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Category: biotech/medical – Page 21

Millions of breast cancer patients could avoid chemotherapy with new genome test

Those who received a high score (above 60) were given chemotherapy and hormone therapy, while those with a low score (less than or equal to 60) were treated with hormone therapy alone.

Of the low-scoring group who did not receive chemotherapy, results showed that outcomes were very similar whether chemotherapy was given or not. Five years after treatment, 94.8 per cent of those who received chemotherapy alongside hormone therapy were alive and free from breast cancer recurrence, and 93.6 per cent of those treated with hormone therapy alone were also alive and recurrence-free.

Doctors said the results show that people aged 40 or older with hormone‑sensitive breast cancer and a low Prosigna score can safely avoid chemotherapy.

Longevity-linked APOE2 gene variant helps neurons repair DNA and resist aging

People who carry the APOE2 version of the apolipoprotein E gene are more likely to live to advanced age and are partly protected against Alzheimer’s disease, but scientists have struggled to explain why. A new study from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, now published in Aging Cell, offers a mechanistic answer: APOE2 helps human neurons keep their DNA intact and resist becoming senescent, a damaged, dysfunctional state that accumulates with age and contributes to neurodegeneration.

The findings shift attention away from APOE’s well-known role in cholesterol transport and toward a previously underappreciated function of the gene: shaping how brain cells maintain the integrity of their genome as they age.

“We’ve known for years that APOE2 carriers tend to live longer and have a lower risk of Alzheimer’s, but the protective mechanism has been a black box,” says senior author Lisa M. Ellerby, Ph.D., professor at the Buck Institute. “Our work shows that APOE2 neurons are better at preventing and repairing DNA damage, and they resist the cellular aging program that drives so much of late-life decline. Our findings point to entirely new therapeutic directions.”

New MRI sensors detect target molecules in the brain and body with high sensitivity

When doctors and scientists want to see inside a body, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful tool. MRI can noninvasively capture detailed images of the body’s muscles, organs, and bones. It can monitor blood flow to generate a map of brain activity. And with new sensors developed by bioengineers at MIT, MRI can track the kinds of molecules that make our brains and bodies work.

In the May 13 issue of the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by Alan Jasanoff, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior at MIT, reports on their new sensors, which can brighten or dim MRI signals in response to specific molecular targets. The probes are designed to amplify the effect that each target molecule has on MRI signal, dramatically improving sensitivity over previous small-molecule sensors.

Jasanoff, who is also an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, says the approach his team used should enable the development of MRI sensors that detect neurotransmitters and other important molecules in the brain.

Nanofiber implant delivers three drugs, doubles survival in glioblastoma mice

Researchers with the University of Cincinnati and Johns Hopkins Medicine developed a potential treatment for brain cancer that uses nanofibers embedded with a combination of drugs that work in concert to target tumors. The drugs proved more effective in combination than when administered alone and can provide both immediate and long-lasting doses to kill cancer cells.

“In our study, a three-drug combination showed strong synergistic effects across multiple glioblastoma models and significantly improved survival in animal studies,” said Daewoo Han, an assistant professor in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science and lead author of the paper published in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering.

Han and Distinguished Research Professor Andrew Steckl incorporated the drugs into electrospun fiber membranes, creating a nanofiber drug delivery system. Steckl’s NanoLab at the University of Cincinnati is a leading developer of this technology that uses an electric field to create a multilayered fiber mesh for drug delivery, among other uses. “This combination is pretty powerful,” Steckl said.

Cancer jab can eradicate entire tumours in patients, trial shows

In an international trial spanning 11 countries, the injection was offered to patients whose cancer had spread or come back and whose disease had failed to respond to other treatments.

The jab, called amivantamab, shrank the tumours of more than a third of patients, with dramatic changes seen within weeks. In 15 of them, doctors found the drug had melted away their tumours altogether.

Kevin Harrington, professor in biological cancer therapies at the Institute of Cancer Research, London (ICR), said: These are unprecedentedly strong responses in patients whose disease has become resistant to both chemotherapy and immunotherapy.

Inside Alzheimer’s neurons, tau may set off a genetic chain reaction that ends in cell death

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by a progressive decline in mental functions and memory loss. Along with frontotemporal dementia and some other neurodegenerative disorders, Alzheimer’s disease has been associated with an accumulation inside neurons of abnormal clumps of a protein called “tau.”

The tau protein is important for brain health, stabilizing structures called microtubules inside neurons. In Alzheimer’s disease and other tauopathies (i.e., diseases linked with the abnormal accumulation of tau), tau proteins aggregate into toxic and insoluble clumps that are harmful to brain cells, gradually leading to their death.

Researchers at Zhejiang University, Xiamen University and other institutes in China recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the processes via which tau aggregation contributes to the death of neurons in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that these tau clumps prompt the reactivation of transposable DNA elements in neurons, which can in turn lead to their death.

Legend scientific founder returns to ASCO with new ambition for high-yield, non-gene-editing CAR-T platform

Nine years after wowing the audience at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting with a CAR-T candidate that would become Carvykti—now the world’s most successful cell therapy—Legend Biotech’s scientific founder, Frank Fan, M.D., Ph.D., is returning to the spotlight with an entirely new playbook.

This time, Fan isn’t showcasing an autologous product engineered with each individual patient’s cells. Instead, with his new venture, Wondercel Therapeutics, Fan hopes an off-the-shelf universal CAR-T platform can tackle two bottlenecks of the cell therapy industry: massive production scalability and the pitfalls associated with gene editing.

“If this approach proves successful, the critical thing is that we can achieve linear scalability in CAR-T production capacity that can match traditional biologics,” Fan said in an interview with Fierce.

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