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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,712

Regenerating new heart tissue to repair disease

Scientists are developing heart patches for adults as well. For example, biomedical engineers at Duke University have created a fully functioning lab-grown human heart muscle large enough to patch over the damage typically suffered in a heart attack.

While Duke’s heart patches are still in their early stages, they appear to be a tremendous improvement over existing cell therapies. Clinical trials are currently testing the tactic of injecting stem cells directly into the affected site in an attempt to restore some of the damaged heart muscle. However, it doesn’t help very much. Fewer than 1% of the injected cells survive in the heart, and even fewer become cardiac muscle cells.

On the other hand, heart patches could potentially be implanted over the dead heart muscle and remain active for a long time, strengthening contractions and providing a conductive circuit for the heart’s electrical signals to travel through. These patches also secrete growth factors and enzymes that could help the recovery of damaged tissue that hasn’t yet died.

Researchers Paint Bullseye on Target to Stop Tumor Metastasis

Summary: In a medical first, UT Dallas researchers just found a way to paint a bullseye target on cancer stem cells, the source of tumor metastases which spread through the body to cause 90% of all cancer deaths. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Researchers with the University of Texas at Dallas just found a way to isolate and tag cancer stem cells, the chief culprit involved in cancer spreading to other parts of the body – the cause of 90% of all cancer deaths.

While they haven’t developed drugs that eliminate these aggressive cancer cells, they can paint a bright bullseye on their elusive target, making it easier to kill cancer stem cells.

Team develops 3D tissue model of a developing human heart

Utilizing induced pluripotent stem cells for regenerative medicine.

The #heart is the first organ to develop in the womb and the first cause of concern for many parents.

For expecting mothers, the excitement of pregnancy is often offset by anxiety over medication they require. Parents and doctors often have to consider the mother’s health as well as the potential risk regarding how medication could affect their baby. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires certain drugs to be labeled with pregnancy exposure and risk. Some drugs are labeled to show that testing on animals has failed to demonstrate a risk but there are no adequate and well-controlled studies of pregnant women.

“Some drugs are difficult for doctors to prescribe to pregnant women because they don’t know the embryo toxicity, how does that effect fetal development,” said biomedical engineering Professor Zhen Ma. “They don’t have the clinical outcome based on human study.”

New therapeutic gel shows promise against cancerous tumors!

Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and NC State have created an injectable gel-like scaffold that can hold combination #chemo-immunotherapeutic drugs and deliver them locally to tumors in a sequential manner. The results in animal models so far suggest this approach could one day ramp up therapeutic benefits for patients bearing tumors or after removal of the primary tumors.

The research, published in Science Translational Medicine, focused on two specific types of melanoma and breast #cancer, but this approach could work in other tissue types. Also, the research showed that this localized delivery of combination therapy significantly inhibited the recurrence of cancer after the primary was surgically removed.

“We’ve created a simple method to use #chemotherapy while leveraging the biology of the #tumor and our natural defense against foreign invaders to beat back with limited side effects,” said senior author Zhen Gu, PhD, associate professor in the joint UNC/NCSU Biomedical Engineering Department. “We have a lot more work to do before human clinical trials, but we think this approach holds great promise.”

Bionic Kidney To Replace Dialysis

It’s not uncommon for the press to get hyped up before the long process of refinement and FDA approval. Let’s hope that this one moves along quickly — while demonstrating safety and efficacy.

https://www.troab.com/worlds-first-bionic-kidney-set-replace…-two-years

Undoing Aging With Aubrey de Grey Part Three

Parte 3 of the SENS Research Foundation interview by LEAF is out!

Welcome to part three and the final part of our SENS Undoing Aging 2018 interview; we have a few more scientific questions today for Aubrey and his team as well as questions about future developments and taking new therapies to market.

Dr. de Grey, has your position on the relevance of telomere attrition changed since you first devised SENS, especially in the light of the recent results with fibrosis and your involvement with AgeX?

Aubrey: No. Let’s start with the big picture. Neither I nor anyone sensible has ever suggested that telomere attrition has no functional effects in aging: telomere attrition causes cells to become senescent and runs down the proliferative capacity of stem cells, amongst other things. Nor have I suggested that there wouldn’t be some short-term health benefits to activating telomerase or telomerase gene therapy in aging animals or animal models of age-related disease (or even their human equivalents). Indeed, there was plenty of animal data to support this long before the recent results with a mouse model of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF)[1].

Hybrid artificial-natural cells bring together the best of both worlds

Sometimes I think I’m jumping the gun when speculating. Take this further, a better full body replacement?

The more we study natural biological cells, the more we learn about how to control them or build artificial versions. These independent avenues of study have huge potential, but also their limitations. Researchers from Imperial College London have worked out a way to borrow the strengths of each, fusing together living and non-living cells to create tiny chemical factories that might one day aid drug delivery.

In past work, scientists have packaged proteins and enzymes inside artificial casings to better treat conditions like cancer or diabetes. Rather than just using some natural parts, the Imperial College study instead wrapped entire biological cells inside artificial ones.

“Biological cells can perform extremely complex functions, but can be difficult to control when trying to harness one aspect,” says Oscar Ces, lead researcher on the project. “Artificial cells can be programmed more easily but we cannot yet build in much complexity. Our new system bridges the gap between these two approaches by fusing whole biological cells with artificial ones, so that the machinery of both works in concert to produce what we need.”

Blood, Fraud and Money Led to Theranos CEO’s Fall From Grace

“The Theranos story is an important lesson for Silicon Valley,” said Jina Choi, director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office. “Innovators who seek to revolutionize and disrupt an industry must tell investors the truth about what their technology can do today, not just what they hope it might do someday.”

Elizabeth Holmes raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors on the promise that her medical-testing startup Theranos Inc. would change medicine with a single drop of blood. On Wednesday, securities regulators called her a fraud and forced her to give up the company she built.

The lawsuit and settlement announced Wednesday by the U.Securities and Exchange Commission detailed how Holmes and her chief deputy lied for years about their technology, snookered the media, and used the publicity to get investors to hand more than $700 million to keep the closely held company afloat.