A patient in New Zealand became the first person to receive the biotech’s medicine, which uses base editing to turn off a specific gene in the liver and thereby lower cholesterol.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,238
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𝐃𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧’𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬
𝘼 𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙏𝙚𝙡 𝘼𝙫𝙞𝙫 𝙐𝙣𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙢𝙖… See more.
A new discovery from Tel Aviv University may provide a key to a great scientific enigma: How does the awake brain transform sensory input into a conscious experience? The groundbreaking study relied on data collected from electrodes implanted, for medical purposes, deep in the human brain. The information was utilized to examine differences between the response of the cerebral cortex to sounds in sleep vs. wakefulness, at a resolution of single neurons.
Our ability to use mathematical modelling is accelerating breakthrough discoveries in health care and biotechnology.
A new study from the University of Bonn, Germany, has found that brown fat cells produce a molecule that helps burn fat, offering implications for treating obesity.
The cancer vaccine project is the latest indication of Amazon’s growing interest in the healthcare sector.
Distinct neuron types in the auditory organ are necessary for encoding different features of sound and relaying them to the brain. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet provide evidence of an early, neuronal activity-independent, emergence of the different subtypes of auditory neurons, prior to birth in mice. The findings have recently been published in Nature Communications.
Distinct neuron types in the auditory organ are necessary for encoding different features of sound and relaying them to the brain. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet provide evidence of an early, neuronal activity-independent, emergence of the different subtypes of auditory neurons, prior to birth in mice. The findings have recently been published in Nature Communications.
Previous studies have provided ambiguous results on whether the different subtypes of auditory neurons emerge during prenatal or postnatal development, with in the latter case, a possible role of neuronal activity in generating their diversity. In this new study, researchers demonstrate that the fate of auditory neuron subtypes is under genetic control in the prenatal period, and reveal the complex molecular networks controlling their genesis.
The tiny crabs, which are about half a millimeter wide, can bend, twist, crawl, walk, turn, and even leap. Additionally, the scientists created millimeter-sized robots that resemble inchworms, crickets, and beetles. The study is experimental at this time, but the researchers think their technique might move the field closer to developing tiny robots that can carry out useful tasks in small, cramped areas.
The study was recently published in the journal Science Robotics. The same team also unveiled a winged microprocessor in September of last year; it was the tiniest flying object ever created by humans (published on the cover of Nature).
“Robotics is an exciting field of research, and the development of microscale robots is a fun topic for academic exploration,” said John A. Rogers, who led the experimental work. “You might imagine micro-robots as agents to repair or assemble small structures or machines in industry or as surgical assistants to clear clogged arteries, to stop internal bleeding or to eliminate cancerous tumors — all in minimally invasive procedures.”
Under a microscope, mammalian tissues reveal their intricate and elegant architectures. But if you look at the same tissue after tumour formation, you will see bedlam. Itai Yanai, a computational biologist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine in New York City, is trying to find order in this chaos. “There is a particular logic to how things are arranged, and spatial transcriptomics is helping us see that,” he says.
‘Spatial transcriptomics’ is a blanket term covering more than a dozen techniques for charting genome-scale gene-expression patterns in tissue samples, developed to complement single-cell RNA-sequencing techniques. Yet these single-cell sequencing methods have a downside — they can rapidly profile the messenger RNA content (or transcriptome) of large numbers of individual cells, but generally require physical disruption of the original tissue, which sacrifices crucial information about how cells are organized and can alter them in ways that might muddy later analyses. Immunologist Ido Amit at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, says that such experiments would sometimes leave his group questioning their results. “Is this really the in situ state, or are we just looking at something which is either not a major [factor] or even not real at all?”
By contrast, spatial transcriptomics allows researchers to study gene expression in intact samples, opening frontiers in cancer research and revealing previously inaccessible biology of otherwise well-characterized tissues. The resulting ‘atlases’ of spatial information can tell scientists which cells make up each tissue, how they are organized and how they communicate. But compiling those atlases isn’t easy, because methods for spatial transcriptomics generally represent a tension between two competing goals: broader transcriptome coverage and tighter spatial resolution. Developments in experimental and computational methods are now helping researchers to balance those aims — and improving cellular resolution in the process.
Nematodes, a specific sort of microscopic worm, have been proven by Osaka University researchers to be capable of killing cancer cells, according to Interesting Engineering and SciTechDaily.
The study titled “Nematode surface functionalization with hydrogel sheaths tailored in situ” by Wildan Mubarok, Masaki Nakahata, Masaru Kojima and Shinji Sakai showed that Hydrogel-based “sheaths” that can be further modified to transport useful cargo (cancer-killing substances) could be applied to these worms as a coating.
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Often when Dr. Thomas Valley sees a new patient in the intensive care unit at Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor, he clamps a pulse oximeter on their finger – one of the many devices he uses to gauge their health and what course of care they might require, whether they are a child having seizures, a teenage car accident victim or an older person with Covid-19.
But recently, Valley, an assistant professor in the University of Michigan’s Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, realized first-hand that the small device may yield less accurate oxygen readings in patients with dark skin.
One end of the device sends light through the finger while a sensor on the other side receives this light and uses it to detect the color of your blood; bright red blood is highly oxygenated, while blue or purplish blood is less. If the device isn’t calibrated for darker skin tones, the pigmentation of the skin could affect how the light is absorbed by the sensor, leading to flawed oxygen readings.