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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,234

Researchers at Amsterdam’s UMC have identified a rare gene that halves people’s chances of developing dementia in old age.

People with the genetic variant, which occurs in around 1% of the population, are also more likely to live longer. The researchers studied 16 different sample populations in Europe and North America, including a number of people over the age of 100, for the study published in the journal Acta Neuropathologica.

The discovery could potentially be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative illnesses such as frontotemporal and Lewy body dementia.

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When Elon Musk and DARPA both hop aboard the cyborg hypetrain, you know brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are about to achieve the impossible.

BMIs, already the stuff of science fiction, facilitate crosstalk between biological wetware with external computers, turning human users into literal cyborgs. Yet mind-controlled robotic arms, microelectrode “nerve patches”, or “memory Band-AIDS” are still purely experimental medical treatments for those with nervous system impairments.

With the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program, DARPA is looking to expand BMIs to the military. This month, the project tapped six academic teams to engineer radically different BMIs to hook up machines to the brains of able-bodied soldiers. The goal is to ditch surgery altogether—while minimizing any biological interventions—to link up brain and machine.

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The development of new cancer immunotherapies including checkpoint blockade and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has revolutionized cancer treatment. CAR T cells have shown tremendous success in certain B cell malignancies, resulting in U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of this approach for certain types of leukemia and lymphoma. However, response rates against solid cancer have been less successful to date. Approaches to modulate the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment including targeting checkpoint pathways, modulating metabolic pathways, and generating cytokine-producing T cells have led to considerable enhancement of adoptive T cell immunotherapy, first in preclinical models and now in patients.

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David A. Sinclair, Ph.D., A.O. is an Australian biologist and a Professor in the Department of Genetics and co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School. He is best known for his work on understanding why we age and how to slow its effects. He obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and received the Australian Commonwealth Prize. In 1995, he received a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Leonard Guarente. Since 1999 he has been a tenured professor in the Genetics Department of Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Sinclair is co-founder of several biotechnology companies (Sirtris, Ovascience, Genocea, Cohbar, MetroBiotech, ArcBio, Liberty Biosecurity) and is on the boards of several others. He is also co-founder and co-chief editor of the journal Aging. His work is featured in five books, two documentary movies, 60 Minutes, Morgan Freeman’s “Through the Wormhole” and other media.

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Bone marrow is a soft spongy material that is located inside of the bones. Bone marrow is necessary for the transition that stem cells make to become one of the types of blood cells (red blood cells, platelets or white blood cells). Bone marrow disease occurs when there is some kind of abnormality or interference with the production of blood cells. Leukemia, aplastic anemia and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are three types of bone marrow disorders that affect the production of blood cells and the bone marrow. Symptoms of each type of bone marrow disease will vary according to its severity, but tend to be similar in nature.

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Why didn’t it tell the world? Drug companies frequently have been pilloried for not fully disclosing negative side effects of their drugs. What happens when the opposite is the case?

A team of researchers inside Pfizer made a startling find in 2015: The company’s blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis therapy Enbrel, a powerful anti-inflammatory drug, appeared to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 64 percent.

The results were from an analysis of hundreds of thousands of insurance claims. Verifying that the drug would actually have that effect in people would require a costly clinical trial — and after several years of internal discussion, Pfizer opted against further investigation and chose not to make the data public, the company confirmed.

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CHICAGO (AP) — Newer drugs are substantially improving the chances of survival for some people with hard-to-treat forms of lung, breast and prostate cancer, doctors reported at the world’s largest cancer conference.

Among those who have benefited is Roszell Mack Jr., who at age 87 is still able to work at a Lexington, Kentucky, horse farm, nine years after being diagnosed with lung cancer that had spread to his bones and lymph nodes.

“I go in every day, I’m the first one there,” said Mack, who helped test Merck’s Keytruda, a therapy that helps the immune system identify and fight cancer. “I’m feeling well and I have a good quality of life.”

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