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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,562

Rewinding the biological clock: How to reverse ageing

Researchers claim to have reversed ageing in mice. It has long been believed that if we understand the causes of ageing, it may be possible to reverse it. New work on mice shows that it is possible to cure vision loss caused by old age or injury. Researchers think that this effect may depend on rewinding the ‘biological clock’ which marks the age of cells, suggesting that the cells in the eye have been made functionally younger.

Read the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4

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AI Solves Momentous Disease-Fighting Problem Decades Ahead of Schedule

Diseases caused by folded proteins in the body are all over the news every day, like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and COVID-19. And now, a Google model powered by artificial intelligence could map these folded proteins in more detail than ever before, allowing scientists to “unfold” proteins and better explore possible treatments.

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Scientists reverse age-related vision loss, eye damage from glaucoma in mice

Harvard Medical School scientists have successfully restored vision in mice by turning back the clock on aged eye cells in the retina to recapture youthful gene function.

The team’s work, described Dec. 2 in Nature, represents the first demonstration that it may be possible to safely reprogram complex tissues, such as the nerve of the eye, to an earlier age.

In addition to resetting the cells’ aging clock, the researchers successfully reversed vision loss in animals with a condition mimicking human glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness around the world.

Pfizer Vaccine Authorized in the UK | The State of Science

For too long, the coronavirus has been allowed to ravage human society. However, now, we have begun deploying our own weapon to fight back against this deadly pestilence- a vaccine. Today, the UK has approved of Pfizer and BioNtech’s coronavirus vaccine.

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‘Wonderful news to wake up to’: U.K. greenlights Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine

MHRA will only become fully independent on 1 January 2021, following Brexit, but U.K. regulations allow it to grant authorizations on an emergency basis. The United Kingdom has bought 40 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine—enough for 20 million people—and health secretary Matt Hancock today announced the first 800,000 doses will be available next week. The rollout will prioritize health workers as well as the elderly and other vulnerable populations, but the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has yet to offer its final guidance on the exact priorities.

Russia on 11 August allowed its COVID-19 vaccine, developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, to be used on certain groups of people, and China has granted emergency use authorizations (EUAs) for several vaccines and has already vaccinated hundreds of thousands of people with them. A few other countries, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, have issued an EUA for one of the Chinese vaccines, produced by Sinopharm.

The Pfizer vaccine, whose key ingredient is messenger RNA that encodes the spike protein of the pandemic coronavirus, was found to have 95% efficacy, a clinical trial measurement of effectiveness, in a phase III trial in 43,000 people. But it presents logistical challenges for a widescale and rapid rollout, as it requires storage at −70°C. The lesser demands of other vaccines—including a candidate developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca—mean they will likely still play an important role in providing vaccinations for the whole U.K. population—and for global coverage, according to Michael Head, a global health researcher at the University of Southampton, “but, for now, this is wonderful news to wake up to.”

Postdocs need urgent financial support amid COVID conditions

Earlier in the year, many funders agreed to extend deadlines for research projects halted or delayed by the pandemic — but fewer offered extra funding to cover this period. Worryingly, most of the funders we approached still have no concrete plans to provide such additional financial support to postdocs. Many postdocs are not eligible for the government salary subsidies, or furlough schemes, that have been made available to many workers during the pandemic. Expanding access to such schemes is arguably the one intervention that could do the most to ease pressures at this time.

Most funders have no plans to provide postdoctoral researchers with additional pandemic funding. Society will pay a high price if this neglect continues.

COVID-19 Research: Study Shows That High-Density Lipoproteins (HDL) Or ‘Good’ Cholesterol Facilitates SARS-CoV-2 Cell Entry

COVID-19 Research: Chinese researchers from the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS)-China led by Professor Dr Wei Congwen, have found the role of an HDL (high-density lipoprotein) receptor in the facilitation of entry of the SARS CoV-2 into human host cells.

The SARS-CoV-2 infects host cells through binding of the viral spike protein (SARS-2-S) to the cell-surface receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2).

Simulations open a new way to reverse cell aging

Simulations that model molecular interactions have identified an enzyme that could be targeted to reverse a called cellular senescence. The findings were validated with laboratory experiments on and equivalent tissues, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Our research opens the door for a new generation that perceives aging as a reversible biological phenomenon,” says Professor Kwang-Hyun Cho of the Department of Bio and Brain engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), who led the research with colleagues from KAIST and Amorepacific Corporation in Korea.

Cells respond to a variety of factors, such as oxidative stress, DNA damage, and shortening of the telomeres capping the ends of chromosomes, by entering a stable and persistent exit from the . This process, called cellular senescence, is important, as it prevents damaged from proliferating and turning into . But it is also a natural process that contributes to aging and . Recent research has shown that cellular senescence can be reversed. But the laboratory approaches used thus far also impair tissue regeneration or have the potential to trigger malignant transformations.