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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,074

Study finds high blood pressure medications safe for patients with COVID-19 disease

This is very surreal. A study was done to assess the safety of common drugs, and COVID, and whether taking them leads to severe symptoms. There has been concern as these drugs increase ACE2 receptors coronavirus binds to. So someone had the bright idea of going through over 12,000 digital patients records to come up with the conclusion the drugs are safe to take and they do not cause worse symptoms. No animal studies, no clinical trials, and this was actually published.

“For the study, the researchers identified patients in the NYU Langone Health electronic health record with COVID-19 test results. For each identified patient with COVID-19 test results, the team discretely extracted medical history needed for the analysis, which compared treated and untreated patients.”

First you do a mouse study at least to review how coronavirus behaves in mice who are given the drugs, and compare it to mice not given the drugs. If science has been reduced to just going over records and coming to a conclusion, with no experimentation I have officially lost my mind.

Despite concerns expressed by some experts, common high blood pressure drugs did not increase the risk of contracting COVID-19 — or of developing severe disease — in a study of 12,594 patients.

Published online May 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study was launched in response to a March 17 joint statement issued by the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, and the Heart Failure Society of America. It urgently called for research to answer a question raised by past studies: do high blood pressure (antihypertensive) drugs worsen COVID-19 patient outcomes?

Led by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study found no links between treatment with four drug classes — angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), beta blockers, or calcium channel blockers — and increased likelihood of a positive test for COVID-19.

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Mouse brains seen in unprecedented 3D detail, thanks to new staining technique

To tackle this problem, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research identified a gel that closely mimics the physicochemical properties of organs that have undergone the tissue clearing process. Starting with computer simulations and following up with laboratory tests, the team optimized the soaking solution temperature, dye and antibody concentrations, chemical additives, and electrical properties to produce the best staining and imaging results. They then tested their method with more than two dozen commonly used dyes and antibodies on mouse and marmoset brains.

Scans of an entire mouse brain and one hemisphere of a marmoset brain—rendered into 3D using light sheet microscopy—revealed the similarity between the two animals’ neural vascular systems, showing the use of the system for comparative anatomy, the researchers report this week in. They also showed that they could simultaneously stain and image up to four molecular targets in a mouse brain, a feat that “has never been reported before,” says Ludovico Silvestri, of the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy, who was not involved in the research.

The team also used its technique to image an entire infant marmoset and a small human brain sample—something that could one day lead to new understandings of solid tumors and neurodegenerative diseases. The team says its approach to optimizing staining can be applied to other techniques to advance the entire field of 3D imaging.

Aging and diet lead to proteome changes in the intestinal epithelium

The small intestine is one of the most important interfaces between the environment and our body. It is responsible for nutrient absorption but also forms a barrier against potentially harmful environmental cues. A research team, led by researchers from the Leibniz Institute on Aging—Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena, Germany, investigated the effects of aging and diet on the intestinal epithelium of young and old mice. They were able to show region-specific effects on the proteome and age-related impairments in adaptation to nutrient availability. Their results provide a complete picture of the spatial organization of the small intestine proteome in the mouse. The results were published in the journal Cell Reports.

The small (SI) is one of the most important interfaces between the environment and our body. It has two major functions: it is responsible for absorbing nutrients from the food we eat and functions as a barrier to restrict the entry of harmful substances. The SI is a highly adaptive and dynamic organ, as it adapts to changes in nutrient intake or diet. The intestinal epithelium undergoes a process of continuous renewal, every 3–5 days.

Effects of aging and diet on the small intestine have already been investigated. It is known that aging leads to reduced absorption of nutrients by the epithelium thus contributing to malnutrition in elderly people. In addition, anatomical differences between different regions of the SI are well known, but so far, region-specific effects of aging and diet on the set of proteins that compose the intestinal epithelium had not been investigated.

MigVax: Israeli COVID-19 vaccine closer to trials

Well, every dark cloud does have a silver lining. Out of nearly three million confirmed cases of coronavirus, 1.77 million are mild cases, and more than 807,050 people have recovered as of the time of my writing this.

I think it is fair to say that a vast majority of human beings on planet Earth have one question in their minds: When will we have an actual vaccine?

Well, I have some good news.

New molecular insights into how gut bacteria influences memory

New research from an international team of scientists has tracked a compelling series of connections between the gut microbiome and memory. Using a novel mouse model engineered to simulate the genetic diversity of a human population, the study illustrates how genetics can influence memory via bacterial metabolites produced in the gut.

Over the past few years there has been significant research interest in the relationship between memory, cognition and the gut microbiome. While certain families of bacteria that live in our gut have been implicated in memory function, this new study set out to investigate the connection from a different angle, starting with the role genetics play in this relationship.

“To know if a microbial molecule influenced memory, we needed to understand the interaction between genetics and the microbiome,” explains co-corresponding author on the study, Antoine Snijders.

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