A team of researchers at Tel Aviv University has developed a breakthrough RNA-based drug delivery system to target diseased cells that could improve the treatment of blood cancers, various types of solid cancers, different inflammatory diseases and viral diseases – including coronavirus.
“We are the first in the world to deliver the drug exclusively to cells that are currently relevant to the disease.”
Of the 88 neurosurgical patients, 30 showed a decrease in self-reported spiritual belief before and after neurosurgical brain tumor resection, 29 showed an increase, and 29 showed no change. Using lesion network mapping, the team found that self-reported spirituality mapped to a specific brain circuit centered on the PAG. The circuit included positive nodes and negative nodes — lesions that disrupted these respective nodes either decreased or increased self-reported spiritual beliefs.
Summary: A new study has identified a specific brain circuit centered in the periaqueductal gray that is linked to spiritual acceptance and religiosity.
Source: Brigham and Women’s Hospital
More than 80 percent of people around the world consider themselves to be religious or spiritual. But research on the neuroscience of spirituality and religiosity has been sparse. Previous studies have used functional neuroimaging, in which an individual undergoes a brain scan while performing a task to see what areas of the brain light up. But these correlative studies have given a spotty and often inconsistent picture of spirituality.
“I realized that in the middle-dose group, which is the one that mattered for the no-effects level, they had conveniently left out one of the two baseline measurement days,” said Sheppard. “The outrageous thing was that the group they declared as NOEL was only that because they left out data from their analysis.” In a peer-reviewed paper published in October 2020, Sheppard and her colleagues concluded that “the omission of valid data without justification was a form of data falsification.”
In any case, bifenthrin was not the only pesticide that dodged testing to see if it presented dangers. The EPA’s pesticide office granted 972 industry requests to waive toxicity tests between December 2011 and May 2018, 89 percent of all requests made. Among the tests on pesticides that were never performed were 90 percent of tests looking for developmental neurotoxicity, 92 percent of chronic cancer studies, and 97 percent of studies looking at how pesticides harm the immune system.
By law, the companies that submit their products for review pay for these tests, and in a presentation about the waivers last year, Anna Lowit, a senior science adviser in the office, emphasized the savings to these companies: more than $300 million. Lowit also noted that animal lives were saved — a goal that the Trump administration and the chemical industry prioritized within the agency. The EPA developed the guidelines for waiving the tests along with BASF, Corteva, and Syngenta, pesticide manufacturers that all stand to benefit significantly from having their products bypass toxicity testing.
There is no replacement for these waived experiments, according to pediatrician and epidemiologist Philip Landrigan. “There is no other way to know if a chemical is toxic but to test it,” said Landrigan, who co-authored a landmark report on children’s particular vulnerability to pesticides. “If they allow chemicals to come onto the market and to be used widely in the environment and put on food crops without testing them for toxicity, then EPA is clearly not fulfilling its mandate to protect human health.”
Posted in biotech/medical, life extension
Not just the results, but the vector used. I’ll post the paper below.
In this video we cover an experiment where gene therapies to overexpress TERT and Follistatin were used in a mouse model. The mice saw a 41 and 32% increase in median life span. The study also used a novel viral vector, cytomegalovirus for the delivery. Please note that this a preprint which is not peer-reviewed yet.
Papers referred to in this newsletter.
Preliminary results showed potent inhibition of both the Beta and Gamma variants by opaganib at non-cytotoxic doses, the company said.
Opaganib is a unique host-targeted, dual antiviral and anti-inflammatory drug that acts on the cause and effect of COVID-19.
It’s not hard to kill cancer cells,” says Dr. Marianne Koritzinsky, who led the study. “It’s hard to kill cancer cells without harming the cancer patient.
By better understanding the way cancer cells are able to thrive in the human body, scientists continue to learn where their vulnerabilities lie, and with that comes potential new forms of treatment. Researchers in Canada taking this approach have made a significant discovery around pancreatic cancer, pinpointing a protein the cells rely on for growth and targeting it to inhibit tumor growth in the lab.
Led by scientists at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, the study focuses on the unique biology of pancreatic cancer cells, which drive a particularly deadly form of the disease with a five-year survival rate of just eight percent. The scientists knew that these cancer cells increase levels of a key metabolite called NADPH that helps fuel their growth, so they carried out genomic analysis to shed more light on the process.
This revealed that the cells with high levels of NADPH and undergoing uncontrolled growth as a result also suffered from oxidative stress, but an antioxidant protein called PRDX4 was able to combat these effects and enable the cells to survive. In this sense, the cancer cells are highly dependent on, or “addicted to”, the protein, something the scientists hoped to leverage for their purposes.
Researchers have finally sequenced the complete human genome, filling the gaps in the Human Genome Project’s (HGP) historic first draft.
“Having been part of the original Human Genome Project in 2001, and especially focused on the difficult regions, it’s really satisfying for me to see this done even though it took 20 years,” researcher Evan Eichler, a genome scientist from the University of Washington in Seattle, told New Scientist.
The human genome: A genome is like a genetic instruction manual — it contains all the information an organism needs to grow and function. The human genome is written in DNA, and while your exact genome is unique to you, about 99.9% of it is identical across all people.
SOCOM is using Other Transaction Authority (OTA) funds to partner with private biotech laboratory Metro International Biotech, LLC (MetroBiotech) in the pill’s development, which is based on what is called a “human performance small molecule,” he explained.
“These efforts are not about creating physical traits that don’t already exist naturally. This is about enhancing the mission readiness of our forces by improving performance characteristics that typically decline with age,” Hawkins said. “Essentially, we are working with leading industry partners and clinical research institutions to develop a nutraceutical, in the form of a pill that is suitable for a variety of uses by both civilians and military members, whose resulting benefits may include improved human performance – like increased endurance and faster recovery from injury.”
Hawkins said SOCOM “has spent $2.8 million on this effort” since its launch in 2018.
Crayfish DNA can help us conquer cancer finally.
Finding may also provide clues to how cancer spreads.
Over the past ten years, the number of known and named viruses has exploded, owing to advances in the technology for finding them, plus a recent change to the rules for identifying new species, to allow naming without having to culture virus and host. One of the most influential techniques is metagenomics, which allows researchers to sample the genomes in an environment without having to culture individual viruses. Newer technologies, such as single-virus sequencing, are adding even more viruses to the list, including some that are surprisingly common yet remained hidden until now. It’s an exciting time to be doing this kind of research, says Breitbart. “I think, in many ways, now is the time of the virome.”
SARS-CoV-2 is just one of nonillions of viruses on our planet, and scientists are rapidly identifying legions of new species.
