The new issue of Stanford Medicine magazine highlights new paths for chronic disease prevention, management and care.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 195
Unlocking the immune system’s instruction manual: How T follicular helper cells mount a flexible response
Scientists have uncovered how a key type of immune cell adapts its behavior depending on the type of infection, paving the way for better vaccines and advancing research into immune-related diseases.
In their study published in Nature Immunology, a WEHI-led research team has revealed how T follicular helper (Tfh) cells tailor their instructions to the immune system depending on the pathogen they encounter.
The findings shed light on the molecular “instruction manual” that guides antibody production and long-term immunity, offering new tools to improve vaccine design and develop targeted therapies for immune-related conditions and other major health challenges, including cancer.
Visualization of blood flow sharpens artificial heart design
Using magnetic cameras, researchers at Linköping University have examined blood flow in an artificial heart in real time. The results make it possible to design the heart in a way to reduce the risk of blood clots and red blood cell breakdown, a common problem in today’s artificial hearts.
The study, published in Scientific Reports, was done in collaboration with the company Scandinavian Real Heart AB, which is developing an artificial heart.
“The heart is a muscle that never rests. It can never rest. The heart can beat for a hundred years without being serviced or stopping even once. But constructing a pump that can function in the same way—that’s a challenge,” says Tino Ebbers, professor of physiology at Linköping University.
Home high-intensity aerobic training outperforms balance training for cerebellar ataxias
Columbia University Medical Center-led research reports that home high-intensity aerobic training improved ataxia symptoms, fatigue, and aerobic fitness more than dose-matched home balance training in individuals with cerebellar ataxias.
Cerebellar ataxias are a group of different disorders marked by progressive loss of coordination that leads to disability. About 150,000 people in the US live with these conditions, with mean annual health care costs above $18,000 per person. Ongoing trials are searching for treatments that slow disease progression and improve functional abilities. Clinical practice guidelines advise balance training for cerebellar ataxia.
Previous work in ataxia has centered on balance-focused programs that can improve Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia (SARA) scores by 1.0 to 2.8 points when exercises are sufficiently challenging, a range that meets or exceeds the minimal clinically significant difference of 1.0 point.
Groove is in the brain: Music supercharges brain stimulation
Music affects us so deeply that it can essentially take control of our brain waves and get our bodies moving. Now, neuroscientists at Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute are taking advantage of music’s power to synchronize brain waves to boost the effectiveness of a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a promising tool for both basic brain research and treating neuropsychiatric disorders.
Specifically, institute affiliate Jessica Ross and colleagues used TMS pulses to induce movements in people’s hands—a common testing ground for new ideas in the field. By carefully timing those pulses to music, the team found they could double the impact of TMS.
“Because there’s this really strong connection to movement, music can engage motor pathways in the brain. If you’re listening to a certain kind of rhythm, there are going to be very specific times at which your brain is most ready for the TMS effect,” said Ross, an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford Medicine.
Smart device uses AI and bioelectronics to speed up wound healing process
As a wound heals, it goes through several stages: clotting to stop bleeding, immune system response, scabbing, and scarring. A wearable device called “a-Heal,” designed by engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, aims to optimize each stage of the process. The system uses a tiny camera and AI to detect the stage of healing and deliver a treatment in the form of medication or an electric field. The system responds to the unique healing process of the patient, offering personalized treatment.
The portable, wireless device could make wound therapy more accessible to patients in remote areas or with limited mobility. Initial preclinical results, published in the journal npj Biomedical Innovations, show the device successfully speeds up the healing process.
Cytokine Profile in Predicting the Effectiveness of Advanced Therapy for Ulcerative Colitis: A Narrative Review
Cytokine-targeted therapies have shown efficacy in treating patients with ulcerative colitis (UC), but responses to these advanced therapies can vary. This variability may be due to differences in cytokine profiles among patients with UC. While the etiology of UC is not fully understood, abnormalities of the cytokine profiles are deeply involved in its pathophysiology. Therefore, an approach focused on the cytokine profile of individual patients with UC is ideal. Recent studies have demonstrated that molecular analysis of cytokine profiles in UC can predict response to each advanced therapy. This narrative review summarizes the molecules involved in the efficacy of various advanced therapies for UC. Understanding these associations may be helpful in selecting optimal therapeutic agents.
A more precise CRISPR platform enables large-scale gene screening in live mouse brains
Over the past few decades, biomedical researchers and neuroscientists have devised increasingly advanced techniques to study and alter neurophysiological processes. These include CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a sophisticated tool to edit specific genes in some animals, including mice, rats, zebrafish and fruit flies.
Researchers at University of California, San Francisco led by Martin Kampmann recently introduced a more precise CRISPR screening platform that can be applied directly in living tissue, enabling the screening of a larger number of genes at once. The new technique, called CRISPR screening by AAV episome sequencing (CrAAVe-seq), was introduced in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience.
“Human cell-based systems are valuable but cannot fully capture the complexity of the brain,” Biswa Ramani, co-first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “Mice often remain the most effective model for many neurological diseases because their brains preserve the diversity and organization of cell types that cannot be replicated in a dish.”