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Category: biotech/medical – Page 30

FDA-Approved Sleeping Pill Slows Alzheimer’s Tangles in Pre-Clinical Trial

A drug used to treat insomnia has protected mice against the buildup of the tau protein found to clump abnormally in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. This could lead to new ways to help slow the progress of these diseases.

An increasing number of people are facing cognitive decline personally or in their loved ones. There are almost 10 million new cases of dementia globally each year, and despite decades of research, there are still few treatment options that provide clear benefits.

So due to the links between Alzheimer’s and poor sleep, Washington University neurologist Samira Parhizkar and colleagues investigated a central nervous system depressant, lemborexant, that was approved for use as a sleep aid by the FDA in December 2019.

Breakthrough: FDA Approves Injection to Prevent HIV

The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved Gilead Sciences’ twice-yearly injection to prevent HIV – a move the company hailed as a major breakthrough in the fight against the sexually transmitted virus.

Drugs to prevent HIV transmission, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP, have existed for more than a decade. But because they typically require taking a daily pill, they have yet to make a significant dent in global infections.

“This is a historic day in the decades-long fight against HIV,” Gilead chairman and chief executive Daniel O’Day said in a statement.

Startup’s biosensor makes drug development and manufacturing cheaper

In the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, ELISA tests provide critical quality control during drug development and manufacturing. The tests can precisely quantify protein levels, but they also require hours of work by trained technicians and specialized equipment. That makes them prohibitively expensive, driving up the costs of drugs and putting research testing out of reach for many.

Now the Advanced Silicon Group (ASG), founded by Marcie Black ’94, MEng ’95, PhD ’03 and Bill Rever, is commercializing a new technology that could dramatically lower the time and costs associated with protein sensing. ASG’s proprietary sensor combines silicon nanowires with antibodies that can bind to different proteins to create a highly sensitive measurement of their concentration in a given solution.

The tests can measure the concentration of many different proteins and other molecules at once, with results typically available in less than 15 minutes. Users simply place a tiny amount of solution on the sensor, rinse the sensor, and then insert it into ASG’s handheld testing system.

“We’re making it 15 times faster and 15 times lower cost to test for proteins,” Black says. “That’s on the drug development side. This could also make the manufacturing of drugs significantly faster and more cost-effective. It could revolutionize how we create drugs in this country and around the world.”

Advanced Silicon Group, founded by MIT alumna Marcie Black, developed a protein sensor that could make drug development and manufacturing much faster and less expensive.

Stir stick that detects spiked drinks developed by UBC researchers

Researchers at the University of British Columbia say they have developed a new tool to detect common drink-spiking drugs.

They say they plan to test the device, known as Spikeless, in the hopes it will one day be used widely to combat drugs being added to drinks and to prevent sexual assaults.

The university said in a news release that the “seemingly ordinary stir stick” can detect drugs such as GHB and ketamine within 30 seconds, changing colour if a beverage is contaminated.

Sasha Santos, an anti-violence activist working with the researchers on the project, says the technology has the potential to be a game-changer, adding that other drug testing tools are marketed to customers in a problematic way.

An anti-violence activist says the invention, which can detect drugs within 30 seconds, aims to make the stir sticks ubiquitous in bars, clubs and pubs, so every single drink served comes with a safety test.

Creating the World’s First CRISPR Medicine, for Sickle Cell Disease

When Vijay Sankaran was an MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School in the mid-2000s, one of his first clinical encounters was with a 24-year-old patient whose sickle cell disease left them with almost weekly pain episodes.

“The encounter made me wonder, couldn’t we do more for these patients?” said Sankaran, who is now the HMS Jan Ellen Paradise, MD Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital.

In 2008, Orkin, Sankaran, and colleagues achieved their vision by identifying a new therapeutic target for sickle cell disease.

In December 2023, through the development efforts of CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, their decades-long endeavor reached fruition in the form of a new treatment, CASGEVY, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The decision has ushered in a new era for sickle cell disease treatment — and marked the world’s first approval of a medicine based on CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology.

How a genetic insight paired with gene editing technology led to a life-changing new therapy.

Continue reading “Creating the World’s First CRISPR Medicine, for Sickle Cell Disease” | >

The Redox Activity of Protein Disulphide Isomerase Functions in Non‐Homologous End‐Joining Repair to Prevent DNA Damage

Schematic diagram illustrating the protective role of protein disulphide isomerase (PDI) against DNA damage via non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ), which repairs double stranded DNA breaks (DSBs). Ind…

Two transparent worms shed light on evolution

Two species of worms have retained remarkably similar patterns in the way they switch their genes on and off despite having split from a common ancestor 20 million years ago, a new study finds.

The findings appear in the journal Science.

“It was just remarkable, with this evolutionary distance, that we should see such coherence in gene expression patterns,” said Dr. Robert Waterston, professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle and a co-senior author of the paper. “I was surprised how well everything lined up.”

Eye-tracking exhibit helps map gaze behavior development across different life stages

Understanding how people visually browse their surroundings and direct their gaze in specific situations is a long-standing goal among psychology researchers. Past studies suggest that humans exhibit oculomotor biases, which are tendencies that guide the way they look at the world around them, for instance, preferentially directing their gaze around the center of what they are visually exposed to at a given time.

Researchers at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding how these patterns in gazing develop throughout the human lifespan. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, suggest that scene viewing tendencies gradually develop over childhood and adolescence, while older people tend to observe the world following similar viewing and gaze fixation strategies.

“One of the key questions our lab is interested in is how gaze behavior—that is, where and how we look at natural scenes—develops as we grow up,” Marcel Linka, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.