TARRYTOWN, N.Y., Aug. 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) today announced that the Company was informed by study investigators that a randomized, controlled trial evaluating four investigational therapies for Ebola virus infection was stopped early because.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,198
Use of Machine Learning (ML) in Medicine is becoming more and more important. One application example can be Cancer Detection and Analysis.
KNIME Fall Summit 2019
US scientists have begun the daunting task of trying to work out how many genes there are in the human microbiome.
Even when you consider just the gut and the mouth (in itself, a unique research double) the numbers are potentially overwhelming.
Microbiologists and bioinformaticians from Harvard Medical School and Joslin Diabetes Centre gathered all publicly available sequencing data on human oral and gut microbiomes and analyzed the DNA from around 3500 samples – 1400 from mouths and 2100 from guts.
Last month, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a neurotechnology company, revealed its plans to develop brain-reading technology over the next few years. One of the goals for Musk’s firm is to eventually implant microchip-devices into the brains of paralyzed people, allowing them to control smartphones and computers.
Although this Black Mirror-esque technology could hold potentially life-changing powers for those living with disabilities, according to Cognitive Psychologist Susan Schneider, it’s not such a great idea, and I can’t help but feel relieved, I’m with Schneider on this.
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a new antibiotic that, when combined with two existing antibiotics, can tackle the most formidable and deadly forms of tuberculosis. The trio of drugs treats extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), along with cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) that have proven unresponsive to other treatments.
Tuberculosis is the single leading infectious killer in the world, infecting an estimated 10 million people in 2017 and killing 1.6 million of them. XDR-TB and MDR-TB are even more savage forms of the disease, which is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The drug-resistant strains of TB kill an estimated 60% and 40% of their victims, respectively.
MDR-TB strains can resist at least the two most powerful anti-TB drugs, isoniazid and rifampin. A strain gets into XDR-territory when they also become resistant to any fluoroquinolone drug, such as ciprofloxacin or levofloxacin, plus at least one of three injectable second-line drugs, which are amikacin, kanamycin, and capreomycin. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis infected an estimated 558,000 people in 2017.
‘Pain does not occur only in the skin’s nerve fibres, but also in this pain-sensitive organ’
A team of scientists at UC San Francisco and the National Institutes of Health have achieved another CRISPR first, one which may fundamentally alter the way scientists study brain diseases.
In a paper published August 15 in the journal Neuron, the researchers describe a technique that uses a special version of CRISPR developed at UCSF to systematically alter the activity of genes in human neurons generated from stem cells, the first successful merger of stem cell-derived cell types and CRISPR screening technologies.
Though mutations and other genetic variants are known to be associated with an increased risk for many neurological diseases, technological bottlenecks have thwarted the efforts of scientists working to understand exactly how these genes cause disease.
A new study outlines multiple ways in which epiblast stem cells can be reprogrammed back into a fully pluripotent state, paving the way for a better understanding of epigenetics.
The role of epigenetics
Epigenetics are why our cells, which all have the same DNA, differ in function. A bone cell has the same genetics as a nerve cell, but its epigenetic switches instruct it to perform the functions of a bone cell and not a nerve cell. Epigenetic alterations, however, are one of the primary hallmarks of aging. As we age, harmful epigenetic switches are activated and beneficial ones are deactivated, causing age-related dysfunction. This may even lead to inflammation, which causes further epigenetic damage, leading to a dangerous feedback loop.
A new organ involved in the sensation of pain has been discovered by scientists, raising hopes that it could lead to the development of new painkilling drugs.
Researchers say they have discovered that the special cells that surround the pain-sensing nerve cells that extend into the outer layer of skin appear to be involved in sensing pain – a discovery that points to a new organ behind the feeling of “ouch!”.
A research group at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, has made it possible to edit hundreds of genes at once with CRISPR gene editing.
CRISPR gene editing has revolutionized the biotech industry by providing an easy and quick way to genetically modify organisms. So far, however, CRISPR techniques have only managed to edit a maximum of seven genes at once. This limits the potential of the technique in creating cell therapies, since whole networks of genes need to be reprogrammed to control each cell’s fate.
The Swiss research group devised a way to overcome this limitation with a CRISPR technique able to edit 25 genes in one go. This number could also be increased to up to hundreds of genes at a time. This method therefore makes it possible to edit gene networks, and reprogram stem cells to become cell therapies such as skin cells or insulin-producing pancreatic cells.