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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,598

Driver Clocks And Longevity — Dissecting True Functional “Drivers” Of Aging Phenotypes — Dr. Daniel Ives Ph.D., Founder and CEO — Shift Bioscience Ltd.

Dr. Daniel Ives, Ph.D. is Founder and CEO of Shift Bioscience Ltd. (https://shiftbioscience.com), a biotech company making drugs for cellular rejuvenation in humans through the application of machine-learning ‘driver’ clocks to cellular reprogramming, and is the scientific founder who first discovered the gene shifting targets upon which the Shift drug discovery platform is based.

Dr. Ives graduated from Imperial College with a degree in biochemistry and gained his PhD in 2013 working at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge. He carried out his post-doctoral studies under Ian Holt at the National Institute of Medical Research in Mill Hill, now part of the Crick Institute, pursuing damage-removal strategies for mitochondrial DNA mutations.

In 2016 Dr. Ives left the Crick Institute and founded Shift Bioscience to commercialize mitochondrial targeted drugs for age linked diseases, incorporating novel ageing biomarkers technologies, CRISPR screens, and other tools to dissect true functional ‘drivers’ of ageing phenotypes.

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A licensed drug normally used to treat abnormal levels of fatty substances in the blood could reduce infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus by up to 70 percent, reveals a study in the laboratory by an international collaboration of researchers.

The research team, led by the University of Birmingham and Keele University in the UK and the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Italy, has demonstrated that and its active form (fenofibric acid) can significantly reduce SARS-COV-2 infection in human cells in the laboratory. Importantly, reduction of infection was obtained using concentrations of the drug which are safe and achievable using the standard clinical dose of fenofibrate. Fenofibrate, which is approved for use by most countries in the world including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), is an oral drug currently used to treat conditions such as high levels of cholesterol and lipids (fatty substances) in the blood.

The team is now calling for to test the drug in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, to be carried out in addition to two clinical trials also currently underway in such patients in research being led by the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in the US and Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

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The Pfizer coronavirus vaccine may be linked to a form of eye inflammation called uveitis, according to a multicenter Israeli study led by Prof. Zohar Habot-Wilner from Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center.

The research was conducted at Rambam Health Care Campus, Galilee Medical Center, Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Kaplan Medical Center and Sourasky. It was accepted for publication by the peer-reviewed ophthalmology journal Retina.

Habot-Wilner, head of the Uveitis Service at the hospital, found that 21 people (23 eyes) who had received two shots of the Pfizer vaccine developed uveitis within one to 14 days after receiving their first shot or within one day to one month after the second.

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Researchers remain perplexed as to why some patients infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, remain asymptomatic while other patients develop severe disease symptoms. This question is once again at the front of mind as the Delta variant spreads across the country. In a new retrospective study, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) discovered a specific and sensitive biomarker in blood samples that predicts which patients will develop COVID-19 symptoms. Their results, published online on July 9 in Scientific Reports, show that reduced levels of a specific lipid, sphingosine, are significantly associated with developing COVID-19 symptoms. Conversely, elevated levels of sphingosine, as well as a protein involved in its production, acid ceramidase (AC), are associated with asymptomatic infections.

“We developed this project at a time when there wasn’t a successful vaccine,” said Besim Ogretmen, Ph.D., director of the Lipidomics Shared Resource at Hollings Cancer Center and leader of the Hollings Developmental Cancer Therapeutics Research Program. “We wanted to contribute to the field and know which patients who were exposed to this virus would be symptomatic versus asymptomatic.”

Over the past 16 months several waves of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the U.S. have resulted in more than 35 million cases and almost 630000 deaths. Despite the development of multiple safe and effective vaccines, we are currently experiencing another wave of infections.

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Researchers have discovered one of the oldest and best-preserved brains in the fossil record. A 310-million-year-old horseshoe crab was found with its complete brain intact, thanks to a previously unknown preservation method.

The majority of our knowledge of ancient creatures comes from bones – soft tissues don’t fossilize very well. Some mechanisms are better than others at preserving these fragile tissues though, most famously amber. Scientists can then scan amber-encased creatures to image their brains and other organs.

But that record only goes back so far. The oldest amber inclusions date back about 230 million years ago, to the Triassic period. Burgess Shale-type deposits, however, extend as far back as 520 million years ago, to the early Cambrian. These mudstone deposits can also preserve soft tissues as carbon films – most commonly the gut, but on rare occasions imprints of parts of the nervous system can be found.

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Upon an otherwise unruly landscape of choppy sea and craggy peaks, the salmon farms that dot many of Norway’s remote fjords impose a neat geometry. The circular pens are placid on the surface, but hold thousands of churning fish, separated by only a net from their wild counterparts. And that is precisely the conundrum. Although the pens help ensure the salmon’s welfare by mimicking the fish’s natural habitat, they also sometimes allow fish to escape, a problem for both the farm and the environment.

In an attempt to prevent escaped fish from interbreeding with their wild counterparts and threatening the latter’s genetic diversity, molecular biologist Anna Wargelius and her team at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway have spent years working on ways to induce sterility in Atlantic salmon. Farmed salmon that cannot reproduce, after all, pose no threat to the gene pool of wild stocks, and Wargelius has successfully developed a technique that uses the gene-editing technology Crispr to prevent the development of the cells that would otherwise generate functioning sex organs.

In fact, Wargelius’ team was a little too successful. To be financially viable, commercial fish farms need at least some of their stock to reproduce. So the scientists went a step further, developing a method of temporarily reversing the modification they had already made. They’ve created what they call “sterile parents.”

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As a cardiac electrophysiologist, Deeptankar DeMazumder has worked for years with people at risk for sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). Despite the latest medical advances, less than 10 percent of individuals stricken with an SCA will survive this highly dangerous condition in which irregular heart rhythms, or arrhythmias, cause the heart suddenly to stop beating.

In his role as a physician, DeMazumder keeps a tight focus on the electrical activity in their hearts, doing his best to prevent this potentially fatal event. In his other role, as a scientist at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, DeMazumber is also driven by a life-saving aspiration: finding ways to identify at-risk individuals with much greater accuracy than currently possible—and to develop better ways of protecting them from SCAs. He recently received a 2020 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to pursue one of his promising ideas.

SCAs happen without warning and can cause death within minutes. Poor heart function and abnormal heart rhythms are important risk factors, but it’s not possible today to predict reliably who will have an SCA. However, doctors already routinely capture a wealth of information in electrical signals from the heart using electrocardiograms (ECGs). They also frequently use electroencephalograms (EEGs) to capture electrical activity in the brain.

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The mosquito-borne Zika virus is an emerging pathogen from the Flavivirus genus for which there are no approved antivirals or vaccines. Using the clinically validated PDK-53 dengue virus vaccine strain as a backbone, we created a chimeric dengue/Zika virus, VacDZ, as a live attenuated vaccine candidate against Zika virus. VacDZ demonstrates key markers of attenuation: small plaque phenotype, temperature sensitivity, attenuation of neurovirulence in suckling mice, and attenuation of pathogenicity in interferon deficient adult AG129 mice. VacDZ may be administered as a traditional live virus vaccine, or as a DNA-launched vaccine that produces live VacDZ in vivo after delivery. Both vaccine formulations induce a protective immune response against Zika virus in AG129 mice, which includes neutralising antibodies and a strong Th1 response.

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Current tissue engineering strategies lack materials that promote angiogenesis. Here the authors develop a microfluidic in vitro model in which chemokine-guided endothelial cell sprouting into a tunable hydrogel is followed by the formation of perfusable lumens to determine the material properties that regulate angiogenesis.

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