A new approach for turning calorie-storing white fat into beige fat, which we burn to keep our body temperatures, could potentially inform development of new type of obesity treatments.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 228
Systemic factors in young human serum influence
Aging is a complex process that significantly contributes to age-related diseases and poses significant challenges for effective interventions, with few holistic anti-aging approaches successfully reversing its signs. Heterochronic parabiosis studies illuminated the potential for rejuvenation through blood-borne factors, yet the specific drivers including underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown and until today insights have not been successfully translated to humans. In this study, we were able to recreate rejuvenation of the human skin via systemic factors using a microphysiological system including a 3D skin model and a 3D bone marrow model. Addition of young human serum in comparison to aged human serum resulted in an improvement of proliferation and a reduction of the biological age as measured by methylation-based age clocks in the skin tissue. Interestingly, this effect was only visible in the presence of bone marrow-derived cells. Further investigation of the bone marrow model revealed changes in the cell population in response to young versus aged human serum treatment. Using proteome analysis, we identified 55 potential systemic rejuvenating proteins produced by bone marrow-derived cells. For seven of these proteins, we were able to verify a rejuvenating effect on human skin cells using hallmarks of aging assays, supporting their role as systemic factors rejuvenating human skin tissue.
Aging | doi:10.18632/aging.206288. Johanna Ritter, Cassandra Falckenhayn, Minyue Qi, Leonie Gather, Daniel Gutjahr, Johannes Schmidt, Stefan Simm, Stefan Kalkhof, Janosch Hildebrand, Thomas Bosch, Marc Winnefeld, Elke Grönniger, Annette Siracusa.
NASA and Google are building an AI medical assistant to keep Mars-bound astronauts healthy
That looming reality is pushing NASA to gradually make on-orbit medical care more “Earth-independent.” One early experiment is a proof-of-concept AI medical assistant the agency is building with Google. The tool, called Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), is designed to help astronauts diagnose and treat symptoms when no doctor is available or communications to Earth are blacked out.
The multimodal tool, which includes speech, text, and images, runs inside Google Cloud’s Vertex AI environment.
The project is operating under a fixed-price Google Public Sector subscription agreement, which includes the cost for cloud services, the application development infrastructure, and model training, David Cruley, customer engineer at Google’s Public Sector business unit, told TechCrunch. NASA owns the source code to the app and has helped fine-tune the models. The Google Vertex AI platform provides access to models from Google and other third parties.