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Category: biotech/medical – Page 200

Laser-based analytical platform enhances CAR T cell therapy manufacturing and effectiveness

A team of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC has developed an advanced tool for analyzing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, including how they evolve during manufacturing and which ones are most effective at killing cancer. Using the platform, which leverages a laser-based technology known as spectral flow cytometry, researchers have already found one key insight: CAR T cells are better equipped to fight cancer after a shorter five-day expansion process than at the 10-day mark.

The study was just published in the 25th anniversary special issue of Molecular Therapy.

CAR T cell therapies, which reprogram a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and attack cancer, represent a major advance in treating blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. But not all patients respond equally well, and researchers believe one key to optimizing treatment is to understand how various T-cell features relate to patient outcomes down the line.

Fasting-Style Diet Seems to Result in Dynamic Changes in Human Brains

Scientists looking to tackle our ongoing obesity crisis have made an important discovery: Intermittent calorie restriction leads to significant changes both in the gut and the brain, which may open up new options for maintaining a healthy weight.

Researchers from China studied 25 volunteers classed as obese over a period of 62 days, during which they took part in an intermittent energy restriction (IER) program – a regime that involves careful control of calorie intake and relative fasting on some days.

Not only did the participants in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 percent of their body weight on average – there was also evidence of shifts in the activity of obesity-related regions of the brain, and in the make-up of gut bacteria.

How calcium may have unlocked the origins of life’s molecular asymmetry

A new study led by researchers at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Institute of Science, Tokyo, has uncovered a surprising role for calcium in shaping life’s earliest molecular structures. Their findings suggest that calcium ions can selectively influence how primitive polymers form, shedding light on a long-standing mystery: how life’s molecules came to prefer a single “handedness” (chirality).

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Like our left and right hands, many molecules exist in two mirror-image forms. Yet life on Earth has a striking preference: DNA’s sugars are right-handed, while proteins are built from left-handed . This phenomenon, called homochirality, is essential for life as we know it—but how it first emerged remains a major puzzle in origins of life research.

Hypoxic Preconditioning Enhances the Potential of Mesenchymal Stem Cells to Treat Neonatal Hypoxic-Ischemic Brain Injury

About 20% to 35% of the population suffers from chronic sleep disorders—and up to half of all people in older age. Moreover, almost every teenager or adult has experienced short-term sleep deprivation at some point. There are many reasons for not getting enough sleep, whether it be partying, a long day at work, caring for relatives, or simply whiling away time on smartphones.

In a recent meta-study, Jülich researchers have now been able to show that the involved in the short-term and long-term conditions differ significantly. The results of the study were published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

“Poor sleep is one of the most important—but changeable—risk factors for in adolescents and ,” says Jülich researcher and Privatdozent Dr. Masoud Tahmasian, who coordinated the study. In contrast, long-term pathological sleep disorders, such as insomnia, obstructive sleep apnea, narcolepsy, and short-term sleep deprivation, are located in different parts of the brain.

Brain-computer interface allows paralyzed users to customize their sense of touch

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists are one step closer to developing a brain-computer interface, or BCI, that allows people with tetraplegia to restore their lost sense of touch.

While exploring a digitally represented object through their artificially created sense of touch, users described the warm fur of a purring cat, the smooth rigid surface of a door key and the cool roundness of an apple. This research, a collaboration between Pitt and the University of Chicago, is published in Nature Communications.

In contrast to earlier experiments where artificial touch often felt like indistinct buzzing or tingling and didn’t vary from object to object, scientists gave BCI users control over the details of the electrical stimulation that creates tactile sensations, rather than making those decisions themselves. This key innovation allowed participants to recreate a sense of touch that felt intuitive to them.

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