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Category: biotech/medical – Page 352

Working To Reduce Global Catastrophic Biological Risks — Dr. Jaime Yassif, Ph.D. — VP, Global Biological Policy and Programs, Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Dr. Jaime Yassif, Ph.D. serves as Vice President of Global Biological Policy and Programs, at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (https://www.nti.org/about/people/jaim…) where she oversees work to reduce global catastrophic biological risks, strengthen biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and drives progress in advancing global health security.

Prior to this, Dr. Yassif served as a Program Officer at the Open Philanthropy Project, where she led the initiative on Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness. In this role, she recommended and managed approximately $40 million in biosecurity grants, which rebuilt the field and supported work in several key areas, including: development of new biosecurity programming at several leading think tanks; cultivation of new talent through biosecurity leadership development programs; initiation of new biosecurity work in China and India; establishment of the Global Health Security Index; development of the Clade X tabletop exercise; and the emergence of a new discussion about global catastrophic biological risks.

Previously, Dr. Yassif was a Science and Technology Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she focused on oversight of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program and East Asia security issues. During this period, she also worked on the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) at the Department of Health and Human Services, where she helped lay the groundwork for the WHO Joint External Evaluations and the GHSA Steering Group.

Dr. Yassif’s previous experience includes work with Connecting Organizations for Regional Disease Surveillance, Chatham House, NTI, the Federation of American Scientists and the Tsinghua University Institute for International Studies.

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A previously unknown mechanism for inactivating genes that suppress tumor formation helps explain why cancer risk is associated with an unhealthy diet or unmanaged metabolic conditions like diabetes.

Researchers from Singapore and the UK used mouse models, human tissue, and human breast organoids grown in the lab to find that changes in glucose metabolism could help cancer grow by temporarily disabling a gene that protects us from tumors called BRCA2.

“These findings raise awareness of the impact of diet and weight control in the management of cancer risks,” says the first author of the new study, cancer pharmacologist Li Ren Kong from the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI Singapore).

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Researchers identified a subcortical brain network that is thought to combine arousal and awareness, playing a key role in human consciousness.

A study recently published in Science Translational Medicine by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, both part of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, introduces a connectivity map of a brain network. This map, the researchers suggest, is essential for maintaining human consciousness.

The study involved high-resolution scans that enabled the researchers to visualize brain connections at submillimeter spatial resolution. This technical advance allowed them to identify previously unseen pathways connecting the brainstem, thalamus, hypothalamus, basal forebrain, and cerebral cortex.

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The Rabbit R1 handheld AI device is a simple Android device, and a developer made the AI run on an iPhone.

The Rabbit R1 offers the ability to answer queries and perform tasks using AI, instead of using an iPhone directly. However, the work of one enterprising developer has resulted in a clone of the “iPhone-killer” which can run on an iPhone.

In X tweets on Monday, Will Hobick of Flutterflow posted that he would be posting a “cloneable template” of the Rabbit R1 app later in the week. In a follow-up post on Tuesday, he demonstrates a version of the app running on an iPhone.

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Researchers have discovered the process by which dietary choline crosses the blood-brain barrier. This breakthrough has potential applications in enhancing drug delivery to the brain for treating neurological disorders.

A researcher from the University of Queensland has identified molecular doorways that could facilitate the delivery of drugs to the brain for treating neurological disorders.

Dr. Rosemary Cater from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience led a team that discovered that an essential nutrient called choline is transported into the brain by a protein called FLVCR2.

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Most antibiotics target metabolically active bacteria, but with artificial intelligence, researchers can efficiently screen compounds that are lethal to dormant microbes.

Since the 1970s, modern antibiotic discovery has been experiencing a lull. Now the World Health Organization has declared the antimicrobial resistance crisis as one of the top 10 global public health threats.

When an infection is treated repeatedly, clinicians run the risk of bacteria becoming resistant to the antibiotics. But why would an infection return after proper antibiotic treatment? One well-documented possibility is that the bacteria are becoming metabolically inert, escaping detection of traditional antibiotics that only respond to metabolic activity. When the danger has passed, the bacteria return to life and the infection reappears.

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A study in Nature identifies molecular responses to endurance exercise training in rats, including sex-specific responses. The findings may offer new insights into the impact of exercise on health and disease. Read the paper:

Temporal multi-omic analysis of tissues from rats undergoing up to eight weeks of endurance exercise training reveals widespread shared, tissue-specific and sex-specific changes, including immune, metabolic, stress response and mitochondrial pathways.

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