Circa 2016 Basically this could be modified to make our own immune system more advanced to evolve to each virus by itself.
Mimivirus defence system might lead to new genome-editing tools.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,155
Summary: SARS_CoV_2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 infects and replicates in astrocytes, reducing neural viability.
Source: FAPESP
A Brazilian study published in the journal PNAS describes some of the effects infection by SARS-CoV-2 can have on the central nervous system.
In a discovery with wide-ranging implications, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that uniformly charged macromolecules—or molecules, such as proteins or DNA, that contain a large number of atoms all with the same electrical charge—can self-assemble into very large structures. This finding upends our understanding of how some of life’s basic structures are built.
Traditionally, scientists have understood charged polymer chains as being composed of smaller, uniformly charged units. Such chains, called polyelectrolytes, display predictable behaviors of self-organization in water: They will repel each other because similarly charged objects don’t like to be close to each other. If you add salt to water containing polyelectrolytes, then molecules coil up, because the chains’ electrical repulsion is screened by the salt.
However, “the game is very different when you have dipoles,” says Murugappan Muthukumar, the Wilmer D. Barrett Professor in Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst, the study’s senior author.
An interdisciplinary team of University of Minnesota Twin Cities scientists and engineers has developed a first-of-its-kind, plant-inspired extrusion process that enables synthetic material growth. The new approach will allow researchers to build better soft robots that can navigate hard-to-reach places, complicated terrain, and potentially areas within the human body.
The paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary, high-impact scientific journal.
“This is the first time these concepts have been fundamentally demonstrated,” said Chris Ellison, a lead author of the paper and professor in the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. “Developing new ways of manufacturing are paramount for the competitiveness of our country and for bringing new products to people. On the robotic side, robots are being used more and more in dangerous, remote environments, and these are the kinds of areas where this work could have an impact.”
Circa 2015 face_with_colon_three
Researchers have built the world’s first artificial neuron that’s capable of mimicking the function of an organic brain cell — including the ability to translate chemical signals into electrical impulses, and communicate with other human cells.
These artificial neurons are the size of a fingertip and contain no ‘living’ parts, but the team is working on shrinking them down so they can be implanted into humans. This could allow us to effectively replace damaged nerve cells and develop new treatments for neurological disorders, such as spinal cord injuries and Parkinson’s disease.
“Our artificial neuron is made of conductive polymers and it functions like a human neuron,” lead researcher Agneta Richter-Dahlfors from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden said in a press release.
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Move over, BA-4 and BA-5, there’s a new COVID-19 variant that’s spreading even as the push is on for the current round of boosters.
The word from the experts is to get the booster and don’t let your guard down. KDKA’s John Shumway spoke with CBS News medical expert Dr. David Agus — and some of what he had to say is a bit disconcerting.
Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Omicron, BA-4, BA-5, and now comes BF-7.
There needs to be a radical change to biological wetware in order to handle viruses. What is needed is either nanoparticles or an immunity to all diseases. Crispr is the main path for the biological singularity but it needs to be perfected first as the human body is still a black box due to restrictions. I do believe that mass spectrometry will essentially be key to see the inner world of human biology. Then crispr can make new parts essentially to evolve past our current limits. But either way the biological singularity is needed for survival of human beings for better health.
The coronavirus revealed flaws in the nation’s pandemic plans. The spread of monkeypox shows that the problems remain deeply entrenched.
Foresight Biotech & Health Extension Meeting sponsored by 100 Plus Capital.
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Jennifer Garrison, Buck Institute.
Reframing Health and Aging through the Lens of Reproduct.
Jennifer Garrison is an assistant professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and also holds appointments in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. During her doctoral studies at UCSF with Jack Taunton, she discovered the molecular target of a natural product and elucidated a novel mechanism by which small molecules can regulate protein biogenesis.
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Brain-age (BA) estimates based on deep learning are increasingly used as neuroimaging biomarker for brain health; however, the underlying neural features have remained unclear. We combined ensembles of convolutional neural networks with Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to detect which brain features contribute to BA. Trained on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of a population-based study (n = 2,637, 18–82 years), our models estimated age accurately based on single and multiple modalities, regionally restricted and whole-brain images (mean absolute errors 3.37–3.86 years). We find that BA estimates capture ageing at both small and large-scale changes, revealing gross enlargements of ventricles and subarachnoid spaces, as well as white matter lesions, and atrophies that appear throughout the brain. Divergence from expected ageing reflected cardiovascular risk factors and accelerated ageing was more pronounced in the frontal lobe. Applying LRP, our study demonstrates how superior deep learning models detect brain-ageing in healthy and at-risk individuals throughout adulthood.
CHICAGO, Sept 30 (Reuters) — Clear evidence this week that Eisai (4523.T) and Biogen’s (BIIB.O) drug lecanemab slows cognitive decline in early stage dementia has galvanized efforts among Alzheimer’s researchers toward a tantalizing goal — preventing dementia even before symptoms start.
Lecanemab is an antibody that targets and removes toxic clumps of a protein called amyloid beta that accumulate in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s. Results from the companies’ 1,800-patient trial released on Tuesday showed convincingly that doing so also slows the advance of the mind-robbing disease.
In volunteers with mild cognitive impairment and early stage dementia, the drug showed a 27% reduction in cognitive decline after 18 months compared with those who got a placebo.