

One alternative is to use paper-based circuit boards, which should be easier to dispose of, less expensive and more flexible. However, current options require specialized paper, or they simply have traditional metal circuitry components mounted onto a sheet of paper. Instead, Choi and colleagues wanted to develop circuitry that would be simple to manufacture and that had all the electronic components fully integrated into the sheet.

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In a recent study published in the eLife journal, researchers demonstrated that tumor cells evade immunotherapy by generating unique transient cell-in-cell structures, resistant to chemotherapy and destruction by T cells.

Despite some remarkable success stories, cancer immunotherapies that use the body’s immune system to combat cancer stops working in many patients. It is unclear why this occurs, but how the immune system attacks cancer cells might have a role to play in this phenomenon.

Immunotherapies activate specialized killer T-cells, which trigger the immune response to tumors. These cells can identify cancer cells and inject toxic granules through their membranes to kill them. However, killer T-cells are not always effective because cancer cells are inherently good at avoiding detection. During treatment, their genes tend to mutate, giving them novel ways to evade the human immune system.

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This video is the 1st of a series of “What is Aging” webinars that aims to unravel what aging is, how we age, why we age, and how to reverse it.

We welcome Jason C. Mercurio, MFE, Dr. Jose Cordeiro, and Dr. Ian Hale to discuss the topic.

Thanks to our transhumanist influencers including:
@G. Stolyarov II @Ray Kurzweil 2017 @The Singularity is Near.
#ageless #agelesspartners #agereveal #longevity #biohacking #biotechnology #agingbackwards.

Book a coaching session with an Ageless Coach today:
https://agelesspartners.com/ageless-coaching/

Live long and age less!

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Stanford University researchers have discovered a rapid and sustainable way to synthetically produce a promising cancer-fighting compound right in the lab. The compound’s availability has been limited because its only currently known natural source is a single plant species that grows solely in a small rainforest region of Northeastern Australia.

The compound, designated EBC-46 and technically called tigilanol tiglate, works by promoting a localized against tumors. The response breaks apart the ’s blood vessels and ultimately kills its cancerous cells. EBC-46 recently entered into following its extremely high success rate in treating a kind of cancer in dogs.

Given its complex structure, however, EBC-46 had appeared synthetically inaccessible, meaning no plausible path seemed to exist for producing it practically in a laboratory. However, thanks to a clever process, the Stanford researchers demonstrated for the first time how to chemically transform an abundant, plant-based starting material into EBC-46.

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Companies creating lab-grown steak, chicken, and fish see a recent White House announcement as a signal that meat grown without animal slaughter is on the cusp of being legally sold and eaten in the US.

“We are laser focused on commercial-scale production, and for us, that means moving into competing with conventional meat products in scale,” said Eric Schulze, vice president of product and regulation at Upside Foods, a cultivated meat company, as the industry calls itself. The goal is to be selling its meat on the US market within the year.

The traditional meat and poultry industry reacted strongly to President Joe Biden’s executive order last month on biotechnology and biomanufacturing, which observers say could push federal agencies to allow commercial sales of meat grown from an animal’s cells.

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Accurate detection and manipulation of endogenous proteins is essential to understand cell biological processes, which motivated laboratories across cell biology to develop highly efficient CRISPR genome editing methods for endogenous epitope tagging (Auer et al., 2014; Nakade et al., 2014; Lackner et al., 2015; Schmid-Burgk et al., 2016; Suzuki et al., 2016; Nishiyama et al., 2017; Artegiani et al., 2020; Danner et al., 2021). Multiplex editing using NHEJ-based CRISPR/Cas9 methods remains limited because of the high degree of cross talk that occurs between two knock-in loci (Gao et al., 2019; Willems et al., 2020). In the current study we present CAKE, a mechanism to diminish cross talk between NHEJ-based CRISPR/Cas9 knock-ins using sequential activation of gRNA expression. We demonstrate that this mechanism strongly reduces cross talk between knock-in loci, and results in dual knock-ins for a wide variety of genes. Finally, we showed that CAKE can be directly applied to reveal new biological insights. CAKE allowed us to perform two-color super-resolution microscopy and acute manipulation of the dynamics of endogenous proteins in neurons, together revealing new insights in the nanoscale organization of synaptic proteins.

The CAKE mechanism presented here creates a mosaic of CreON and CreOFF knock-ins, and the number of double knock-in cells depends on the efficacy of each knock-in vector. Therefore, to obtain a high number of double knock-in cells, the efficacy of both the CreON and CreOFF knock-in vector must be optimized. We identified three parameters that regulate the efficacy for single and double knock-ins in neurons. First, the efficacy of gRNAs varies widely, and even gRNAs that target sequences a few base pairs apart in the same locus can have dramatically different knock-in rates (Willems et al., 2020; Danner et al., 2021; Fang et al., 2021; Zhong et al., 2021). Thus, the efficacy of each individual gRNA must be optimized to increase the chance of successful multiplex labeling in neurons. gRNA performance is dependent on many factors, including the rate of DNA cleavage and repair (Rose et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2020; Park et al.

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Thanks to new RNA vaccines, we humans have been able to protect ourselves incredibly quickly from new viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These vaccines insert a piece of ephemeral genetic material into the body’s cells, which then read its code and churn out a specific protein—in this case, telltale “spikes” that stud the outside of the coronavirus—priming the immune system to fight future invaders.

The technique is effective, and has promise for all sorts of therapies, says Eerik Kaseniit, Ph.D. student in bioengineering at Stanford. At the moment, though, these sorts of RNA therapies can’t focus on specific cells. Once injected into the body, they indiscriminately make the encoded protein in every cell they enter. If you want to use them to treat only one kind of cell—like those inside a cancerous tumor—you’ll need something more precise.

Kaseniit and his advisor, assistant professor of chemical engineering Xiaojing Gao, may have found a way to make this possible. They’ve created a new tool called an RNA “sensor”—a strand of lab-made RNA that reveals its contents only when it enters particular tissues within the body. The method is so exact that it can home in on both and cell states, activating only when its target cell is creating a certain RNA, says Gao. The pair published their findings Oct. 5 in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

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Carnegie Mellon University researchers have pioneered the CMU Array—a new type of microelectrode array for brain computer interface platforms. It holds the potential to transform how doctors are able to treat neurological disorders.

The ultra-high-density microelectrode (MEA), which is 3D-printed at the nanoscale, is fully customizable. This means that one day, patients suffering from epilepsy or limb function loss due to stroke could have personalized medical treatment optimized for their individual needs.

The collaboration combines the expertise of Rahul Panat, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Eric Yttri, assistant professor of biological sciences. The team applied the newest microfabrication technique, Aerosol Jet 3D printing, to produce arrays that solved the major design barriers of other brain computer interface (BCI) arrays. The findings were published in Science Advances.

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