Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,582

Big gap between Pfizer, Moderna vaccines seen for preventing COVID hospitalizations

Data collected from 18 states between March and August suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19 by 91% in the first four months after receiving the second dose. Beyond 120 days, however, that vaccine efficacy drops to 77%.

Meanwhile, Moderna’s vaccine was 93% effective at reducing the short-term risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and remained 92% effective after 120 days.

Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine does a significantly better job of preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations compared with Pfizer’s shot.

The microbial molecule that turns plants into zombies

A newly discovered manipulation mechanism used by parasitic bacteria to slow down plant aging, may offer new ways to protect disease-threatened food crops.

Parasites manipulate the organisms they live off to suit their needs, sometimes in drastic ways. When under the spell of a parasite, some plants undergo such extensive changes that they are described as “zombies”. They stop reproducing and serve only as a habitat and host for the parasitic pathogens.

Until now, there’s been little understanding of how this happens on a molecular and mechanistic level.

Time Until Dementia Symptoms Appear Can Be Estimated via Brain Scan

“You may hit the tipping point when you’re 50; it may happen when you’re 80; it may never happen,” Schindler said. “But once you pass the tipping point, you’re going to accumulate high levels of amyloid that are likely to cause dementia. If we know how much amyloid someone has right now, we can calculate how long ago they hit the tipping point and estimate how much longer it will be until they are likely to develop symptoms.”

Summary: A new algorithm uses neuroimaging data of amyloid levels in the brain and takes into account a person’s age to determine when a person with genetic Alzheimer’s risk factors, and with no signs of cognitive decline, will develop the disease.

Source; WUSTL

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed an approach to estimating when a person who is likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, but has no cognitive symptoms, will start showing signs of Alzheimer’s dementia.

The algorithm, available online in the journal Neurology, uses data from a kind of brain scan known as amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) to gauge brain levels of the key Alzheimer’s protein amyloid beta.

We created holograms you can touch: You could soon shake a virtual colleague’s hand

The TV show “Star Trek: The Next Generation” introduced millions of people to the idea of a holodeck: an immersive, realistic 3D holographic projection of a complete environment that you could interact with and even touch.

In the 21st century, holograms are already being used in a variety of ways such as medical systems, education, art, security and defense. Scientists are still developing ways to use lasers, modern digital processors, and motion-sensing technologies to create several different types of holograms which could change the way we interact.

My colleagues and I working in the University of Glasgow’s bendable electronics and sensing technologies research group have now developed a system of holograms of people using “aerohaptics,” creating feelings of touch with jets of air. Those jets of air deliver a sensation of touch on people’s fingers, hands and wrists.

New Gene Therapy Pathway Could Protect Us From Cancer and Dementia

Summary: A newly identified gene therapy pathway has the potential to protect us against dementia and cancer, researchers report.

Source: University of Sheffield.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield have discovered a new gene therapy pathway that has uncovered an important regulatory mechanism to keep our genome healthy. This pathway has the potential to protect us against serious life-limiting diseases such as cancer and dementia.

Deep learning helps predict new drug combinations to fight COVID-19

The existential threat of COVID-19 has highlighted an acute need to develop working therapeutics against emerging health threats. One of the luxuries deep learning has afforded us is the ability to modify the landscape as it unfolds — so long as we can keep up with the viral threat, and access the right data.

As with all new medical maladies, oftentimes the data needs time to catch up, and the virus takes no time to slow down, posing a difficult challenge as it can quickly mutate and become resistant to existing drugs. This led scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to ask: how can we identify the right synergistic drug combinations for the rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2?

Typically, data scientists use deep learning to pick out drug combinations with large existing datasets for things like cancer and cardiovascular disease, but, understandably, they can’t be used for new illnesses with limited data.

Plants as mRNA Factories for Edible Vaccines

University of California-Riverside (UCR) researchers say they are studying whether they can turn edible plants like lettuce into mRNA vaccine factories.

One of the challenges with this new technology is that it must be kept cold to maintain stability during transport and storage. If this new project is successful, plant-based mRNA vaccines, which can be eaten, could overcome this challenge with the ability to be stored at room temperature.

The project’s goals, made possible by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are threefold: showing that DNA containing the mRNA vaccines can be successfully delivered into the part of plant cells where it will replicate, demonstrating the plants can produce enough mRNA to rival a traditional shot, and finally, determining the right dosage.

Drug Targets for Memory Enhancement

Summary: Researchers identified specific receptors for acetylcholine that reroute information flow through memory circuits in the hippocampus. The findings could have implications for the development of drugs to help enhance or protect memory from diseases associated with cognitive decline.

Source: University of Bristol.

Bristol-led research has identified specific drug targets within the neural circuits that encode memories, paving the way for significant advances in the treatment of a broad spectrum of brain disorders.

Directed evolution of a family of AAV capsid variants enabling potent muscle-directed gene delivery across species

Progress.

Replacing or editing disease-causing mutations holds great promise for treating many human diseases. Yet, delivering therapeutic genetic modifiers to specific cells in vivo has been challenging, particularly in large, anatomically distributed tissues such as skeletal muscle. Here, we establish an in vivo strategy to evolve and stringently select capsid variants of adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) that enable potent delivery to desired tissues. Using this method, we identify a class of RGD motif-containing capsids that transduces muscle with superior efficiency and selectivity after intravenous injection in mice and non-human primates. We demonstrate substantially enhanced potency and therapeutic efficacy of these engineered vectors compared to naturally occurring AAV capsids in two mouse models of genetic muscle disease. The top capsid variants from our selection approach show conserved potency for delivery across a variety of inbred mouse strains, and in cynomolgus macaques and human primary myotubes, with transduction dependent on target cell expressed integrin heterodimers.

Mending Broken DNA: Researchers Solve Puzzling Biological Search Problem

The label on RecA together with fluorescent markers on the DNA allows the researchers to follow every step of the process accurately; for example, they conclude that the whole repair is finished in 15 minutes, on average, and that the template is located in about nine. Using microscopy, Elf and his team investigate the fate of the break site and its homologous copy in real-time. They also find that the cell responds by rearranging RecA to form thin filaments that span the length of the cell.

How the cell can mend broken DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).