A recent study published in JAMA Neurology identifies certain neurological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease in the brains of older adults with sleep apnea.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,070
Experimental Drug Blocks Growth of SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus in Cell Cultures and Organoids
A trial drug called APN01 or human recombinant soluble ACE2 (hrsACE2) can significantly block early stages of SARS-CoV-2 infections, according to a paper published in the journal Cell.
‘We can’t go back to normal’: how will coronavirus change the world?
Because crises shape history, there are hundreds of thinkers who have devoted their lives to studying how they unfold. This work – what we might call the field of “crisis studies” – charts how, whenever crisis visits a given community, the fundamental reality of that community is laid bare. Who has more and who has less. Where the power lies. What people treasure and what they fear.
Times of upheaval are always times of radical change. Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future. Others fear it may only make existing injustices worse. By Peter C Baker.
VA struggles to fill hospital jobs; it has 49,000 openings across the country
Staffing shortages amid the 386,000 VA employees are “a root cause for many of the problems in veterans’ care,” said Inspector General Michael Missal.
There are two main reasons for the shortages — low salaries and a lack of qualified applicants, with the former leading to the latter.
Consider this item from the report: VA “medical center directors make approximately 25% of a private sector hospital chief executive officer salary yet have a greater scope of responsibility.” Top pay for a VA medical center director is $201,900.
Scientists Are Printing Living “Xenobots” out of Biological Cells
Designer Babies
Xenobots, which were first brought to life back in January, can’t reproduce. Instead, computer scientists program them in a virtual environment and then 3D print their creations out of embryonic cells.
“We are witnessing almost the birth of a new discipline of synthetic organisms,” Columbia University roboticist Hod Lipson, who was not part of the research team, told the NYT. “I don’t know if that’s robotics, or zoology or something else.”
Jeff Bezos’ space company is pressuring employees to launch a tourist rocket during the pandemic
Employees at Jeff Bezos’ aerospace firm Blue Origin are outraged that senior leadership is pressuring workers to conduct a test launch of the company’s New Shepard rocket — designed to take wealthy tourists into space — while the COVID-19 pandemic devastates the United States.
To conduct the flight, Blue Origin officials are considering transporting employees from the company’s main headquarters in Kent, Washington — a town near Seattle where COVID-19 cases have surged — to a small town in West Texas called Van Horn. The town, which has a population of just over 2,000, is home to Blue Origin’s test launch facility where the company has conducted all past flights of the New Shepard rocket.
Many employees fear that traveling to Van Horn might expose them to the novel coronavirus and inadvertently introduce COVID-19 to the residents of the rural town where there is very little infrastructure to handle an outbreak. The Verge spoke exclusively with four Blue Origin employees who all asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the company. They say they are frustrated by the company’s desire to conduct a launch, as it could unnecessarily jeopardize the health of employees at Blue Origin and residents of Van Horn.
The FDA-approved Drug Ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro
Shared by Michael Michalchik
Ivermectin is an inhibitor of the COVID-19 causative virus (SARS-CoV-2) in vitro.
• A single treatment able to effect ∼5000-fold reduction in virus at 48h in cell culture.
• Ivermectin is FDA-approved for parasitic infections, and therefore has a potential for repurposing.
• Ivermectin is widely available, due to its inclusion on the WHO model list of essential medicines.
Although several clinical trials are now underway to test possible therapies, the worldwide response to the COVID-19 outbreak has been largely limited to monitoring/containment. We report here that Ivermectin, an FDA-approved anti-parasitic previously shown to have broad-spectrum anti-viral activity in vitro, is an inhibitor of the causative virus (SARS-CoV-2), with a single addition to Vero-hSLAM cells 2 hours post infection with SARS-CoV-2 able to effect ∼5000-fold reduction in viral RNA at 48 h. Ivermectin therefore warrants further investigation for possible benefits in humans.
‘Rebooting the brain’: Our fight to bring people back from the dead
Studies of hibernating animals suggest that the molecular and synaptic integrity of neurons in the cerebral cortex that underlie self and consciousness is maintained in many cases when from the outside the brain appears dead.
A striking feature of medicine over the past few centuries has been our growing ability to bring people back from the “dead.” For most of human history, patients who were unconscious and not breathing were treated as though they had died. But the concept of resuscitation emerged as doctors grew to understand the basic function of the lungs and airways. That led to new techniques and tools capable of restoring both breathing and heartbeat — and the realization that cardiac arrest was not always a death sentence. That, in turn, gave rise to a distinction between what’s now called clinical death versus brain death.
Today that brain focus continues, but with a growing glimmer of hope that even brain death might be reversible in some instances. These dreams are fueled by research showing that the disappearance of brain function is not the same as deletion of computer files. Rather, it represents a deterioration of the pathways that normally enable different parts of the brain to communicate. This idea was bolstered recently with the 2017 success in France, where a patient was partially revived from a 15-year vegetative state. It also dovetails with insights from the study of hibernating animals.
Medical magic: Expansion of resuscitation of capability over the centuries
Resuscitation entered the field of medicine beginning in the 1500s, not surprisingly with practices that may have helped victims occasionally, but with a low success rate. Such practices included flagellation, and were based on experience rather than an understanding of the underlying physiological processes. This started to change with the use of air bellows, based on an understanding that air needed to flow in and out of the lungs. But the 1740s, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was standard practice in France for resuscitating drowning victims.