Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,917

Now, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a way to use gene editing system CRISPR-Cas9 to edit a mutation in human-induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and then turn them into beta cells. When transplanted into mice, the cells reversed preexisting diabetes in a lasting way, according to results published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

While the researchers used cells from patients with Wolfram syndrome—a rare childhood diabetes caused by mutations in the WFS1 gene—they argue that the combination of a gene therapy with stem cells could potentially treat other forms of diabetes as well.

Virtual Event

Read more | >

Capping decades of research, a new study may offer a breakthrough in treating dyskeratosis congenita and other so-called telomere diseases, in which cells age prematurely. Using cells donated by patients with the disease, researchers at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center identified several small molecules that appear to reverse this cellular aging process. Suneet Agarwal, MD, Ph.D., the study’s senior investigator, hopes at least one of these compounds will advance toward clinical trials. Findings were published April 21 in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

If so, it could be the first treatment for dyskeratosis congenita, or DC, that could reverse all of the disease’s varying effects on the body. The current treatment, , is high-risk, and only helps restore the blood system, whereas DC affects multiple organs.

Read more | >

Engineering researchers developed a next-generation miniature lab device that uses magnetic nano-beads to isolate minute bacterial particles that cause diseases. Using this new technology improves how clinicians isolate drug-resistant strains of bacterial infections and difficult-to-detect micro-particles such as those making up Ebola and coronaviruses.

Ke Du and Blanca Lapizco-Encinas, both faculty-researchers in Rochester Institute of Technology’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, worked with an international team to collaborate on the design of the new system — a microfluidic device, essentially a lab-on-a-chip.

Drug-resistant bacterial infections are causing hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world every year, and this number is continuously increasing. Based on a report from the United Nations, the deaths caused by antibiotics resistance could reach to 10 million annually by 2050, Du explained.

Read more | >

A drug that has shown promising results against coronavirus is going to be tested in four hospitals in Israel as part of a global clinical trial involving around forty clinical centers.

The drug, Selinexor, or XPOVIO as it is currently marketed in the US, has been developed by oncology-focused pharmaceutical company Karyopharm Therapeutics. Co-founded by Israeli scientist Sharon Shacham in 2008, the company is based in the US but maintains a regional office in Israel.

XPOVIO was developed for treating patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. It is FDA approved for this purpose. However, it has the potential to be a tool to fight the coronavirus, and clinical trials are needed to assess its effectiveness, according to Anat Haas Mizrahi, Karyopharm’s Israel general manager; and Dayana Michel, its senior medical director.

“In our research, we are committed also to develop drugs for additional purposes,” Haas Mizrahi told The Jerusalem Post. “One of the studies was focused on viral diseases, and we tested the drug for several of them. When the coronavirus emerged, we decided to look into our data and information, and we realized that there was an option that could be applicable for treating COVID-19, so we started looking into it.”

About a month ago, the company began to work around the clock on the treatment, realizing that the drug had the potential to disrupt the replication of the virus and to mediate anti-inflammatory effects, including respiratory infections. Tests were carried out on several animal models.

Read more | >

Amazon is partnering with local grocery stores in India to let them sell goods through the company’s ecommerce platform. Under the “Local Shops on Amazon” program, the firm aims to bring small brick and mortar stores online.

The company said the project was in a pilot phase for the last six months with more than 5,000 stores onboard. Now, with the increasing demand for delivered groceries during the coronavirus pandemic, it has decided to formally launch the program. As a part of the launch, the Amazon is pumping ₹10 crores ($1.3 million) into this initiative.

[Read: Google Duo majorly improves low-bandwidth video quality with new codec].

Read more | >

COVID-19 has only been around for a few months, so at this point scientists don’t know that much about it. But more is being learned every day.

We now know, for example, it can live on surfaces for up to nine days and survives in the air for a few hours. We also now know that the virus particles are shed through saliva and fluids coughed up from the lungs. And that the virus can also be shed from our faeces.

It’s easy for an infected person to spread the virus particles through coughing, touching other people or leaving the virus on surfaces.

Read more | >

:ooooo.

At the beginning of March, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced a series of executive orders he hoped would help slow the spread, and subsequently mitigate the health impact, of COVID-19. One of those orders told Golden State residents to shelter-in-place. This order, set for two weeks, has been extended until May. Gov. Newsom has subsequently told residents that the process through which these public health safety measures will be loosened up is going to be deliberate, and done by degrees.

A study out of UC Davis in California says there is one silver lining to the shelter-in-place orders, though. According to researchers, the California highway patrol—who on average respond to more than 2,000 roadway “incidents” per day—have reported an enormous reduction in the daily rate of collisions. This means a lot less death and injury and a lot of public money saved.

UC Davis researchers found that the daily rate of collisions in California was cut in half after the order, and that cut closely matched the reduction in deaths and injuries connected to vehicular crashes. To this end, the study found that trauma centers reported a 40% reduction in people seen during this time, which includes pedestrians and cyclists involved in vehicular collisions. The savings to the public is estimated at about $40 million per day, adding up to around $1 billion in savings since the beginning of the shelter-in-place order.

Read more | >

The economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic has governments struggling with how to restart a global economy that has come to a grinding halt. Some short term needs have to be addressed as soon as possible — avoiding starvation, extending unemployment benefits, and arranging for emergency healthcare for those infected. But even as the world faces such daunting tasks, decisions made today will have enormous consequences for the future. While the emergency today is great, a much bigger emergency waits just around the corner as the Earth continues to overheat.

Governments in thrall to fossil fuel interests, such as the United States, see the virus as a chance to roll back advances in renewable energy. After all, the oil and gas industries provide for 10,000,000 jobs around the world. Surely those jobs must be protected, right?

Read more | >

An international team of researchers has found that an ancient crocodile relative underwent body transitions as it evolved from a land to a sea creature before its ears changed to suit an underwater environment. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their in-depth study of thalattosuchia skulls and what they found.

Thalattosuchia was an ancient crocodile species that lived in the world’s oceans over 150 million years ago. But before that, they were land-dwelling. Prior research has shown that they took to water in a much slower fashion than other creatures like whales, existing as semi-aquatic creatures for many years before becoming full-fledged sea creatures. Study of their fossilized remains has shown their front legs evolving to become fins, and their back legs evolving into a fluked tail. Their bodies grew slimmer and sleeker to so they could glide smoothly through the water. And once they became sea creatures, their changed to suit the new environment. One such organ was the inner ear. And it was this organ that was the focus of this new work.

To learn more about the evolution of thalattosuchia’s , the researchers conducted CAT scans on over a dozen skull fossils. They focused most specifically on the inner ear structures used to maintain balance and equilibrium in land creatures.

Read more | >

The common view of heredity is that all information passed down from one generation to the next is stored in an organism’s DNA. But Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, disagrees.

In two new papers, Jose argues that DNA is just the ingredient list, not the set of instructions used to build and maintain a living organism. The instructions, he says, are much more complicated, and they’re stored in the that regulate a cell’s DNA and other functioning systems.

Jose outlined a new theoretical framework for heredity, which was developed through 20 years of research on genetics and epigenetics, in peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface and the journal BioEssays. Both papers were published on April 22, 2020.

Read more | >