Robert E. Litan introduces four solutions to concerns about automation’s impact on wages.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,447
Eating foods high in salt is known to contribute to high blood pressure, but does that linear relationship extend to increased risk of cardiovascular disease and death? Recent cohort studies have contested that relationship, but a new study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and their colleagues using multiple measurements confirms it. The study suggests that an inaccurate way of estimating sodium intake may help account for the paradoxical findings of others.
“Sodium is notoriously hard to measure,” said Nancy Cook, ScD, a biostatistician in the Department of Medicine at BWH. “Sodium is hidden—you often don’t know how much of it you’re eating, which makes it hard to estimate how much a person has consumed from a dietary questionnaire. Sodium excretions are the best measure, but there are many ways of collecting those. In our work, we used multiple measures to get a more accurate picture.”
Sodium intake can be measured using a spot test to determine how much salt has been excreted in a person’s urine sample. However, sodium levels in urine can fluctuate throughout the day so an accurate measure of a person’s sodium intake on a given day requires a full 24-hour sample. In addition, sodium consumption may change from day to day, meaning that the best way to get a full picture of sodium intake is to take samples on multiple days.
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A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a #syntheticbiology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.
Proteins, the end product of genes, carry out life functions. Most human proteins are modified by a process called serine phosphorylation — a chemical switch that can alter their structure and function. Malfunctions in this process have been implicated in diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s yet are difficult to detect and study. A group of researchers from Yale University and Agilent Technologies have developed a synthetic biology technique that turns bacterium E. Coli into a phosphorylated protein factory capable of churning out every known instance of this modification in human proteins.
“We synthesized over 110,000 phosphoproteins from scratch and we can now study how they all function together,” said Jesse Rinehart, associate professor of cellular and molecular physiology at the Systems Biology Institute and senior author of the research. “This is the future of scientific research — we can build everything we study.”
Previously, researchers were only able to create a single phosphoprotein at a time. The new platform will help scientists create designer proteins by studying the impact of phosphorylation on all potential protein interactions, the authors say. “Biologists want to know which proteins interact with each other because diseases can arise when these interactions go wrong,” said Karl Barber, a Yale graduate student who is the first author on the study and a recently named Schmidt Science Fellow.
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The first known human case of the virus was identified in a Florida teen after a year of tests. Known symptoms include fever and a severe rash, but it’s unclear if it causes brain inflammation.
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I felt my hand, as if a hollow shell, got filled with life again.”
Researchers have created e-dermis, an electronic skin that transmits sensations of pain from an amputee’s prosthetic hand to their brain.
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Researchers tissue-engineered human pancreatic islets in a laboratory that develop a circulatory system, secrete hormones like insulin and successfully treat sudden-onset type 1 diabetes in transplanted mice.
In a study published by Cell Reports, the scientists use a new bioengineering process they developed called a self-condensation cell culture. The technology helps nudge medical science closer to one day growing human organ tissues from a person’s own cells for regenerative therapy, say study investigators at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in the U.S. and Yokohama City University (YCU) in Japan.
“This method may serve as a principal curative strategy for treating type 1 diabetes, of which there are 79,000 new diagnoses per year,” said Takanori Takebe, MD, a physician-scientist at the Cincinnati Children’s Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine. “This is a life-threatening disease that never goes away, so developing effective and possibly permanent therapeutic approaches would help millions of children and adults around the world.”
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Compared with brain organoids grown from ordinary human cells (top), those with a Neanderthal gene variant (bottom) differ in appearance and behavior.
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The exponential potential of longevity technologies.
Jim Mellon became a billionaire by pouncing on a wide variety of opportunities, from the dawn of business privatization in Russia to uranium mining in Africa and real estate in Germany. But all of that might eventually look small, he says, compared to the money to be made in the next decade or so from biotechnologies that will increase human longevity well past 100.
The British investor is so enthusiastic about these technologies that he co-authored a 2017 book about them, Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity, and launched a company, Juvenescence Ltd., to capitalize on them. “Juvenescence” is a real word — it’s the state of being youthful. Says Mellon, who is 61: “I’m hoping that this stuff works on me as well as on my portfolio.”
Juvenescence Ltd., which has raised $62.5 million from Mellon and some partners, has invested in or is close to confirming investments in nine biotech companies. He won’t discuss most of them. But one of the deals was an 11 percent stake in Insilico Medicine, a company applying machine-learning techniques to drug discovery. Insilico Medicine and Mellon’s company also formed a joint venture called Juvenescence AI to investigate the therapeutic properties of specific compounds. Mellon is particularly optimistic that this venture can develop a “senolytic” drug that helps the body clear out cells that have stopped dividing and can damage other cells.
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Herpes Viruses And Alzheimer’s: A Possible Link : Shots — Health News Two herpes viruses that cause skin rashes in toddlers may accelerate Alzheimer’s disease when they infect brain cells. The finding suggests antiviral drugs might help protect the brain.
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An interview with Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, Harvard University.
We have recently had occasion to have a chat with Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, Professor of Medicine and Director of Redox Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, in Boston, Massachusetts. He is an expert in aging and redox biology and is known for his characterization of the human selenoproteome. His research laboratory focuses on comparative genomics, selenoproteins, redox biology, and, naturally, aging and lifespan control.
Dr. Gladyshev graduated from Moscow State University, in Moscow, Russia; his postdoctoral studies in the 1990s took place at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland. Even when he was young, he was very much interested in chemistry and experimental science: he twice won the regional Olympiad in chemistry and graduated from high school with a gold medal. He also graduated with the highest honors from Moscow State University. This enviable track record is even more impressive considering that Dr. Gladyshev completed music school and high school at the same time and became a chess player equivalent to national master during his college years.
You’ll have a chance to meet Dr. Gladyshev at our upcoming New York City conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases, on July 12; if you can’t attend, you can at least enjoy our interview with Dr. Gladyshev below.
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