Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,841

Paris (AFP) — Scientists have developed a human embryo “blueprint” using human stem cells, in a breakthrough that could provide vital insight into the early stages of infant development, new research showed Thursday.

Teams from the University of Cambridge and the Netherlands-based Hubrecht Institute said their model will allow them to observe never-before-seen processes underlying the formation of the human body.

The layout of humans — known as the body plan — happens through a process known as gastrulation, where three distinct layers of cells are formed in the embryo that will later give rise to the body’s three main systems: nervous, musculoskeletal and digestive.

Read more | >

“The operation is believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S. The patient, a woman in her 20s, had been healthy, but the coronavirus devastated her lungs.”

A young woman whose lungs were destroyed by the coronavirus received a double lung transplant last week at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, the hospital reported on Thursday, the first known lung transplant in the United States for Covid-19.

The 10-hour surgery was more difficult and took several hours longer than most lung transplants because inflammation from the disease had left the woman’s lungs “completely plastered to tissue around them, the heart, the chest wall and diaphragm,” said Dr. Ankit Bharat, the chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the lung transplant program at Northwestern Medicine, which includes Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in an interview.

He said the patient, a woman in her 20s who had no serious underlying medical conditions, was recovering well: “She’s awake, she’s smiling, she FaceTimed with her family.”

Read more | >

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals announced Thursday that it’s started the first clinical trial of its experimental coronavirus antibody drug.

The antibody cocktail is being tested in four human populations. Two groups of people will receive the drug to test its effectiveness as a treatment for Covid-19; the other two will receive it as a possible prevention.

“We’ll be hopefully to quickly test the safety and then start understanding the efficacy for four major different settings of this virus challenge,” Regeneron’s chief scientific officer, Dr. George Yancopoulos, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Yancopoulos said he thinks that, “if all goes well,” the company could have “definitive data” within a few months on the effectiveness of the antibody cocktail.

“I think there’s a lot of reason for hope,” Yancopoulos said, noting the company’s work on Ebola. But he also stressed the unpredictable nature of science and biology, saying “there’s always reasons to be concerned and to be cautious.” “So we’re going to be moving forward very carefully, hand-in-hand in with the FDA, and we hope sooner rather than later we can get answers that can really make a difference,” he said.

Regeneron is the latest company to begin trials for a potential Covid-19 therapy. Eli Lilly, which began trials of its antibody drug earlier this month, said a treatment could be authorized, if all goes well, for use as early as September. In scientific trials so far, Gilead Sciences’s antiviral remdesivir is the only drug to show some effectiveness in treating the disease. There are more than 7.4 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the world, including over 2 million in the U.S., according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 417,100 people have died worldwide, with over a quarter of the fatalities in the U.S. Regeneron’s drug is being tested on four distinct types of patients, including “the sickest patients” who are hospitalized and on a ventilator or oxygen support, Yancopoulos said. It’s also being tested to see whether it can prevent high-risk people from contracting the disease, such as health-care workers. The drug, known as REGN-COV2, is a combination of two antibodies. Yancopoulos said Regeneron firmly believes this is the correct approach to treat Covid-19 when using antibodies.

“Just like with conventional, old fashion antiviral drugs, giving one can have enormous benefit initially but it can lead to the selection and the arise of escaped viral mutants, which can could be very dangerous and risky,” he said. “What we showed is that in order to prevent this, you have to give these antibodies in cocktails.”

Continue reading “Regeneron sees ‘a lot of reason for hope’ as human testing of its coronavirus drug begins” | >

Recent therapeutic trials of “classical” psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin (from magic mushrooms) or LSD, have reported benefits to wellbeing, depression and anxiety. These effects seem to be linked to a sense of “ego dissolution” — a dissolving of the subjective boundaries between the self and the wider world. However, the neurochemistry behind this effect has been unclear. Now a new paper, published in Neuropsychopharmacology, suggests that changes in brain levels of the neurotransmitter glutamate are key to understanding reports of ego dissolution — and perhaps the therapeutic effects of psychedelics.

Natasha Mason at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, and colleagues recruited 60 participants for their study. All had taken a psychedelic drug before, but not in the three months prior to the study. Half received a placebo and the other half were given a low to moderate dose of psilocybin (0.17 mg/kg of body weight).

The team then used a technique called proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to look at concentrations of glutamate (as well as other neurochemicals) in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the hippocampus — two regions that have been implicated as key to the psychedelic drug experience. The team also looked at patterns of “functional connectivity” within networks of brain regions, a measure of how closely correlated brain activity is across those regions. Six hours after taking the drug or placebo, the participants reported on their subjective experiences using two surveys: The 5 Dimensions of Altered States of Consciousness and the Ego Dissolution Inventory.

As the researchers expected (based on the findings of earlier research), those given the drug reported increased feelings of ego dissolution, as well as altered states of consciousness. They also showed disruptions in the connectivity of particular networks, including the default mode network, which has also been implicated in past work on the effects of psychedelic drugs…

But, for the first time in humans, the team also observed higher levels of glutamate in the mPFC and lower levels in the hippocampus after taking psilocybin — and they linked these changes to different aspects of ego dissolution. Increases in the mPFC were most strongly linked to unpleasant aspects, such as a loss of control over thoughts and decision-making, and also anxiety. Decreases in the hippocampus, meanwhile, were most strongly linked to more positive aspects, such as feelings of unity with the wider world, and of having undergone a spiritual-type experience.

