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Category: biotech/medical – Page 19

Immunotherapy drug eliminates aggressive cancers in clinical trial

Over the past 20 years, a class of cancer drugs called CD40 agonist antibodies have shown great promise—and induced great disappointment. While effective at activating the immune system to kill cancer cells in animal models, the drugs had limited impact on patients in clinical trials and caused dangerously systemic inflammatory responses, low platelet counts, and liver toxicity, among other adverse reactions—even at a low dose.

But in 2018, the lab of Rockefeller University’s Jeffrey V. Ravetch demonstrated it could engineer an enhanced CD40 agonist antibody so that it improved its efficacy and could be administered in a manner to limit serious side effects. The findings came from research on mice, genetically engineered to mimic the pathways relevant in humans. The next step was to have a clinical trial to see the drug’s impact on cancer patients.

Now the results from the phase 1 clinical trial of the drug, dubbed 2141-V11, have been published in Cancer Cell. Of 12 patients, six patients saw their tumors shrink, including two who saw them disappear completely.

The researchers demonstrate that an engineered antibody improves a class of drugs that has struggled to make good on its early promise.

AI can find cancer pathologists miss

Men assessed as healthy after a pathologist analyses their tissue sample may still have an early form of prostate cancer. Using AI, researchers at Uppsala University have been able to find subtle tissue changes that allow the cancer to be detected long before it becomes visible to the human eye.

Previous research has demonstrated that AI is able to detect tissue changes indicative of cancer. In the current study, published in Scientific Reports, the researchers show that AI can also find cancers missed by pathologists.

“The study has been nicknamed the ‘missed study’, as the goal of finding the cancer was ‘missed’ by the pathologists. We have now shown that with the help of AI, it is possible to find signs of prostate cancer that were not observed by pathologists in more than 80 per cent of samples from men who later developed cancer,” says Carolina Wählby, who led the AI development in the study.

“When we looked at the patterns that the AI ranked as informative, we saw changes in the tissue surrounding the glands in the prostate”, says Carolina Wählby. Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt.

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s rBio uses virtual cells to train AI, bypassing lab work

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced Thursday the launch of rBio, the first artificial intelligence model trained to reason about cellular biology using virtual simulations rather than requiring expensive laboratory experiments — a breakthrough that could dramatically accelerate biomedical research and drug discovery.

The reasoning model, detailed in a research paper published on bioRxiv, demonstrates a novel approach called “soft verification” that uses predictions from virtual cell models as training signals instead of relying solely on experimental data. This paradigm shift could help researchers test biological hypotheses computationally before committing time and resources to costly laboratory work.

Groundbreaking new cancer detection replaces toxic compounds with diamonds

Scientists have developed a diamond-based sensor that could make it easier for doctors to detect the spread of cancer.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have created a handheld device that is designed to trace tiny magnetic particles injected into the body.

The scientists said this offers a non-toxic alternative to radioactive tracers and dyes currently used in hospitals.

Cold plasma penetrates deep into tissue to fight cancer

Researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology (INP) have collaborated with partners at Greifswald University Hospital and University Medical Center Rostock to demonstrate that cold plasma can effectively combat tumor cells even in deeper tissue layers.

What is particularly noteworthy is that, by developing new models, they were able to precisely investigate the effect of individual plasma components on tumor cells for the first time. The research is published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology.

Scientists solve 30-year mystery of a hidden nutrient that shields the brain and fights cancer

Scientists have finally uncovered the missing link in how our bodies absorb queuosine, a rare micronutrient crucial for brain health, memory, stress response, and cancer defense. For decades, researchers suspected a transporter had to exist, but it remained elusive—until now.

Zooming in reveals a world of detail: Protein mapping technique reveals inner workings of cells

In the past decade, there has been significant interest in studying the expression of our genetic code down to the level of single cells, to identify the functions and activities of any cell through the course of health or disease.

The identity of a cell, and the way that identity can go awry, is critical to its role in many of the biggest health challenges we face, including cancer, neurodegeneration, or genetic and developmental disorders. Zooming in on single cells allows us to tell the difference between variants which would otherwise be lost in the average of a region. This is essential for finding new medical solutions to diseases.

Most single-cell gene expression experiments make use of a technology called single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), which produces a map of exactly which genes are being copied out into short “transcripts” inside the nucleus. However, scRNA-seq only gives us a window into the intermediate step between the genetic code and the proteins which take care of (almost) all the tasks inside our bodies.

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