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Category: biotech/medical – Page 349

Small Molecule Found to Weaken Immune Cells in Lung Cancer

To maintain a healthy immune system, doctors advise patients to take vitamins and minerals. Vitamins have many functions that benefit the body, including resisting infection, energy boost, aiding in blood clotting, improving brain function, generation of red blood cells, promoting a healthy gut microbiome, improving wound healing, preventing eye deterioration, and developing strong bones. We can get vitamins from various sources, including orange juice, which is rich in vitamin C, folate, and potassium. Physicians often recommend supplements for patients low on specific vitamins. However, dysregulation of vitamins can weaken the immune system and promote overall bad health. One vitamin in particular that helps maintain cellular function includes B12. This vitamin is essential to generate DNA and red blood cells, and aids in nerve function, energy conversion, and protein metabolism. When a patient has a B12 deficiency it can result in muscle weakness, numbness in hands and feet, difficulty walking, nausea, loss of appetite, and unintentional weight loss. In addition, it can allow the buildup of a small molecule known as methylmalonic acid (MMA).

In healthy tissues, vitamin B12 helps break down MMA. In B12 deficient patients, MMA is increased and can be measured through blood or urine samples. Methylmalonic acid is produced when proteins in your muscle, known as amino acids, are broken down. Tests to determine B12 deficiency or a genetic disorder are done by physicians at birth and after the appearance of symptoms related to B12 deficiency. Interestingly, a group of scientists have discovered a new deleterious role of MMA in lung carcinoma.

A recent publication from Oncogene, by Dr. Ana P. Gomes and others, demonstrated that MMA in aged patients weakens immune cell function and promotes lung cancer progression. Gomes is a professor of molecular oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida. Her work specifically focuses on understanding metabolic changes as we age and how this change in metabolism influences cancer risk.

US scientists may have developed the first robot syllabus that allows machines to transfer skills without human intervention

Whether it’s our phones, cars, televisions, medical devices or even washing machines, we now have computers everywhere.

Using bigger computers, we solve bigger problems like managing the operation of a power grid, designing an aircraft, predicting the weather or providing different types of artificial intelligence (AI).

But all these machines work by manipulating data in the form of ones and zeros (bits) using classical techniques that have not changed since the abacus was invented in antiquity.

Scientists can tweak gene to reduce brain aging and extend lifespans by ‘30%’

In case you thought science was going to take a day off, researchers have just figured out a way of reversing brain aging – in fruit flies, but still.

They previously did something similar in lab mice, claiming to “reverse and repair” damage done by Alzheimer’s disease. The brain is a fascinating thing: it behaves weirdly after midnight, performs a magical reset while sleeping to “save memories,” and automatically corrects spelling errors even when you don’t see them yourself. Whatever next, health experts?!

When a common type of protein builds up in the brain, it stops cells from getting rid of “unnecessary or dysfunctional components,” i.e., waste.

Scientists identify immune molecule that keeps Metabolism in tune and on time

Recent research reveals that the immune system interacts with the body’s internal clock, influencing both fat storage and temperature regulation.

The discovery hints at why shift workers and others with irregular work, eating, or sleep patterns driven by the demands of modern life fall out of metabolic sync, and may hold potential for developing therapies to address obesity and prevent wasting.

The key finding—that an immune molecule within adipose (fat) tissue, known as interleukin-17A (IL-17A), plays a regulatory role in fat storage—holds significant therapeutic potential for addressing obesity, preventing wasting, and mitigating other metabolic disorders. By targeting this molecule, drug developers may gain a valuable new pathway for creating treatments aimed at these conditions.

Revolutionizing Drug Discovery: Scientists Develop World’s First Single-Atom Editing Technology

KAIST researchers have developed a groundbreaking single-atom editing technology using light-powered “molecular scissors” to convert oxygen atoms into nitrogen in drug compounds, simplifying drug development and boosting efficacy.

In the field of pioneering drug development, a groundbreaking new technology that enables the precise and rapid editing of key atoms critical to drug efficacy has been hailed as a transformative and “dream” innovation, revolutionizing the process of discovering potential drug candidates. Researchers at KAIST have achieved a world-first by successfully developing single-atom editing technology designed to maximize drug efficacy.

On October 8th, KAIST (represented by President Kwang-Hyung Lee) announced that Professor Yoonsu Park’s research team from the Department of Chemistry successfully developed technology that enables the easy editing and correction of oxygen atoms in furan compounds into nitrogen atoms, directly converting them into pyrrole frameworks, which are widely used in pharmaceuticals.