The hippocampus is our most important memory structure. Based on earlier work on the impacts of psychedelic drugs on patterns of brain connectivity, it’s been suggested that a temporary reduction or loss of access to memories about our own lives might contribute to a weakening of the “self”. The new work suggests that changes in glutamate levels in the hippocampus might be key to this process.

But if glutamate rises in the mPFC are linked to unpleasant aspects of ego dissolution, and also to anxiety, how does this fit in with trial results finding that psychedelic drugs can treat anxiety disorders?

Continue reading “Psilocybin Alters Brain Levels Of The Neurotransmitter Glutamate — And This Could Explain Why Users Experience “Ego Dissolution”” | >

Yay I can ride a trex or something: p.

Jurassic Park eat your heart out. The smallest dinosaur on record has been found stuck in amber. When we think about dinosaurs, the creatures we picture are usually quite large, such as the Apatosaurus or the T-Rex. We know others are smaller, such as Velociraptors, but even those were around 180 pounds. Some dinosaurs were a lot smaller than that, a fact which recently demonstrated when scientists recently reported finding the smallest dinosaur ever discovered, trapped in a chunk of amber, according to the BBC. The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature.

The fossil was found in northern Myanmar, in a piece of amber that is approximately 99 million years old. It is the skull of a dinosaur that resembled a bird, and its size suggests that the entire creature would only have been about as large as a bee hummingbird, the smallest bird currently living.

Even other small dinosaurs, such as the Microraptor, were still a couple of feet in size and could weigh between two and three pounds. This new find, however could have only weighed a couple of grams. Its diminutive size may help researchers gain some insight about how small birds evolved from larger dinosaurs. According to Jingmai O’Connor from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, there are problems that are very particular to creatures of that size, including staying warm and how to fit all the necessary sensory organs into such a small head.

Read more | >

Researchers at the Nanoscience Center and at the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland have demonstrated that new distance-based machine learning methods developed at the University of Jyväskylä are capable of predicting structures and atomic dynamics of nanoparticles reliably. The new methods are significantly faster than traditional simulation methods used for nanoparticle research and will facilitate more efficient explorations of particle-particle reactions and particles’ functionality in their environment. The study was published in a Special Issue devoted to machine learning in the Journal of Physical Chemistry on May 15, 2020.

The new methods were applied to ligand-stabilized metal , which have been long studied at the Nanoscience Center at the University of Jyväskylä. Last year, the researchers published a method that is able to successfully predict binding sites of the stabilizing ligand molecules on the nanoparticle surface. Now, a new tool was created that can reliably predict based on the atomic structure of the particle, without the need to use numerically heavy electronic structure computations. The tool facilitates Monte Carlo simulations of the atom dynamics of the particles at elevated temperatures.

Potential energy of a system is a fundamental quantity in computational nanoscience, since it allows for quantitative evaluations of system’s stability, rates of chemical reactions and strengths of interatomic bonds. Ligand-stabilized metal nanoparticles have many types of interatomic bonds of varying chemical strength, and traditionally the energy evaluations have been done by using the so-called density functional theory (DFT) that often results in numerically heavy computations requiring the use of supercomputers. This has precluded efficient simulations to understand nanoparticles’ functionalities, e.g., as catalysts, or interactions with biological objects such as proteins, viruses, or DNA. Machine learning methods, once trained to model the systems reliably, can speed up the simulations by several orders of magnitude.

Read more | >

She cooked up Italian food to protect her noodle!

A 60-year-old woman from the country’s Marche region prepared dozens of delicious stuffed olives while undergoing brain surgery — to reduce the risk of damaging the vital organ, according to a report Wednesday.

As doctors removed a brain tumor from her left temporal lobe, the unnamed patient whipped up 90 of the breaded-and-fried olives in a makeshift kitchen inside the operating room, according to the BBC.

Read more | >

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tells me that despite the pandemic, the agency will do its utmost to meet the 2024 Artemis lunar return deadline.

“We continue to assess the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on our missions, but we strongly believe that we can still meet the goal of landing the first woman and the next man on the Moon in 2024,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told me via a headquarters’ spokesperson.

Yet NASA has also experienced shakeups in its human spaceflight directorate that could hinder meeting Artemis’ goals. Case in point, Doug Laverro, Associate Administrator of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, departed less than a month ago.

Read more | >

Although many animals have evolved intrinsic transparency for the purpose of concealment, the development of dynamic, that is, controllable and reversible, transparency for living human cells and tissues has remained elusive to date. Here, by drawing inspiration from the structures and functionalities of adaptive cephalopod skin cells, we design and engineer human cells that contain reconfigurable protein-based photonic architectures and, as a result, possess tunable transparency-changing and light-scattering capabilities. Our findings may lead to the development of unique biophotonic tools for applications in materials science and bioengineering and may also facilitate an improved understanding of a wide range of biological systems.

Read more | >