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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,168

Melanoma is a deadly form of skin cancer that has been increasing in the U.S. for the past 30 years. Nearly 100,000 new cases of melanoma are diagnosed every year, and 20 Americans die every day from it, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. Now, researchers have developed a fast-acting skin patch that efficiently delivers medication to attack melanoma cells. The device, tested in mice and human skin samples, is an advance toward developing a vaccine to treat melanoma and has widespread applications for other vaccines.

The researchers will present their findings today at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2019 National Meeting and Exposition.

“Our has a unique chemical coating and mode of action that allows it to be applied and removed from the skin in just a minute while still delivering a therapeutic dose of drugs,” says Yanpu He, a who helped develop the device. “Our patches elicit a robust antibody response in living mice and show promise in eliciting a strong immune response in .”

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Stem cell biologist Hiromitsu Nakauchi has been waiting for this moment for more than a decade.

After years of planning, the persistent researcher has at last received approval from a government willing to pursue one of the most controversial scientific studies there is: human-animal embryo experiments.

While many countries around the world have restricted, defunded or outright banned these ethically-fraught practices, Japan has now officially lifted the lid on this proverbial Pandora’s box. Earlier this year, the country made it legal to not only transplant hybrid embryos into surrogate animals, but also to bring them to term.

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At Ending Age-Related Diseases, Michael Greve discussed the Forever Healthy Foundation and its Rejuvenation Now initiative along with the current state of rejuvenation biotechnology, including companies and therapies, and a direction for the future of this emerging industry.

See Forever Healthy’s Rejuvenation Now initiative at https://forever-healthy.org/en/initiatives/rejuvenation-now/

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New York, NY—August 12, 2019—A novel neck brace, which supports the neck during its natural motion, was designed by Columbia engineers. This is the first device shown to dramatically assist patients suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in holding their heads and actively supporting them during range of motion. This advance would result in improved quality of life for patients, not only in improving eye contact during conversation, but also in facilitating the use of eyes as a joystick to control movements on a computer, much as scientist Stephen Hawkins famously did.

A team of engineers and neurologists led by Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine, designed a comfortable and wearable robotic neck brace that incorporates both sensors and actuators to adjust the head posture, restoring roughly 70% of the active range of motion of the human head. Using simultaneous measurement of the motion with sensors on the neck brace and surface electromyography (EMG) of the neck muscles, it also becomes a new diagnostic tool for impaired motion of the head-neck. Their pilot study was published August 7 in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.

The brace also shows promise for clinical use beyond ALS, according to Agrawal, who directs the Robotics and Rehabilitation (ROAR) Laborator y. “The brace would also be useful to modulate rehabilitation for those who have suffered whiplash neck injuries from car accidents or have from poor neck control because of neurological diseases such as cerebral palsy,” he said.

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Hamlet Pharma Ltd. is making great progress and has just concluded the first part of a clinical trial in patients with bladder cancer. Drug development often takes many years, due to complex development and approval processes. Based on our extensive prior experience, the drug candidate, Alpha1H, has passed a number of important milestones in a relatively short time and with moderate cost. Alpha1H is natural and is found in breast milk. The trial has shown its effectiveness in dissolving tumors.

The strategic goal of Hamlet Pharma is to develop novel cancer treatments for patients who currently lack therapeutic options. Conducting clinical trials is crucial to reach primary goals such as evaluating the therapeutic window for HAMLET in bladder cancer. We also aim to gain new insights that facilitate the drug development for Alpha1H and the diversification of our activities to include other indications.

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This device is 1,000 times more sensitive than other methods at detecting of CTCs in the blood of patients with melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer.

The Cytophone also has shown the ability to detect CTCs even when the tumor is not identifiable on the skin, either because too small (known as the T0 or TX stage) or after surgical removal, and then to destroy them without harming surrounding blood cells.

The team’s findings titled “In Vivo Liquid Biopsy using Cytophone Platform for Photoacoustic Detection of Circulating Tumor Cells in Melanoma Patients” were published in the June 12 issue of Science Translational Medicine, a prestigious scientific journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and the Rockefeller University say they have uncovered the basic mechanism of Piezo proteins, which function as sensors in the body for mechanical stimuli such as touch, bladder fullness, and blood pressure. The discovery opens up many new paths of investigation into the roles of Piezo proteins in human diseases and potential new therapeutic strategies, according to the scientists.

In the study (“Force-induced conformational changes in PIEZO1”), published in Nature, the team used advanced microscopy techniques to image the Piezo1 protein at rest and during the application of mechanical forces. They confirmed this complex protein’s structure and showed essentially how it can convert mechanical stimuli into an electrical signal.

“Piezo1 is a mechanosensitive channel that converts applied force into electrical signals. Partial molecular structures show that Piezo1 is a bowl-shaped trimer with extended arms. Here we use cryo-electron microscopy to show that Piezo1 adopts different degrees of curvature in lipid vesicles of different sizes. We also use high-speed atomic force microscopy to analyze the deformability of Piezo1 under force in membranes on a mica surface and show that Piezo1 can be flattened reversibly into the membrane plane,” the investigators wrote.

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Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed an organ-on-an-electronic-chip platform, which uses bioelectrical sensors to measure the electrophysiology of the heart cells in three dimensions. These 3D, self-rolling biosensor arrays coil up over heart cell spheroid tissues to form an “organ-on-e-chip,” thus enabling the researchers to study how cells communicate with each other in multicellular systems such as the heart.

The organ-on-e-chip approach will help develop and assess the efficacy of drugs for disease treatment—perhaps even enabling researchers to screen for drugs and toxins directly on a human-like , rather than testing on animal tissue. The platform will also be used to shed light on the connection between the heart’s and disease, such as arrhythmias. The research, published in Science Advances, allows the researchers to investigate processes in cultured cells that currently are not accessible, such as tissue development and cell maturation.

“For decades, electrophysiology was done using cells and cultures on two-dimensional surfaces, such as culture dishes,” says Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Materials Science & Engineering (MSE) Tzahi Cohen-Karni. “We are trying to circumvent the challenge of reading the heart’s electrical patterns in 3D by developing a way to shrink-wrap sensors around heart cells and extracting electrophysiological information from this tissue.”

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