Abbott’s BinaxNOW COVID-19 test will cost $5 and take 15 minutes to run. It looks for the protein on the surface of the coronavirus, instead of the genetic sequence of the virus, and doesn’t take any lab equipment. People who test negative can display that result on an app.
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The incidence of fungi bloodstream infections increases during aging-is that a potential explanation for the presence of fungi in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients? Rapamycin is a known antifungal-is it effective against fungi that are found in the blood and brain?
An international, first-of-its-kind cardiology trial used personalized genetic testing to reduce by 34 percent the number of serious adverse events following balloon angioplasty, a treatment for the most common form of heart disease.
For patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)—a non-surgical procedure where physicians inflate a balloon and place a metal stent in narrowed heart arteries to improve blood flow to the heart —the choice of antiplatelet therapy can be critical to post-treatment success, and to minimize the chance of heart attack or stroke.
The TAILOR-PCI trial, co-led by principal investigators Dr. Michael Farkouh, cardiologist and Multinational Clinical Trials Chair at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre and Dr. Naveen Pereira, Professor of Medicine and cardiologist at Mayo Clinic, studied the effectiveness of genetic-guided therapy in patients that have had PCIs when compared to conventional therapy.
LG has officially announced a portable air purifier that you wear on your face like a mask. The PuriCare Wearable Air Purifier uses a pair of replaceable filters similar to what you’d find in LG’s range of air purifiers for the home, pairing them with battery-powered fans to help you breathe. LG says the device has sensors to detect when you’re breathing in or out, and adjusts the fans’ speeds accordingly.
Today’s announcement ahead of IFA 2020 doesn’t explicitly mention the COVID-19 pandemic, but it heavily implies that the mask was developed in response to it. The company says the wearable air purifier is designed to replace the “inconsistent” homemade masks worn by some people, as well as the disposable masks that it says have been in short supply.
Back in July, when LG first announced the mask and said it would be donating 2,000 of the devices to a university hospital in Seoul, one executive from the company said they hoped it would help medical staff “amid the protracting COVID-19 pandemic,” The Korea Herald reported. They hoped it would make it easier for medical staff to wear a mask for hours at a time.
Very interesting.
Despite the limited supply of organs available for patients on waitlists for transplantation, organs from older, deceased donors are frequently discarded or not utilized. Available older organs have the potential to close the gap between demand and supply that is responsible for the very long wait-times that lead to many patients not surviving the time it takes for an organ to become available. Older organs can also often provoke a stronger immune response and may put patients at greater risk of adverse outcomes and transplant rejection. But, as the world population ages, organs from older, deceased donors represent an untapped and growing resource for patients in need. Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital are leading efforts to breathe new life into older organs by leveraging a new class of drugs known as senolytics, which target and eliminate old cells. Using clinical and experimental studies, the team presents evidence that senolytic drugs may help rejuvenate older organs, which could lead to better outcomes and a wider pool of organs eligible for donation. Results are published in Nature Communications.
“Older organs are available and have the potential to contribute to mitigating the current demand for organ transplantation,” said corresponding author Stefan G. Tullius, MD, Ph.D., chief of the Division of Transplant Surgery at the Brigham. “If we can utilize older organs in a safe way with outcomes that are comparable, we will take a substantial step forward for helping patients.”
Continue reading “Rejuvenating old organs could increase donor pool” »
Your pancreas is a little sweet potato-shaped organ that sits snug behind your stomach. The pancreas is studded with islets, the cell clusters that house insulin-producing beta cells. In people with type 1 diabetes, the body’s own immune cells head for the islets and start attacking the beta cells. No one knows exactly what triggers this attack.
One clue may lie in the pattern of beta cell death. Many beta cells are killed off in big patches while other beta cells are mysteriously untouched. Something seems to be drawing immune cells to attack specific groups of beta cells while ignoring others.
In a new Science Advances study, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) report that the nervous system may be driving this patchy cell die-off. Their new findings in a mouse model suggest that blocking nerve signals to the pancreas could stop patients from ever developing type 1 diabetes.
Obesity is the main cause of type 2 diabetes and related chronic illnesses that together will kill more people around the globe this year than the COVID-19 coronavirus. Scientists at Joslin Diabetes Center have delivered a proof of concept for a novel cell-based therapy against this dangerous condition.
The potential therapy for obesity would transplant HUMBLE (human brown-like) fat cells, human white fat cells that have been genetically modified to become similar to heat-generating brown fat cells, says Yu-Hua Tseng, Ph.D., a Senior Investigator in Joslin’s Section on Integrative Physiology and Metabolism.
Brown fat cells burn energy instead of storing energy as white fat cells do, says Tseng, senior author on a paper about the work in Science Translational Medicine. In the process, brown fat can lower excessive levels of glucose and lipids in the blood that are linked to metabolic diseases such as diabetes.
Research looking at a possible new therapeutic approach for Alzheimer’s disease was recently published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation. The paper out of the University of Kentucky’s Sanders-Brown Center on Aging (SBCoA) is titled “Therapeutic Trem2 activation ameliorates amyloid-beta deposition and improves cognition in the 5XFAD model of amyloid deposition”. The work looked at targeting inflammation by using an antibody. Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias have no disease-modifying treatments at this time and represent a looming public health crisis given the continually growing aging population.
The paper explains that current therapeutic approaches to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease focus on the major pathological hallmarks of the disease which are amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. They are the requirements for a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. However, the authors say there has been an explosion of genetic data suggesting the risk for sporadic Alzheimer’s disease is driven by several other factors including neuroinflammation, membrane turnover and storage, and lipid metabolism.
In this study the researchers focused on triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cell-2 (TREM2). “TREM2 was identified several years ago as a gene that, when there’s a mutation, significantly increases risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The field thinks that this mutation reduces the function of the receptor, so we hypothesized that targeting TREM2 to increase its function might be a valid treatment for Alzheimer’s,” explained Donna Wilcock, SBCoA associate director.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink will likely show off its design for a brain-computer interface Friday evening. The concept it unveiled last summer involves surgically implanting it into the brain to detect the activity of neurons. The US military also wants to develop a brain-computer interface, as we explain in this story from October. But here’s the kicker: no surgery required—and the device could be put on and taken off like a helmet or headband.
In August, three graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University were crammed together in a small, windowless basement lab, using a jury-rigged 3D printer frame to zap a slice of mouse brain with electricity.
The brain fragment, cut from the hippocampus, looked like a piece of thinly sliced garlic. It rested on a platform near the center of the contraption. A narrow tube bathed the slice in a solution of salt, glucose, and amino acids. This kept it alive, after a fashion: neurons in the slice continued to fire, allowing the experimenters to gather data. An array of electrodes beneath the slice delivered the electric zaps, while a syringe-like metal probe measured how the neurons reacted. Bright LED lamps illuminated the dish. The setup, to use the lab members’ lingo, was kind of hacky.
Continue reading “The US military is trying to read minds” »
Our kidneys are crucial for keeping us alive and healthy. A sort of chemical computer that keeps our blood chemistry stable—whether we’re eating a sugary birthday cake or a vitamin-filled salad—they prevent waste buildup, stabilize our electrolyte levels, and produce hormones to regulate our blood pressure and make red blood cells.
Kidneys clean our blood using nephrons, which are essentially filters that let fluid and waste products through while blocking blood cells, proteins, and minerals. The latter get reintegrated into the blood, and the former leave the body in urine.
Scientists have struggled to come up with viable treatments for kidney disease and renal failure, and their complexity means kidneys are incredibly hard to synthetically recreate; each kidney contains around one million intricately-structured nephrons.
