Now this is what I am talking about when brain stimulation can treat disease and disorders were often better off.
LONDON: A small study in 16 people with severe anorexia has found that implanting stimulation electrodes into the brains of patients could ease their anxiety and help them gain weight.
Researchers found that in extreme cases of the eating disorder, the technique — known as deep brain stimulation (DBS) — swiftly helped many of those studied reduce symptoms of either anxiety or depression, and improved their quality of life.
A few months later, the improved psychological symptoms began to lead to changes in weight, the researchers said, with the average body mass index (BMI) of the group increasing to 17.3 – a rise of 3.5 points – over the course of the study.
Scientists from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), CIEMAT (Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research), Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, in collaboration with the firm BioDan Group, have presented a prototype for a 3D bioprinter that can create totally functional human skin. This skin is adequate for transplanting to patients or for use in research or the testing of cosmetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical products.
This research has recently been published in the electronic version of the scientific journal Biofabrication. In this article, the team of researchers has demonstrated, for the first time, that, using the new 3D printing technology, it is possible to produce proper human skin. One of the authors, José Luis Jorcano, professor in UC3M’s department of Bioengineering and Aerospace Engineering and head of the Mixed Unit CIEMAT/UC3M in Biomedical Engineering, points out that this skin “can be transplanted to patients or used in business settings to test chemical products, cosmetics or pharmaceutical products in quantities and with timetables and prices that are compatible with these uses.”
This new human skin is one of the first living human organs created using bioprinting to be introduced to the marketplace. It replicates the natural structure of the skin, with a first external layer, the epidermis with its stratum corneum, which acts as protection against the external environment, together with another thicker, deeper layer, the dermis. This last layer consists of fibroblasts that produce collagen, the protein that gives elasticity and mechanical strength to the skin.
A new study from the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain has found a vaccine that has ‘functionally cured’ five HIV patients. It could prevent the need to take antiretroivral drugs again.
On 10 February 2017, the London-based charity Cancer Research UK announced that a team of molecular biologists, astronomers and game designers would receive up to £20 million (US$25 million) over the next five years to develop its interactive virtual-reality map of breast cancers. Currently there are animations for tumor that allow virtual flew throughs. However, they are mock-up. The real models will include data on the expression of thousands of genes and dozens of proteins in each cell of a tumor. The hope is that this spatial and functional detail could reveal more about the factors that influence a tumor’s response to treatment.
The project is just one of a string that aims to build a new generation of cell atlases: maps of organs or tumors that describe location and make-up of each cell in painstaking detail.
Cancer Research UK awarded another team up to £16 million to make a similar tumor map that will focus on metabolites and proteins. Later this year, the US National Institute of Mental Health will announce the winners of grants to map mouse brains in extraordinary molecular detail. And on 23–24 February, researchers will gather at Stanford University in California to continue planning the Human Cell Atlas, an as-yet-unfunded effort to map every cell in the human body.
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.
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.
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 circuits 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.
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.
