This post was prompted by a colleague sharing with me this recent study: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6389801/
The authors found that out of 516 studies evaluating the performance of ML algorithms for the diagnostic analysis of medical images, only 31 had externally validated their algorithms.
This should concern us all.
Circa 2015
ETH researchers have found an error-free way to store information in the form of DNA, potentially preserving it for millions of years: encapsulate the information-bearing segments of DNA in silica (glass), using an error-correcting information-encoding scheme.
Scrolls thousands of years old provide us with a glimpse into long-forgotten cultures and the knowledge of our ancestors. In this digital era, in contrast, a large part of our knowledge is located on servers and hard drives, which may not survive 50 years, let alone thousands of years. So researchers are searching for new ways to store large volumes of data over the long term.
Continue reading “How to store data error-free for millions of years” »
Some antidepressants could potentially be used to treat a wide range of diseases caused by bacteria living within cells, according to work by researchers in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine and collaborators at other institutions.
Research published in the April print edition of the journal Life Science Alliance, shows that antidepressant drugs called FIASMAs, including desipramine, amitriptyline, and nortriptyline, halt the growth or kill four different intracellular bacterial pathogens in tissue cell culture and animal models.
“Antibiotic options for diseases caused by intracellular bacteria are limited because many of these drugs cannot penetrate our cell membranes. In essence, the bacteria are protected,” said Jason Carlyon, Ph.D., leader of the study and professor in the VCU Department of Microbiology and Immunology.
The cells of most patients’ cancers are resistant to a class of drugs, called proteasome inhibitors, that should kill them. When studied in the lab, these drugs are highly effective, yet hundreds of clinical trials testing proteasome inhibitors have failed. Now scientists may have solved the mystery of these cells’ surprising hardiness. The key: Resistant cancer cells have shifted how and where they generate their energy. Using this new insight, researchers have identified a drug that resensitizes cancer cells to proteasome inhibitors and pinpointed a gene that is crucial for that susceptibility.
As cancer cells develop, they accrue multiple genetic alterations that allow the cells to quickly reproduce, spread and survive in distant parts of the body, and recruit surrounding cells and tissues to support the growing tumor. To perform these functions, cancer cells must produce high volumes of the proteins that support these processes. The increased protein production and numerous mutated proteins of cancer cells make them particularly dependent on the proteasome, which is the cell’s protein degradation machine. These huge protein complexes act as recycling machines, gobbling up unwanted proteins and dicing them into their amino acid building blocks, which can be reused for the production of other proteins.
Previously, researchers exploited cancer cells’ increased dependency on their proteasomes to develop anti-cancer therapies that inhibit the proteasomes’ function. Several distinct proteasome inhibitors have been developed, and when used in the lab, these proteasome inhibitor drugs are indeed highly effective at eradicating tumor cells. However, when administered to animal models or patients with cancer, such as multiple myeloma, proteasome inhibitors have limited efficacy and even initially vulnerable cancer cells quickly develop resistance to them. How do cancer cells so adroitly sidestep drugs that should kill them?
Continue reading “Drug-resistant cancer cells create own Achilles heel” »
Photo by Erin Ashford Yale University Principal Investigator: David Spiegel Research Team: Prof. Jason Crawford, Nam Kim, Venkata Sabbasani, Matthew Streeter The long-lived collagen proteins that give structure to our arteries and other tissues are continuously exposed to blood sugar and other highly reactive molecules necessary for life. Occasionally, …Glucosepane Crosslinks and Undoing Age-Related Tissue Damage.
Unregulated cell division is a hallmark of cancer, and one of the key proteins involved in controlling cell division is called FoxM1. Abnormal activation of FoxM1 is a common feature of cancer cells and is correlated with poor prognosis, metastasis, and resistance to chemotherapy.
Now researchers at UC Santa Cruz have determined the structure of this protein—a kind of “master switch” for cell division—in its inactive or “off” conformation. This new understanding of the structure of FoxM1 could ultimately be used to design new drugs that stabilize the protein in its inactive state and thereby stop the uncontrolled proliferation of cancer cells.
Seth Rubin, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz, explained that FoxM1 is a “transcription factor,” a protein that controls the activity of specific genes.
Continue reading “Study reveals structure of a ‘master switch’ controlling cell division” »
If you’re planning a trip to Hawaii, be mindful of what you eat, the state’s Department of Health states in an advisory published last week. Officials are ramping up efforts to warn tourists about rat lungworm disease, an illness caused by a parasite that can infest human brains. The advisory follows an alert from the CDC that confirmed three new rat lungworm cases all linked to Hawaii.
Two studies are shedding light on the links between the gut, the brain, and autism. The research reveals how gut problems can be triggered by the same gene mutations associated with autism, and a study shows how a fecal transplant from humans with autism can promote autism-like behaviors in mice.
The newest results from the Human Microbiome Project have revealed just how connected the microbes in our gut are to our overall health.
You have about as many bacteria and other microbes living in your body as your own cells—and yet, we still don’t understand much about how this microbiome relates to bodily function. Back in 2007, the National Institutes of Health kicked off the Human Microbiome Project, a $200 million effort to understand these microbes. Scientists have now published the results from the second phase of this project, designed to study how the microbiome interacts with the human body. These three studies, which examine preterm birth, inflammatory bowel disease, and pre-diabetes, demonstrate that microbiomes are unique to individuals and intimately tied to our health.
