Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins has died at the age of 90 after a battle with cancer, his family confirmed Wednesday morning.
Collins was part of the three-man crew that made history with the lunar landing in 1969, but unlike Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, he never walked on the moon.
Fixing traumatic injuries to the skin and bones of the face and skull is difficult because of the many layers of different types of tissues involved, but now, researchers have repaired such defects in a rat model using bioprinting during surgery, and their work may lead to faster and better methods of healing skin and bones.
“This work is clinically significant,” said Ibrahim T. Ozbolat, Hartz Family Career Development Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Biomedical Engineering and Neurosurgery, Penn State. “Dealing with composite defects, fixing hard and soft tissues at once, is difficult. And for the craniofacial area, the results have to be esthetically pleasing.”
Currently, fixing a hole in the skull involving both bone and soft tissue requires using bone from another part of the patient’s body or a cadaver. The bone must be covered by soft tissue with blood flow, also harvested from somewhere else, or the bone will die. Then surgeons need to repair the soft tissue and skin.
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Cidara Therapeutics inked a deal worth up to $780 million with Johnson & Johnson to develop and commercialize Cidara’s candidate CD388 for the prevention and treatment of seasonal and pandemic influenza.
San Diego-based Cidara Therapeutics will receive an upfront payment of $27 million from Janssen, a division of J&J for the development of CD388, one of Cidara’s Cloudbreak antiviral conjugates (AVCs). Cidara, which is focusing on the development of therapeutics for serious fungal or viral infections, said CD388 has the potential to be a true universal preventative for the flu, with distinct advantages over vaccines that can be used across all populations, including the young, elderly and immunocompromised. Additionally, the company believed CD388 is capable of providing protection from all influenza strains, including seasonal and pandemic influenza A, influenza B and all major clinically characterized drug resistant influenza strains. Not only that, but Cidara suggests CD388 could provide a therapeutic role, such as the widely-used Tamiflu.
A team from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), the Universitat de València (UV) and the Aiken Ophthalmic Clinic (through its Research Foundation) have designed and assessed in their laboratories a new groundbreaking implant, the only one in its kind, to correct presbyopia. As a result of the work of five years of research, they have created the first trifocal corneal inlay that is also fully transparent. Such an inlay would allow good eyesight to presbyopic people of objects located at several distances: far, intermediate (computer, mobile devices) and near. Their work has been published in Nature group’s Scientific Reports journal.
This inlay could be an alternative for those suffering from presbyopia who would rather not use glasses or contact lenses. Furthermore, it would be fully compatible with laser refractive surgery in myopic and hyperopic patients, as well as possible subsequent cataract interventions. We are suggesting something totally new that is also not incompatible with any other ocular therapy.
After four months of hand-wringing and a deep investigation into how a patient was diagnosed with cancer after getting uniQure’s hemophilia gene therapy, the FDA is allowing the trial to continue.
In December, the FDA put uniQure’s hemophilia B gene therapy on clinical hold in response to a case of hepatocellular carcinoma (a form of liver cancer) in a patient in the pivotal trial of etranacogene dezaparvovec.
UniQure and partner CSL Behring had already completed dosing in the affected studies, but the safety concern threatened the chances of the therapy in an indication targeted by Pfizer and Spark Therapeutics’ fidanacogene elaparvovec.
Why not add a light switch instead?
This month, a team from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) reimagined CRISPR to do just that. Rather than directly acting on genes—irrevocably dicing away or swapping genetic letters— the new CRISPR variant targets the biological machinery that naturally turns genes on or off.
Translation? CRISPR can now “flip a light switch” to control genes—without ever touching them directly. It gets better. The new tool, CRISPRoff, can cause a gene to stay silent for hundreds of generations, even when its host cells morph from stem cells into more mature cells, such as neurons. Once the “sleeping beauty” genes are ready to wake up, a complementary tool, CRISPRon, flips the light switch back on.
All brains shrink with age, and the dominant view has been that more education slows the rate of shrinking. However, the evidence has been inconclusive because studies have not been able to track the rate of change over time. Until now.
Measured brain shrinkage over time
A team of researchers measured brain aging by measuring the volume of the cortical mantle and hippocampus regions of the brain, in MRI scans from more than 2000 participants in the Lifebrain and UK biobanks. These areas of the brain are prone to shrinkage over time, as a natural part of aging. Participants’ brains were scanned up to three times over an 11 year period, in what is known as a ‘longitudinal’ study.
CEO of Turn. Bio at 3:40 talking about getting product to market in a few years rather than a decade.
#ERA #sebastiano #turnbio #krammer #stanford #healthspan #aging #longevity.
Ms. Anja Krammer, CEO of Turn Biotechnologies talks about the initial targets for ERA, the time line for clinical trials and FDA approval.
Turn Bio was co-founded by Dr. Vittorio Sebastiano to develop and market the Epigenetic Reprogramming of Aging technology that came out of his lab in Stanford University.
Ms. Krammer is a veteran of F500 healthcare and technology companies and co-founder of three Silicon Valley start ups. She is an entrepreneur who has built biotech, pharmaceutical and consumer businesses by assembling high-performance, results-driven teams and a counsellor to multiple enterprises, who has served on boards of public and private companies, industry organizations and foundation.
Turn Biotechnologies, Inc.
https://www.turn.bio/
Paper on ERA Technology.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15174-3
More papers by Dr. Sebastiano.
http://med.stanford.edu/sebastiano/publications.html
“While epidural stimulators have shown some degree of success with limb paralysis in research elsewhere, this is the first such study at the VA, explained Dr. Ashraf Gorgey, chief of spinal cord injury research at the Richmond hospital. Gorgey said the study has several goals: to see how well an epidural stimulator made by Medtronic for pain management can work on spinal cord injuries and to demonstrate the promise of the technology, which can be implanted with minimum surgery. “With this study, we might get companies like Medtronic and Boston Scientific to start creating something more specific for spinal cord injuries,” he said. “We also want to show that you don’t need invasive surgery to use this device. We use just a needle under fluoroscopy, and through the needle, we thread the leads in. On the same day Josh had his surgery, he was down in this room working out on the mat.””
That immediate change following the implant bolstered confidence in his decision to enroll in the research, he added.
When he is not at the VA — he spends 90 minutes there three times a week — Burch works with his brother, Travis, also a former Marine, renovating and flipping houses in Portsmouth, and he plays on two wheelchair rugby teams. He credits the sport, once known as murderball, and his teammates on the Oscar Mike Militia, an all-veterans team, for his recovery to date.
“The first tournament I ever went to, I had my mom with me because I couldn’t really do anything. And my teammates were like, ‘You gonna bring your mommy to every tournament?’ I was like, ‘OK, I need to learn to be independent,’” Burch said.