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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,659

Hibernation used in conjunction with radiotherapy could be the key to fighting cancer in the future, according to new research.

Putting cancer patients into a hibernation-like ‘deep sleep’ state could hypothetically slow down their bodily functions and halt the spread of tumours inside their tissues, while also increasing the body’s resistance to radiation, scientists suggest.

The experimental treatment – which is still many years away from being attempted in humans – might sound like science fiction, but does have some grounding in reality.

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An interaction between two proteins enables cancer cells to use the physical forces of healthy cells to start spreading to other parts of the body.

The finding by researchers from the Francis Crick Institute in London and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in Barcelona is published in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

The process by which cancer cells separate from the original tumour to form new tumours in other organs or tissues of the body is called metastasis, and it is responsible for the majority of deaths in patients with cancer.

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Electronic circuits are found in almost everything from smartphones to spacecraft and are useful in a variety of computational problems from simple addition to determining the trajectories of interplanetary satellites. At Caltech, a group of researchers led by Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Lulu Qian is working to create circuits using not the usual silicon transistors but strands of DNA.

The Qian group has made the technology of DNA accessible to even novice researchers—including undergraduate students—using a software tool they developed called the Seesaw Compiler. Now, they have experimentally demonstrated that the tool can be used to quickly design DNA circuits that can then be built out of cheap “unpurified” DNA strands, following a systematic wet-lab procedure devised by Qian and colleagues.

A paper describing the work appears in the February 23 issue of Nature Communications.

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Last week, the US Patent and Trademarks Office ruled on the most-watched patent proceeding of the 21st century: the fight for Crispr-Cas9. The decision was supposed to declare ownership of the rights to the revolutionary gene editing technique. But instead, the patent judge granted sorta-victories to each of the rival parties—a team from UC Berkeley and another with members from both MIT and Harvard University’s Broad Institute. That’s great for those groups (and their spin-off, for-profit gene editing companies with exclusive licenses). But it leaves things a bit murkier for anyone else who wants to turn a buck with gene editing.

The Crispr discoverers now have some authority over who gets to use Crispr, and for what. And while exclusive licenses aren’t rare in biotech, the scope of these do stand out: They cover all the 20,000-plus genes in the human genome. So this week, legal experts are sending a formal request to the Department of Health and Human Services. They want the federal government to step in and bring Crispr back to the people.

Crispr is new, but patent laws governing genetic engineering date back decades. In 1980, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that genetically engineered microbes were patentable, Congress passed something called the Bayh-Doyle Act. The law gives permission for universities to patent—and license—anything their researchers invented with public funds, making it easier to put those inventions back in the hands of citizens.

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My apologies ahead of time everyone. LifeBoat is about awareness, discovery, history, social and economics and healthcare. And, I never ever post social situations on our site; however, I must raise this as it is all about humanity, being civilized, showing empathy, and respecting each other for, our passions in tech, science, medicine, etc., and simply for being humans with empathy.

Yesterday, I saw a disgusting report on how an innocent husband and wife who are US citizens and of Pakistan descent where verbally attacked by a horrible man on a flight to Houston, TX.

And, Wednesday a fellow techie lost his life in Kansas for being of Indian descent and his features. The person who shot and killed the young man didn’t even know if the engineer was born in the USA, or immigrated here or a citizen, etc. He just killed him as he verbally attacked him.

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UAE will be a major player in technology innovation of the future as they like Israel, Africa, Eastern Europe, and various parts of Asia such as the current ones of China and India as well as Australia and Vietnam will be the new emerging leaders in tech innovation. We’re entering a period of radical change and a complete overhaul of science (including medical) and technology thanks to the realities and opportunities of Quantum. The following announcement shows US UAE’s own commitment to being a leader and I promise you there is much more to come from these amazing hotspots of innovation and invention.

Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, issued directives to Mohammad Bin Rashid Space Centre, MBRSC, to lead the Mars 2117 project and prepare a 100-year plan for its implementation.

As per his directives, the centre’s plan will focus on preparing specialised national cadres and developing their capabilities in the fields of space science, research, artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced space technologies.

The centre will also put in place a detailed plan for the next five years that will deal with all technological, logistical and technical aspects of the project. This five-year plan will be carried out alongside a media plan that will keep pace with the project’s implementation programme. The media plan will ensure coverage at local, regional and international levels, taking into consideration how well the project was received when it was announced during the World Government Summit 2017.

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Nice discovery.

Why are pancreatic tumors so resistant to treatment? One reason is that the “wound”-like tissue that surrounds the tumors, called stroma, is much more dense than stromal tissue surrounding other, more treatable tumor types. Stromal tissue is believed to contain factors that aid tumor survival and growth. Importantly, in pancreatic cancer, its density is thought to be a factor in preventing cancer-killing drugs from reaching the tumor.

“You can think of a pancreas tumor as a big raisin oatmeal cookie, with the raisins representing the cancer cells and oatmeal portion representing the dense stroma that makes up over 90% of the tumor,” says David Tuveson, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Tuveson leads the Lustgarten Foundation Designated Lab in Pancreatic Cancer Research at CSHL, and his team today reports an important discovery about stromal tissue in the major form of pancreatic cancer, called pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, or PDA.

Tuveson, who is also Director of Research for the Lustgarten Foundation, wants to know more about stromal tissue in PDA. “We were interested to read the results obtained by researchers in other labs, who targeted the stroma in various ways, sometimes with encouraging results, but sometimes causing tumors to grow even faster” he explains.

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Interesting find on hippocampus and ingestive control.

In animals, a Western style diet–high in saturated fat and added sugar–causes impairments in hippocampal-dependent learning and memory (HDLM) and perception of internal bodily state (interoception). In humans, while there is correlational support for a link between Western-style diet, HDLM, and interoception, there is as yet no causal data. Here, healthy individuals were randomly assigned to consume either a breakfast high in saturated fat and added sugar (Experimental condition) or a healthier breakfast (Control condition), over four consecutive days. Tests of HDLM, interoception and biological measures were administered before and after breakfast on the days one and four, and participants completed food diaries before and during the study. At the end of the study, the Experimental condition showed significant reductions in HDLM and reduced interoceptive sensitivity to hunger and fullness, relative to the Control condition. The Experimental condition also showed a markedly different blood glucose and triglyceride responses to their breakfast, relative to Controls, with larger changes in blood glucose across breakfast being associated with greater reductions in HDLM. The Experimental condition compensated for their energy-dense breakfast by reducing carbohydrate intake, while saturated fat intake remained consistently higher than Controls. This is the first experimental study in humans to demonstrate that a Western-style diet impacts HDLM following a relatively short exposure–just as in animals. The link between diet-induced HDLM changes and blood glucose suggests one pathway by which diet impacts HDLM in humans.

Citation: Attuquayefio T, Stevenson RJ, Oaten MJ, Francis HM (2017) PLoS ONE 12: e0172645. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0172645

Editor: Lin Lu, Peking University, CHINA

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