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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,454

Digging ancient signals out of modern human genomes

With new genome analysis tools, scientists have made significant advances in our understanding of modern humans’ origins and ancient migrations.

But trying to find ancient DNA, let alone prove that the ancient DNA is ancestral to a population living today is extremely challenging.

A new study in Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE) adds to this understanding by reconstructing artificial genomes with the analyses of the of 565 contemporary South Asian individuals to extract ancient signals that recapitulate the long history of human migration and admixture in the region.

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This Neural Implant Accesses Your Brain Through the Jugular Vein

A permanent neural implant that reads brain activity and churns out text could prove to be a valuable medical tool, but it also could provide doctors with an unprecedented 24/7 stream of neural data.

Oxley recognizes that an endless feed of brain activity could be invaluable to medical researchers, but he doesn’t have plans to tap into that yet.

“[The Stentrode is] going to show us information that we hadn’t had before. Whether that helps us understand other things is not what we’re trying to do here,” he said, clarifying that Synchron’s primary goal is to get the new brain-computer interface working so that it can help paralyzed patients. “This is a novel data set, but this raises questions around privacy and security. That’s the patient’s data, and we can’t be mining that.”

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Manfred Eigen, Nobel Prize-winning German chemist and physicist who, after serving in the Wehrmacht, founded two distinct scientific disciplines – obituary

Manfred Eigen, who has died aged 91, was a phenomenally versatile German chemist and physicist who founded two major scientific disciplines, first in chemical reaction kinetics and later in the development of a molecular approach to evolutionary biology.

He also co-founded two biotechnology companies – Evotec, now a €3.29 billion concern, and Direvo, which was acquired by Bayer Healthcare for $300 million in 2008.

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This is the first computer-generated genome

Scientists report the world’s first fully computer-generated genome of a living organism.

To do so, they used a new method that greatly simplifies the production of large DNA molecules containing many hundreds of genes. They report their work in PNAS.

All the genome sequences of organisms known throughout the world are stored in a database belonging to the National Center for Biotechnology Information in the United States. Now, the database has an additional entry: Caulobacter ethensis-2.0.

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Will we win the battle against cancer?

This article opened with some fearful figures about cancer and its effect on people worldwide. But there’s reason to hope.

While the total number of new cancer cases and deaths continues to increase, the rates of cancer diagnoses and deaths decline each year — as absolute figures don’t account for rises in life expectancy, population growth, or aging populations. We’ve made great strides in understanding the disease and its various genetic and environmental origins. And events like Breast Cancer Awareness Month continue to educate the populace about the preventative measures available to them.

Thanks to scientists like those at the University of Basel in Switzerland, we may have more reasons to be hopeful very soon.

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How a blast to the kidney could end high blood pressure for good

A revolutionary 60-minute therapy for high blood pressure could allow patients to throw their tablets away for good.

The unlikely remedy involves blasting nerves in the kidneys with sound waves to stop them sending signals to the brain that drive up blood pressure.

It could slash the risk of heart attacks and strokes, two of Britain’s biggest killers.

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Gene Therapy Was Hailed as a Revolution. Then Came the Bill

More drugmakers are betting gene therapies will have a big impact on patients and profits, with Pfizer Inc. last month agreeing to collaborate with Paris-based Vivet Therapeutics on a treatment for a rare liver disorder. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration forecasts as many as 20 cell- and gene-therapy approvals each year by 2025. Doubts remain about whether the treatments will sustain their dramatic results, making it difficult to determine their value.

Dozens of revolutionary gene therapies that mend faulty strands of DNA are on their way, bringing the power to eliminate lethal childhood diseases, rare blood disorders and other severe illnesses.

Beneath the excitement about these potential cures lies an important catch: no one knows how much to charge for them.

The new therapies aim to fix the root causes of disease with a single dose, and if they can replace a lifetime of conventional costly drugs, they may slash overall spending, even at multimillion-dollar prices. Yet the prospect of high costs is already stirring pushback.

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