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Category: biotech/medical – Page 116

3D-printed magnetoelastic smart pen may help diagnose Parkinson’s

Every year, tens of thousands of people with signs of Parkinson’s disease go unnoticed until the incurable neurodegenerative condition has already progressed.

Motor symptoms, such as tremors or rigidity, often emerge only after significant neurological damage has occurred. By the time patients are diagnosed, more than half of their dopamine-producing neurons may already be lost. This kind of diagnostic delay can limit treatment options and slow progress on early-stage interventions.

While there are existing tests to detect biomarkers of Parkinson’s, including cell loss in the brain and inflammatory markers in blood, they typically require access to specialists and costly equipment at major medical centers, which may be out of reach for many.

Gene therapy restored hearing in deaf patients

Gene therapy can improve hearing in children and adults with congenital deafness or severe hearing impairment, a new study involving researchers at Karolinska Institutet reports. Hearing improved in all ten patients, and the treatment was well-tolerated. The study was conducted in collaboration with hospitals and universities in China and is published in the journal Nature Medicine.

When therapy-induced senescence meets tumors: A… : Medicine

Ficial and detrimental effects on the TME, and the underlying mechanisms contributing to its dual effects. It further elaborates on optimizing the beneficial aspects of therapy-induced cellular senescence while concomitantly mitigating its adverse effects in the treatment of tumors and prevention of recurrence. Finally, potential interventions, including antiaging drug therapies, senescence inducers, senescence clearance agents, and inhibition of adverse senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) production were explored to inhibit the harmful SASP induced by therapy, with the aim of limiting the production of detrimental SASP in the TME, thereby reducing the risk of tumor recurrence.

Gene Therapy Can Restore Hearing in Adults, First-of-Its-Kind Trial Shows

Up to three in every 1,000 newborns has hearing loss in one or both ears. While cochlear implants offer remarkable hope for these children, it requires invasive surgery. These implants also cannot fully replicate the nuance of natural hearing.

But recent research my colleagues and I conducted has shown that a form of gene therapy can successfully restore hearing in toddlers and young adults born with congenital deafness.

Our research focused specifically on toddlers and young adults born with OTOF-related deafness. This condition is caused by mutations in the OTOF gene that produces the otoferlin protein –a protein critical for hearing.

Relationships between electronegativity and genotoxicity

The mean electronegativity of chemicals tested for mutagenicity, genotoxicity, clastogenicity and toxicity was determined. It was found that, as expected, chemicals with ‘structural alerts’ for DNA reactivity, and/or capable of inducing mutations in Salmonella and/or unscheduled DNA synthesis in hepatocytes, as a group, were significantly more electronegative than the molecules lacking these attributes. Molecules capable of inducing somatic mutations and recombinations in Drosophila melanogaster also exhibited this characteristic although it was of borderline statistical significance. Inducers of chromosomal aberrations and sister-chromatid exchanges in cultured CHO cells showed the same trend, however the differences between inducers and non-inducers were not statistically significant. In contrast to the above, inducers of bone marrow micronuclei, as a group, were significantly less electronegative than non-inducers. This is a property they shared with chemicals that exhibited systemic or cellular toxicity or that induced lethality in minnows. These findings suggest that in addition to genotoxicity, cellular and/or systemic toxicity may also contribute to the induction of micronuclei.

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Scientists tackle single-cell data’s reliability crisis with new tool ‘scICE’

The ability to analyze gene expression at the single-cell level—known as single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq)—has transformed life sciences, driving discoveries across immunology, oncology, and developmental biology. Over 40,000 studies have leveraged this technique to map the complex diversity of cells within tissues and organisms.

Yet beneath this explosive growth lies a persistent problem: clustering instability. When researchers attempt to group cells by expression patterns to identify or disease states, they often face inconsistent results—even when analyzing the same dataset repeatedly.

Inaccurate clustering can lead to misclassifying as cancerous or missing rare but critical cell types—jeopardizing interpretation and therapeutic decisions. This “reliability crisis” forces scientists to rerun analyses or rely on computationally expensive pipelines to extract trustworthy insights.

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