Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,200

Many cancer treatments are notoriously savage on the body. Drugs often attack both healthy cells and tumor cells, causing a plethora of side effects.

Immunotherapies that help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells are no different. Though they have prolonged the lives of countless patients, they work in only a subset of patients. One study found that fewer than 30 percent of breast cancer patients respond to one of the most common forms of immunotherapy.

But what if drugs could be engineered to attack only tumor cells and spare the rest of the body?

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From banking to communication our modern, daily lives are driven by data with ongoing concerns over privacy. Now, a new EPFL paper published in Nature Computational Science argues that many promises made around privacy-preserving mechanisms will never be fulfilled and that we need to accept these inherent limits and not chase the impossible.

Data-driven innovation in the form of personalized medicine, better public services or, for example, greener and more efficient industrial production promises to bring enormous benefits for people and our planet and widespread access to data is considered essential to drive this future. Yet, aggressive data collection and analysis practices raise the alarm over societal values and fundamental rights.

As a result, how to widen access to data while safeguarding the confidentiality of sensitive, has become one of the most prevalent challenges in unleashing the potential of data-driven technologies and a new paper from EPFL’s Security and Privacy Engineering Lab (SPRING) in the School of Comupter and Communication Sciences argues that the promise that any is solvable under both good utility and privacy is akin to chasing rainbows.

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Due to safety concerns, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has withdrawn its approval for the cancer medicine Ukoniq (umbralisib). Ukoniq was approved to treat two specific types of lymphoma: marginal zone lymphoma (MZL) and follicular lymphoma (FL).

Updated findings from the UNITY-CLL clinical trial continued to show a possible increased risk of death in patients receiving Ukoniq. As a result, we determined the risks of treatment with Ukoniq outweigh its benefits. Based upon this determination, the drug’s manufacturer, TG Therapeutics, announced it was voluntarily withdrawing Ukoniq from the market for the approved uses in MZL and FL.

Health care professionals should stop prescribing Ukoniq and switch patients to alternative treatments. Inform patients currently taking Ukoniq of the increased risk of death seen in the clinical trial and advise them to stop taking the medicine. In limited circumstances in which a patient may be receiving benefit from Ukoniq, TG Therapeutics plans to make it available under expanded access.

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Using the patient’s own cellsAn American biotech company has just announced that they have successfully transplanted a 3D printed human ear into a patient, initially reported by The New York Times. The company, Queens-based 3DBio Therapeutics, printed the ear using the patient’s own cells.

In what has been described as a world first, a U.S. company has created and transplanted a 3D-printed ear made of the patient’s own cells.

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Electric organs help electric fish, such as the electric eel, do all sorts of amazing things: They send and receive signals that are akin to bird songs, helping them to recognize other electric fish by species, sex and even individual. A new study in Science Advances explains how small genetic changes enabled electric fish to evolve electric organs. The finding might also help scientists pinpoint the genetic mutations behind some human diseases.

Evolution took advantage of a quirk of genetics to develop electric organs. All fish have duplicate versions of the same gene that produces tiny muscle motors, called . To evolve electric organs, electric fish turned off one duplicate of the channel gene in muscles and turned it on in other cells. The tiny motors that typically make muscles contract were repurposed to generate electric signals, and voila! A new organ with some astonishing capabilities was born.

“This is exciting because we can see how a small change in the gene can completely change where it’s expressed,” said Harold Zakon, professor of neuroscience and integrative biology at The University of Texas at Austin and corresponding author of the study.

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A study reveals one of the reasons why neurons die in Parkinson’s patients

According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, around 7 million individuals worldwide suffer from Parkinson’s disease. Although the origins of this neurodegenerative disorder are not entirely understood, it is known that many of its symptoms are caused by the death of neurons that create dopamine.

A study conducted in mice by a research team at the University of Cordoba has uncovered one of the causes of this neuronal loss: the key resides in the protein called DJ1, whose association with Parkinson’s disease has previously been established, but its specific role was unknown until now.

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A new technology is using particles of gold to make colors. With further work, the method developed at Aalto University could herald a new display technology.

The technique uses nanocylinders suspended in a gel. The gel only transmits certain colors when lit by polarized light, and the color depends on the orientation of the gold nanocylinders. In a clever twist, a collaboration led by Anton Kuzyk’s and Juho Pokki’s research groups used DNA molecules to control the orientation of gold nanocylinders in the gel.

“DNA isn’t just an information carrier—it can also be a building block. We designed the DNA molecules to have a certain melting temperature, so we could basically program the material,” says Aalto doctoral candidate Joonas Ryssy, the study’s lead author. When the gel heats past the , the DNA molecules loosen their grip and the gold nanocylinders change orientation. When the temperature drops, they tighten up again, and the nanoparticles go back to their original position.

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When a donor organ becomes available to someone in need of a transplant, medical personnel need to act quickly. It only takes a few hours for expanding ice crystals to damage delicate tissue, leaving a window of less than 12 hours to assess, transport, and implant the new organ.

This not only creates a tremendous time crunch to perform a delicate procedure, but leaves many organs unviable for transplantation.

But a new breakthrough could vastly improve the landscape of liver transplantation: Scientists kept a liver preserved for three days, in non-frozen conditions, before transplanting it into a patient.

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