Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 16

Game-Changing Blood Pressure Drug Works for Patients Not Controlled by Standard Treatments

Blood pressure is one of the most common health problems worldwide, yet it remains difficult to control for many patients even with daily medication. New research from the United Kingdom suggests a different approach could help. Scientists report that a treatment given just twice a year may offer sustained blood pressure reductions for people whose hypertension has proven hard to manage.

The findings come from a large international clinical trial published in JAMA and led by researchers at Queen Mary University of London. The study focused on a long-acting injectable therapy designed to work alongside existing blood pressure medications rather than replace them.

The cytokine TNF is a driver of rheumatoid arthritis, but the signaling-pathway details remain incomplete

Here, Sarah Gaffen & team report on the noncanonical RNA binding protein Arid5a as an activator of TNF signaling that is elevated in human RA tissues. And in mice… its loss results in resistance to collagen-induced arthritis:

The figure shows TNF stimulation causes Arid5a accumulation in the cytoplasm in a murine stromal fibroblast cell line untreated (left) and treated (right); Arid5a (red); RPL7A (green); nuclei (blue).

1Division of Rheumatology & Clinical Immunology, Department of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

2BIOCEV, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Vestec, Czech Republic.

3School of Medicine, Tsinghua Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

An organ-conformal, kirigami-structured bioelectronic patch for precise intracellular delivery

Now online! Organ-level localized delivery is a long-standing challenge, especially for gene therapy. This study establishes a universal conformality theory that enables POCKET—a kirigami-structured bioelectronic patch—to integrate seamlessly with organs and realize precise intracellular electro-delivery of therapeutics without off-target effects.

Bitly: Among adults with treatment-refractory

HER2-positive BiliaryTractCancer, zanidatamab produced sustained, meaningful clinical responses and extended survival compared to prior standards.

In patients with immunohistochemistry (IHC) 3+ tumors, response rates and overall survival were notably higher than those with IHC 2+ tumors, substantiating the use of reflex IHC testing to identify candidates for HER2-targeted therapy.

Safety remained consistent over 33 months of follow-up, and the ongoing HERIZON-BTC-302 phase 3 trial is assessing zanidatamab alongside first-line standard care in this setting.

This is a 404 error, which means you’ve clicked on a bad link or entered an invalid URL. Maybe what you are looking for can be found at Bitly.com. P.S. Bitly links are case sensitive.

Brain Scans Reveal an “Inflamed Brain Type” Across Major Psychiatric Disorders

Individuals with psychiatric disorders exhibiting seemingly similar symptoms often respond very differently to the same treatment, suggesting that distinct biological processes are at work beneath the surface of similar clinical presentations. Researchers have now identified a distinct immuno-inflammatory biomarker across major psychiatric disorders that can be detected using non-invasive brain imaging. Patients exhibiting this brain signature showed systemic inflammation and poorer response to standard treatments. The findings of the new study in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, lay the foundation for a biology-augmented diagnostic framework in psychiatry and detail the potential for biomarker-guided, anti-inflammatory precision therapies.

Neuroimaging links diverse biological mechanisms to clinical manifestations, providing compelling insights into the neural mechanisms underlying brain function implicated in psychiatric diseases. Through neuroimaging, shared neural correlates have been increasingly identified across major psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder. While subtypes within and across psychiatric diagnoses have been identified, the biological underpinnings remain unclear. This study aimed to uncover these hidden “biotypes,” focusing particularly on brain inflammation—a mechanism thought to drive illness in a subset of patients, but which is difficult to measure directly in the living brain.

The research was conducted in two independent cohorts. In the first stage, brain connectivity scans were combined with blood-based molecular (DNA methylation) data to identify a brain network pattern linked to immune system dysfunction. In the second longitudinal stage, investigators validated that patients with this brain marker had higher blood inflammation indices—such as neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratios—and showed less improvement with conventional treatments during hospitalization.

Different Autism Mutations Can Lead to Similar Brain Changes

The shared pathways were linked to neuron maturation, synapse formation, and the control of gene activity. Further analysis pointed to a group of genes involved in organizing DNA and regulating which genes are switched on or off. These genes sit high in the regulatory chain, influencing many downstream processes previously linked to autism.

To test whether this network played an active role, the team reduced the activity of several key regulators using CRISPR-based methods in neural cells. This led to downstream changes similar to those seen in the autism models.

However, organoids from individuals with idiopathic autism showed less consistent changes, likely reflecting the complex and distributed genetic risk seen in most autism cases.

/* */