Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 382

Fungal allies arm plant roots against disease by rewriting the rules of infection

Scientists have discovered that beneficial root-dwelling fungi boost plant resilience to disease by remodeling the plant cell membrane at pathogen infection sites—offering critical new insights into how plants coordinate defenses in complex natural environments.

This new research reveals that the membrane interface between plant cells and invading pathogen microbes is not fixed. Instead, it can be reshaped by co-colonizing symbionts, fundamentally altering how plants interact with pathogens and potentially improving resistance to disease.

The study is published in the journal Cell Reports.

Destructured Drug Discovery: How Sequence-Based AI Speeds and Expands the Search for New Therapeutics

Predictive computational methods for drug discovery have typically relied on models that incorporate three-dimensional information about protein structure. But these modeling methods face limitations due to high computational costs, expensive training data, and inability to fully capture protein dynamics.

Ainnocence develops predictive AI models based on target protein sequence. By bypassing 3D structural information entirely, sequence-based AI models can screen billions of drug candidates in hours or days. Ainnocence uses amino acid sequence data from target proteins and wet lab data to predict drug binding and other biological effects. They have demonstrated success in discovering COVID-19 antibodies and their platform can be used to discover other biomolecules, small molecules, cell therapies, and mRNA vaccines.

Safe and effective in vivo delivery of DNA and RNA using proteolipid vehicles

Current genetic medicines are limited by tolerability, scalability, and immunogenicity issues. Utilizing components from viral and non-viral delivery platforms, we developed a lipid-based delivery vehicle formulated with a chimeric fusion protein that delivers nucleic acid cargo inside cells effectively and with broad distribution and low immunogenicity. This proteolipid vehicle platform is suitable for safe and effective repeat dosing of DNA and/or RNA in vivo.

Abstract: The antibody Teplizumab can delay type 1 diabetes, but therapeutic responses are heterogeneous

Here, Conny Gysemans & team find variable patient responses align with specific immune gene signatures, offering a tool to predict treatment success or resistance.

Address correspondence to: Conny Gysemans, Leuven Diabetes Lab, Clinical and Experimental Endocrinology (CEE), CHROMETA, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. Phone: 32.16.377454; Email: [email protected].

Soft ‘cyborg’ cardiac patches could improve stem cell heart repair

Heart muscle cells grown from patient stem cells—known as human induced pluripotent stem cell–derived cardiomyocytes, or hiPSC-CMs—are a promising way to repair hearts damaged by heart attacks and heart failure. But transplanted hiPSC-CMs often have trouble syncing to the rhythm of native heart cells, which can cause dangerous arrhythmias after transplantation.

For years, stem cell biologists and cardiac researchers have been looking for ways to improve how implanted hiPSC-CMs mature and integrate into the heart. The challenge is that once the hiPSC-CMs are implanted in vivo, it’s hard to monitor how they integrate.

Now, Harvard University researchers have developed the first platform capable of continuously monitoring how transplanted cells mature, communicate, and synchronize with native tissue inside the body. Using this system, the researchers identified a self-assembling peptide that accelerated the maturation of hiPSC-CMs and improved the electrical coupling of the transplanted cardiac organoids. The research is published in Science.

Oncogenic Ras activation in permissive somatic cells triggers rapid-onset phenotypic plasticity and elicits a tumor-promoting neutrophil response

Ras mutations drive tumorigenesis yet persist in normal tissues. Elliot et al. explore this paradox, finding that HRASG12V induces bifurcating cell fates in the zebrafish larval epidermis, with lamc2+krt18+ cancer stem cell-like cells emerging from permissive cells at the preneoplastic stage and expressing neutrophil-modulating cytokines that instigate reciprocal tumor-supportive crosstalk.

Medra Raises $52 Million to Speed Drug Discovery With AI Robots

Medra, which programs robots with artificial intelligence to conduct and improve biological experiments, has raised $52 million to build what it says will be one of the largest autonomous labs in the United States.

The deal brings Medra’s total funding to $63 million, including pre-seed and seed financing. Existing investor Human Capital led the new round, which came together just weeks after the company started talking publicly about its work in September, Chief Executive Officer Michelle Lee said in an interview at the company’s San Francisco lab. The company recently signed an agreement to work on early drug discovery with Genentech, a subsidiary of pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding AG.

Scale of living things

Neal Agarwal published another gift to the internet with Size of Life. It shows the scale of living things, starting with DNA, to hemoglobin, and keeps going up.

The scientific illustrations are hand-drawn (without AI) by Julius Csotonyi. Sound & FX by Aleix Ramon and cello music by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga calm the mind and encourage a slow observation of things, but also grow in complexity and weight with the scale. It kind of feels like a meditation exercise.

See also: shrinking to an atom, the speed of light, and of course the classic Powers of Ten.

Tricking tumors into marking themselves for destruction with focused ultrasound

USC biomedical engineers have found a way to make a solid tumor paint a target on its own back in order to train the body’s immune system to find and destroy it.

The research team from USC Viterbi’s Wang Lab used focused ultrasound waves to “prime” tumor cells so they can be more easily recognized and attacked by chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells, the engineered immune cells that have revolutionized treatment for blood cancers but have until now struggled against solid tumors. The research has been published in Nature Materials.

CAR T-cell therapy works remarkably well in the bloodstream, where rogue cancer cells are exposed and easily targeted. However, solid tumors are another story. They hide deep in tissue, shielded by a microenvironment fortress of healthy cells. Every tumor is different, making it hard to find a single “flag” that marks cancer cells without causing damage to healthy ones.

/* */