Significant advances have been made in the development of patient-derived tumor organoids for preclinical research, in two new studies led by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 16
Blurred genome boundaries emerge as a new layer of Alzheimer’s biology
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Washington have shed new light on Alzheimer’s disease that could point to new directions for treatment.
In a paper published in Science, researchers from SCS’s Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department, Pitt’s Department of Neurobiology and collaborating institutions show that 3D genome architecture is organized differently in certain brain cells from people with Alzheimer’s disease, uncovering a previously underexplored layer of the disease’s biology.
The research team linked genome folding to gene activity and brain tissue organization in Alzheimer’s disease. The team did this with single-cell technology, spatial mapping of brain tissue and a new deep-learning model.
The perfect pesticide?
A native of the Rocky Mountains, the beetle now occurs across the Northern Hemisphere, causing more than half a billion dollars of crop losses each year. It’s a master of resistance, making it hard to control. The pest was an early driver of research into chemical pesticides starting in the 1930s. Ever since, it has evolved immunity to one compound after another—now more than 50 pesticides, representing all major types of active ingredients.
“They were chewing through treated plants like it was nothing,” Andrei Alyokhin, an entomologist at the University of Maine, says of the moment, in 2001, when farmers in Maine noticed that a still-new class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, were no longer controlling the beetle. Finding additional tools has been “increasingly difficult,” he adds.
This year, however, U.S. farmers will have a new weapon against the pest, one that works in an entirely different way from traditional pesticides and that proponents say should be safer for people and the environment. Based on a mechanism called RNA interference (RNAi), the spray targets a vital gene in the Colorado potato beetle. The gene target is unique to the pest and its close relatives, which should prevent damage to pollinators and other species. “You can … hit the insect you want to kill with precision,” says Subba Reddy Palli, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who published a review last year in Frontiers in Insect Science describing the development of RNA-based pesticides. “You cannot get anything better than this.”
Artery-on-a-chip helps predict stroke risk
Predicting an individual’s risk of ischemic stroke is difficult because thrombosis embolization—the process of a blood clot detaching from the area where it formed, traveling and then sticking in another blood vessel—is based on factors unique to each person.
In a study published in Cell Biomaterials, researchers developed a tool to address this challenge: an artery-on-a-chip platform that can replicate a patient’s specific vascular structure and blood flow dynamics, called a “physical twin.”
“This idea was born out of a critical clinical gap,” says author Lining Arnold Ju of the University of Sydney in Australia. “We know that even patients at ‘low risk’ can suffer from severe or fatal strokes. We wanted to find a better way to predict this risk.”
Premature blood stem cell aging in sickle cell disease may be reversible
Sickle cell disease causes premature aging of blood stem cells, which scientists may be able to address with a special class of drugs, according to a new study from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Patients with sickle cell disease experience higher rates of blood stem cell dysfunction and blood cancers compared with their peers, though the reason has been unclear.
The St. Jude researchers found that blood stem cells from young patients with sickle cell disease have features of aging, likely increasing the risk of other complications. Giving senolytics, which target aging-related processes, improved disease symptoms in model systems, with implications for curative gene therapies. The findings were published in Science Translational Medicine.
“We saw that blood stem cells from even young patients with sickle cell disease have many markers of senescence or aging,” said senior co-corresponding author Shannon McKinney-Freeman, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Hematology.
Ancient molecule made inside tumors drives immune response, study finds
An ancient molecule that existed long before the circulatory system evolved has been found to support cancer immunotherapy. Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan found that complement C3 protein acts inside tumors to prevent the accumulation of immunosuppressive cells, but only when produced inside the tumor. C3 circulating in the blood did not affect treatment outcomes.
Published in Nature Communications, the findings suggest that artificially recreating this effect can help patients with tumors that do not naturally produce enough of this protein.
Nanopores can activate human T cells without biochemical signals
Immune cells protect and heal the human body. In medicine, they are specifically activated through biochemical reactions to treat certain diseases. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, ETH Zurich, Humboldt University of Berlin, Charité Berlin and Inselspital Bern have now discovered that immune cells also respond to the surface structure of materials —without chemistry.
This finding opens up new possibilities for effective cancer and immunotherapies as well as implantology. The study is published in the journal ACS Nano.
T cells are important defense cells of the human immune system. They travel through the body, constantly scanning their environment like tiny sensors. On their surface, they have tiny protrusions with receptors—called microvilli—that allow them to identify harmful pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, foreign substances or even altered cells of the body’s own tissues.
A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution
From the article:
“In a 2024 Science study, researchers performed a high-resolution EM reconstruction of the ultrastructure of a cubic millimeter of human temporal cortex. According to the authors, the reconstruction contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150 million synapses, comprising 1,400 terabytes of data.”
This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot.