Ring resonators unlock new abilities in acoustic tweezers

Over the past several decades, researchers have been getting better and better at manipulating tiny particles with acoustic waves. Dubbed “acoustic tweezers,” the technology started with the simplistic trapping of particles and has since expanded to include the precise rotation and movement of cells and organisms in three dimensions.

These abilities make the technology well suited to address challenges in biological studies, medical diagnostics and therapeutics through the precise, dexterous, biocompatible manipulation of bioparticles.

In a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, engineers from Duke University demonstrate an entirely new approach to the technology using “ring resonators.” With the ability to carry out tasks with high precision while requiring much lower power inputs, the work could inspire a new generation of these devices.

Labeling cell particles with barcodes

Cell-to-cell communication through nanosized particles, working as messengers and carriers, can now be analyzed in a whole new way, thanks to a new method involving CRISPR gene-editing technology. The particles, known as small extracellular vesicles (sEVs), play an important role in the spread of disease and as potential drug carriers. The newly developed system, named CIBER, enables thousands of genes to be studied at once, by labeling sEVs with a kind of RNA “barcode.” With this, researchers hope to find what factors are involved in sEV release from host cells. This will help advance our understanding of basic sEV biology and may aid in the development of new treatments for diseases, such as cancer.

Your body “talks” in more ways than one. Your cells communicate with each other, enabling your different parts to function as one team. However, there are still many mysteries surrounding this process. Extracellular vesicles (EVs), small particles released by cells, were previously thought to be useless waste. However, in recent decades they have been dramatically relabeled as very important particles (VIPs), due to their association with various diseases, including cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and age-related diseases.

Small EVs have been found to play a key role in cell-to-cell communication. Depending on what “cargo” they carry from their host cell (which can include RNA, proteins and lipids), sEVs can help maintain normal tissue functions or can further the spread of diseases. Because of this, researchers are interested in how sEVs form and are released. However, separating sEVs from other molecules and identifying the factors which lead to their release is both difficult and time-consuming with conventional methods. So, a team in Japan has developed a new technique.

Inside the Laboratory for Extraordinary Microbes

An exciting Focused Research Organization (FRO): is systematically developing tools for working with non-model microorganisms.

As we walked, Lee told me that’s efforts to make “extraordinary” organisms accessible almost always follow the same basic steps. First, the team orders a microbe from ATCC, a non-profit group that has been storing and mailing microbes to researchers since 1925. The ATCC catalog includes more than 14,000 bacterial strains, the vast majority of which gather dust and are rarely ordered by researchers.

After receiving a microbe in the mail, sequences it. Mutations can creep into strains over time, and even a seemingly minor alteration—a single base swapped here or there—can change how cells grow and respond to their environment.

Lee told me that he once sequenced Vibrio natriegens stored in the ATCC database. Ten years later, a professor at Harvard ordered the same microbe from ATCC and sequenced its genome again. But the professor noticed a small change: the Vibrio cells now carried a single mutation in a ribosomal gene that made the cells sickly and slow-growing. This mutation had not been present when Lee studied the same microbes just a decade prior: evidence that nothing in biology remains constant. By sequencing the genome, constructs a record from which to diagnose future problems.

Pulsed Field Ablation Procedures Found Safe and Effective for Atrial Fibrillation Patients

The “MANIFEST-17K” international study is the first to show important…

Pulsed field ablation (PFA) is safe for treating patients with common types of atrial fibrillation (AF), according to the largest study of its kind on this new technology, led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The “MANIFEST-17K” international study is the first to show important safety outcomes in a large patient population, including no significant risk of esophageal damage, with PFA is the latest ablation modality approved by the Food and Drug Administration that can be used to restore a regular heartbeat. The findings, published July 8 in Nature Medicine, could lead to more frequent use of PFA instead of conventional therapies to manage AF patients.

“MANIFEST-17K provides confidence that, unlike conventional thermal ablation, PFA with the pentaspline catheter does not cause the most feared complication of AF ablation—esophageal damage—nor does it cause pulmonary vein stenosis or persistent injury to the diaphragm,” says senior author Vivek Reddy, MD, The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust Professor of Medicine in Cardiac Electrophysiology at Icahn Mount Sinai. “This study found that other general complications were also rare, including pericardial tamponade occurring in approximately one in 200 patients, stroke in one in 1000, and death in even less than one in 1000 patients. Given the relative novelty of pulsed field ablation, these are important safety outcomes.”