Ever since Biogen and Eisai’s Aduhelm (aducanemab) was approved in 2021 as the first antibody to treat Alzheimer’s disease by clearing amyloid plaques from the brain, the modality has been dogged by a serious side effect: brain bleeding called amyloid-related imaging abnormalities, or ARIA.
Now, researchers from Denali Therapeutics have debuted an antibody that can cross the blood-brain barrier and attack amyloid, but without triggering this potentially life-threatening complication.
A Maryland scientist developed synthetic blood that could save lives when seconds count and fresh blood is out of reach.
Dr. Allan Doctor is a professor-scientist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. His shelf-stable synthetic blood product is called ErythroMer, under development by KaloCyte.
The blood alternative could be used in the field without a refrigerator or a donor match, he said.
In a world first, researchers from Sheba Medical Center and Tel Aviv University have successfully grown human kidney organoids – a synthetic 3D organ culture – using kidney tissue stem cells.
The synthetic kidney organs matured and stayed stable for 34 weeks, which is the longest-lasting and purest set of kidney organoids ever developed.
Prof. Benjamin Dekel, Director of the Pediatric Nephrology Unit and the Stem Cell Research Institute at the Safra Children’s Hospital at Sheba Medical Center and Director of the Sagol Center for Regenerative Medicine at Tel Aviv University led the study. Doctoral student Dr. Michael Namestannikov, a graduate of the Physician-Researcher track at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Medicine, and Dr. Osnat Cohen-Sontag, a research associate at Sheba Medical Center, participated in the research.
Cases of chikungunya fever are rising in southern China, prompting local authorities to take measures to curb its spread.
Here is what you need to know about the disease:
What is chikungunya?
Chikungunya is caused by a virus that can be passed to humans by infected mosquitoes, with most cases occurring in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
The obesity rate has more than doubled in the last 30 years, affecting more than one billion people worldwide. This prevalent condition is also linked to other metabolic disorders, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney disease, and cancers.
Current treatment options include lifestyle interventions, bariatric surgery, and GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy, but many patients struggle to access or complete these treatments or to maintain their weight loss afterward.
Salk Institute scientists are looking for a new treatment strategy in microproteins, an understudied class of molecules found throughout the body that play roles in both health and disease.
Neuroblastoma can be a particularly insidious cancer. In about half of all cases, tumors regress, even without therapy. In the other half, tumors grow very quickly. These tumors often respond well to chemotherapy at first, but usually return after one to two years. A characteristic feature of such aggressive neuroblastoma cells is an abnormally high number of copies of the oncogene MYCN.
A team led by Dr. Jan Dörr and Professor Anton Henssen from the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint institution of Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center, has now discovered that the location of the MYCN gene plays an important role in the aggressiveness of neuroblastoma: If it is located outside chromosomes, cancer cells enter a dormant state and thereby render themselves immune to therapy.
In Cancer Discovery, the research team proposes a new treatment strategy that targets these dormant tumor cells. Their approach has already proven successful in a mouse model.
A new study reveals that fragmented sleep causes cellular damage to the brain’s blood vessels, providing further evidence to suggest that sleep disruption predisposes the brain to dementia.
The research, published in the journal Brain, is the first to offer cellular and molecular evidence that sleep disruption directly causes damage to brain blood vessels and blood flow.
“We found that individuals who had more fragmented sleep, such as sleeping restlessly and waking up a lot at night, had a change in their balance of pericytes—a brain blood vessel cell that plays an important role in regulating brain blood flow and the entry and exit of substances between the blood and the brain,” said Andrew Lim, principal investigator of the study and a sleep neurologist and scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
Background: Chronic liver diseases such as hepatic tumors can affect the brain through the liver–brain axis, leading to neurotransmitter dysregulation and behavioral changes. Cancer patients suffer from fatigue, which can be associated with sleep disturbances. Sleep is regulated via two interlocked mechanisms: homeostatic regulation and the circadian system. In mammals, the hypothalamic suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is the key component of the circadian system. It generates circadian rhythms in physiology and behavior and controls their entrainment to the surrounding light/dark cycle. Neuron–glia interactions are crucial for the functional integrity of the SCN. Under pathological conditions, oxidative stress can compromise these interactions and thus circadian timekeeping and entrainment.
Novel Therapeutic Approaches To Treat Airways Diseases — Dr. Reynold Panettieri, MD, — Vice Chancellor for Translational Medicine and Science Director, Rutgers Institute for Translational Medicine and Science / Professor of Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
