Lifeboat Foundation

Stefan Wilhelm, an associate professor in the Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, and several students in his Biomedical Nano-Engineering Lab have recently published an article in the journal Nano Letters (“Toward the Scalable, Rapid, Reproducible, and Cost-Effective Synthesis of Personalized Nanomedicines at the Point of Care”) that outlines their recent important nanomedicine advancement.

The group examined how to create tools that produce nanomedicines, such as vaccine formulations, directly at the point of care. In doing so, the large centralized facilities, shipping challenges, and extreme cold storage challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic would no longer limit vaccine distribution.

Wilhelm, with student researchers such as Hamilton Young, a senior biomedical engineering student, and Yuxin He, a biomedical engineering graduate research assistant, used 3D printer parts to mix fluid streams together containing the building blocks of nanomedicines and their payloads in a T-mixer format.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have discovered that odors stimulate specific brain cells that may play a role in rapid “go/no-go” decision-making.

The study was published online Tuesday (Feb. 6) in the journal Current Biology.

The scientists focused on the hippocampus, an area of the brain crucial to memory and learning. They knew that so-called “time cells” played a major role in hippocampal function, but didn’t know their role in associative learning.

Even with dialysis, life expectancy is significantly shortened. With a kidney transplant, patients can expect to live 10 to 15 years longer.

The problem is that there aren’t enough donor kidneys to meet demand. If a person is lucky enough to find a matching donor, they still have to take immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives. While the drugs ensure their body won’t reject the organ, they also increase the risk of serious infections.

Continue reading “Artificial kidney aces test in pigs” »

A preventative anti-aging therapy seems like wishful thinking.

Yet a new study led by Dr. Corina Amor Vegas at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory describes a treatment that brings the dream to life—at least for mice. Given a single injection in young adulthood, they aged more slowly compared to their peers.

By the equivalent of roughly 65 years of age in humans, the mice were slimmer, could better regulate blood sugar and insulin levels, and had lower inflammation and a more youthful metabolic profile. They even kept up their love for running, whereas untreated seniors turned into couch potatoes.

Researchers have unveiled a pioneering “bone bandage” that not only regenerates damaged bones in mice but also holds the promise of transforming bone regeneration in humans.

Developed by scientists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), this biomimetic scaffold combines piezoelectric materials and the growth-promoting properties of hydroxyapatite (HAp), a naturally occurring mineral found in bones.

The innovative approach KAIST researchers took, although very much sounding like science fiction, is simply a freestanding scaffold that generates electrical signals when pressure is applied.

The Assistance Publique Hôpitaux de Paris in France recently hosted a set of “socially assistive” robots to help lighten the workload for its human staff.

A Scottish advanced artificial intelligence team has helped trial a team of ‘socially assistive’ robots in a Parisian hospital.

Continue reading “French hospital trials ‘socially assistive’ robots to help the elderly” »

A Stanford Medicine study identifies an easily measured biophysical property that can identify Type 2 diabetics at increased risk for liver cancer who don’t meet current screening guidelines.

The immune system helps fight off disease and allows our bodies to maintain a state of healthy function, known as homeostasis. In this regard, the immune system is made of two distinct responses that act in concert with one another to provide a synergistic and complimentary response against invading pathogens. The first response is the innate immune response, which recognizes infections through various intercellular pathways. The cells then alert or communicate danger to surrounding cells generating a cascade effect. The innate immune system is known to be immediate and less specific than its counterpart the adaptive immune response.

In the second stage of immunity, the adaptive immune response attacks foreign pathogens with more specificity and rigor. The adaptive immune system is slow compared to the innate, however, once an infection infiltrates the immune system then immune memory toward that pathogen will develop. This immune memory will reduce the response time of the adaptive immune system and quickly get rid of the infection the second time. This is the concept behind vaccines. Through pre-exposure of a disease, the body can build up an immunity towards it and provide adequate response next time it encounters the disease. The two immune responses are inter-related and work together to create a strong, well-conducted barrier against invaders.

The immune system communicates in various ways to trigger a complete response. Cells release proteins or cytokines to send messages to one another to signal an attack on the immune system. Cytokines help to control an immune response including inflammation. However, researchers have previously discovered that too much release of cytokines can cause toxicity. This can occur during a severe infection when cells are trying to overcompensate and lyse the disease. As a result, abundant cytokines flood the infected area and generate cytokine release syndrome (CRS) or a “cytokine storm”. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CRS was a major point of concern as individuals were developing CRS toxicity in addition to the COVID-19 virus. Inflammatory cytokines, such as interleukin-6 (IL-6), are major components responsible for CRS. Therefore, many different treatments have been used to target these cytokines to avoid secondary infection.

Norovirus, a highly infectious virus that is the leading cause of diarrhea and vomiting in the U.S., has no approved therapeutics or vaccines to prevent its miserable effects. This is partly due to a lack of reliable animal models to study norovirus infection and predict how effective interventions would be in people. To solve this, NIAID scientists have developed an animal model to study human norovirus infection that could help facilitate the development of new vaccines and therapeutics to treat norovirus infection. Findings from this research were published Feb. 6 in Nature Microbiology.

Human norovirus causes illness in tens of millions of people in the U.S. each year and, in some cases, can result in hospitalization and even death. It is easily spread when people ingest foods, drinks or particles from surfaces contaminated by virus from the stool or vomit of an infected individual. Noroviruses are genetically diverse, with different genogroups—groups characterized by genetic similarity—of the virus infecting different species of animals. Several genogroups of noroviruses infect people without similarly infecting animals. This has led to difficulties in establishing an animal model for human norovirus infection.

Following up on earlier evidence that rhesus macaque monkeys could develop norovirus infections, a team of researchers led by scientists at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center set out to determine whether macaques could serve as an effective animal model for the human disease. The macaques were challenged with several genotypes of human noroviruses at once. Throughout the experiment, the animals were kept in biocontainment, and their health and behavior were carefully monitored. Levels of virus in the animals’ stool were measured, and antibodies against norovirus in the animals’ blood serum were analyzed. The researchers found that the macaques were susceptible to viral infection with at least two genotypes of norovirus, with similar antibody responses, shedding of virus in stool, and pathology as in human norovirus infection. Notably, the infections in the animals did not result in clinical symptoms, such as diarrhea and vomiting.