As bioelectronics merge with tissue engineering, bioengineered organs are gaining the ability to sense, respond, and adapt in real time—ushering in a new era of smart regenerative systems.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 3
A tiny implant just helped paralyzed rats walk again—is human recovery next?
A groundbreaking study from the University of Auckland and Chalmers University of Technology is offering new hope for spinal cord injury patients. Researchers have developed an ultra-thin implant that delivers gentle electric currents directly to the injured spinal cord. This device mimics natural developmental signals to stimulate nerve healing, and in animal trials, it restored movement and touch sensation in rats—without causing inflammation or damage.
First transplantation of iPS cells-derived corneal epithelial cell sheets
A group of researchers led by Prof. NISHIDA Kohji of Osaka University transplanted iPS cells-derived corneal epithelial cell sheets into a patient with corneal disorders in July 2019.
This is the first clinical study of cornea regeneration using iPS to examine the safety and effects of sheet-shaped corneal epithelial cells, which are cultivated by inducing corneal epithelial cells using iPS cells from others (provided by the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University), with their own method. The status of the patient, who was discharged from hospital on August 23, 2019, will be continually monitored.
Corneal epithelial stem cell deficiency caused by damage to the corneal epithelium has challenges, such as donor shortage and rejection in recipients of transplants using donor corneas. In order to ultimately solve these challenges, the research group has advanced the development of regenerative therapies using hiPS-derived corneal cells.
CRISPR uncovers gene that supercharges vitamin D—and stops tumors in their tracks
A gene called SDR42E1 has been identified as a key player in how our bodies absorb and process vitamin D. Researchers found that disabling this gene in colorectal cancer cells not only crippled their survival but also disrupted thousands of other genes tied to cancer and metabolism. This opens the door to highly targeted cancer therapies—by either cutting off vitamin D supply to tumors or enhancing the gene’s activity to boost health. The findings hint at vast possibilities in treating diseases influenced by vitamin D, though long-term impacts remain uncertain.
Study reveals hidden regulatory roles of ‘junk’ DNA
A new international study suggests that ancient viral DNA embedded in our genome, which were long dismissed as genetic “junk,” may actually play powerful roles in regulating gene expression. Focusing on a family of sequences called MER11, researchers from Japan, China, Canada, and the US have shown that these elements have evolved to influence how genes turn on and off, particularly in early human development.
The findings are published in the journal Science Advances.
Transposable elements (TEs) are repetitive DNA sequences in the genome that originated from ancient viruses. Over millions of years, they spread throughout the genome via copy-and-paste mechanisms.
A common food additive solves a sticky neuroscience problem
An interdisciplinary team working on balls of human neurons called organoids wanted to scale up their efforts and take on important new questions. The solution was all around them.
For close to a decade now, the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program has spearheaded a revolutionary approach to studying the brain: Rather than probe intact brain tissues in humans and other animals, they grow three-dimensional brain-like tissues in the lab from stem cells, creating models called human neural organoids and assembloids.
Beginning in 2018 as a Big Ideas in Neuroscience project of Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, the program has brought together neuroscientists, chemists, engineers, and others to tackle the neural circuits involved in pain, genes that drive neurodevelopmental disorders, new ways to study brain circuits, and more.
‘Standard candle’ particle measurement enables hunt for hybrid mesons
A rather unassuming particle is playing an important role in the hunt for subatomic oddities. Similar to protons and neutrons, mesons are composed of quarks bound together by the strong nuclear force. But these short-lived particles have different characteristics that can reveal new information about the atomic nucleus and how the universe works.
Advancing this understanding could one day enable new discoveries in many fields, ranging from nuclear power to medicine and materials engineering.
The so-called a2 meson is a relatively lightweight system of quarks. It is produced in experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.
Different Bacterial Genes Have Different Turn-Ons
Not all genes respond in the same way to regulation by the same molecule—a property that might enable cells to produce complex genetic responses.
Genes in living cells may become active or may be suppressed in response to environmental stimuli such as heat or the availability of nutrients. For bacteria, this gene regulation often appears to be a simple “on-off switch” controlled by regulatory proteins called transcription factors (TFs). But researchers have now found that different genes might respond differently to the same stimulus even if they are regulated by the same TF [1]. The team activated genes involved in DNA repair and observed gene-to-gene variations in their protein production patterns. Such differences might have been exploited by evolution to achieve complex responses with relatively few molecular components, the researchers suggest.
In the typical scenario, a TF binds to a region of a so-called promoter, a DNA sequence next to a gene. If the TF is the type that blocks gene expression, it prevents the enzyme RNA polymerase from binding and thus from beginning the process of producing the protein that the gene encodes. Because of thermal fluctuations (noise), the TF may spontaneously unbind, allowing gene expression to proceed until it rebinds. The rate of TF binding depends on its concentration, so fluctuations in concentration will cause changes in gene expression.
