Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 3

Nicotinamide Significantly Lowers Skin Cancer Risk

Nicotinamide, a vitamin B3 derivative, could significantly reduce skin cancer risk. The corresponding study was published in JAMA Dermatology.

“There are no guidelines for when to start treatment with nicotinamide for skin cancer prevention in the general population,” said the study’s corresponding author, Lee Wheless, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Dermatology and Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in a press release.

“These results would really shift our practice from starting it once patients have developed numerous skin cancers to starting it earlier,” he added.

Astrocyte-derived vesicles could link stress to intestinal inflammation

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs), such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, are chronic and autoimmune conditions characterized by the inflammation of the intestinal tract. This inflammation can cause nausea or vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and cramping, fatigue, fever, and various other debilitating symptoms.

While the underpinnings of IBDs have been widely investigated, the factors that can contribute to its emergence have not yet been clearly elucidated. Past findings suggest that the symptoms of these diseases are often exacerbated by psychological and .

Researchers at Universidad de los Andes and the Center of Interventional Medicine for Precision and Advanced Cellular Therapy (IMPACT) in Chile recently carried out a study aimed at shedding new light on the neurobiological mechanisms via which stress could worsen IBDs. Their findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, hint at the existence of a brain-to-gut communication pathway that is mediated by small communication vehicles known as small extracellular vesicles (sEVs), which are released by astrocytes.

Open-source software reveals complete 3D architecture of brain cells

The neurons in our brain that underlie thought connect to each other using tiny branch-like structures on their surfaces known as dendritic spines. Now scientists at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute and their colleagues have come up with powerful new software driven by artificial intelligence that can automatically map these dendritic spines in pictures of neurons, a tool the researchers are making freely available.

A paper detailing the work, “A deep learning pipeline for accurate and automated restoration, segmentation, and quantification of ,” is published in Cell Reports Methods.

“Dendritic spines are usually the first site that are implicated in such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” said Sergio Bernal-Garcia, a graduate student in the lab of Franck Polleux, Ph.D., and lead author of the paper. “So understanding more about them is vitally important.”

Coffee Extracts and Chlorogenic Acid Inhibit the Proliferation of HepG2 Cells and c-Myc Expression Without Significant Modulation of Wnt/β-Catenin Signaling

Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common type of liver cancer and is associated with poor clinical prognosis and high mortality, despite the advances related to therapeutic options for HCC. Therefore, exploring alternative therapeutic options and their associated mechanisms is relevant and urgently needed. Natural products may be an important source of novel anti-cancer compounds. Coffee consumption is associated with protective effects against liver diseases, but the molecular mechanisms underlying these benefits remain poorly understood. Objectives: In this study, we evaluated the in vitro effects of green (GC) and roasted coffee (RC) extracts, alongside chlorogenic acid (CGA), on the proliferation of HepG2 hepatocellular carcinoma cells.

Study reveals how a stubborn lung infection evolves inside patients over years

Researchers at Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI) and the Irish Mycobacterial Reference Laboratory at St James’s Hospital have uncovered how the bacterium Mycobacterium avium—a leading cause of difficult-to-treat chronic lung infections—changes and adapts inside patients over many years of illness.

Their findings, published in the journal Genome Medicine, could help doctors understand why M. avium infections come back and why antibiotics sometimes fail.

The team undertook this research to understand how M. avium manages to survive for years in people’s lungs, even during long courses of antibiotics. This bacterium causes a type of chronic lung that’s becoming more common around the world.

How the brain’s activity, energy use and blood flow change as people fall asleep

A new study by investigators from Mass General Brigham has used next-generation imaging technology to discover that when the brain is falling asleep, it shows a coordinated shift in activity.

The researchers found that during NREM (non-rapid eye movement) , parts of the brain that handle movement and stay active and keep using energy, while areas involved in thinking, memory and daydreaming quiet down and use less energy. Their results are published in Nature Communications.

“This research helps explain how the brain stays responsive to the outside world even as awareness fades during sleep,” said corresponding author Jingyuan Chen, Ph.D., an assistant investigator at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The changing landscape of primary autoimmune neuropathies

Management of autoimmune neuropathies has remained unchanged for much of the past 30 years, but recent advances are changing the rate of progress. In this Review, the authors summarize the latest developments, including discoveries in disease mechanisms, new diagnostic guidelines, identification of new biomarkers and the status of promising clinical trials.

Balancing innovation and safety in FLASH radiotherapy

FLASH radiotherapy delivers a cancer treatment dose in less than a second, reducing side effects while maintaining tumour control. This Review explores technological advances, safety considerations and future directions needed to bring this promising ultra-fast radiotherapy approach into clinical practice.

/* */