The secret to cellular youth may lie in maintaining a small nucleolus—a dense structure within the cell nucleus—according to investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine. These findings were uncovered in yeast, a model organism renowned for its role in making bread and beer, yet surprisingly similar to humans at the cellular level.
The study, published Nov. 25 in Nature Aging, may lead to new longevity treatments that could extend human lifespan. It also establishes a mortality timer that reveals how long a cell has left before it dies.
As people get older, they are more likely to develop health conditions, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative diseases.
Metabolic imaging is a noninvasive method that enables clinicians and scientists to study living cells using laser light, which can help them assess disease progression and treatment responses.
But light scatters when it shines into biological tissue, limiting how deep it can penetrate and hampering the resolution of captured images.
Now, MIT researchers have developed a new technique that more than doubles the usual depth limit of metabolic imaging. Their method also boosts imaging speeds, yielding richer and more detailed images.
This new technique does not require tissue to be preprocessed, such as by cutting it or staining it with dyes. Instead, a specialized laser illuminates deep into the tissue, causing certain intrinsic molecules within the cells and tissues to emit light. This eliminates the need to alter the tissue, providing a more natural and accurate representation of its structure and function.
Decades of research have established that chronic stress—from money worries, job problems, family tensions, or other sources—causes chemical changes in the body. In a new study, researchers have identified biological changes induced by stress that may help explain how it could cause a tumor to spread, or metastasize.
To conduct the study, the researchers used two established methods for modeling stress in mice. One is designed to mimic exposure to constant, low-level, predictable stress. The other simulates intermittent, unpredictable, mild stress.
They used these methods to induce chronic stress in two different mouse models of breast cancer. In both models, when the mice were exposed to stress using either method, they had both larger mammary tumors and more lung metastases than mice not exposed to stress.
But a series of follow-up experiments strongly suggested that this increased tumor growth and metastasis wasn’t being driven by the effects of stress on cancer cells themselves.
Surprisingly, the organoids were still healthy when they returned from orbit a month later, but the cells had matured faster compared to identical organoids grown on Earth—they were closer to becoming adult neurons and were beginning to show signs of specialization. The results, which could shed light on potential neurological effects of space travel, were published on October 23, 2024, in Stem Cells Translational Medicine.
“The fact that these cells survived in space was a big surprise,” says co-senior author Jeanne Loring, PhD, professor emeritus in the Department of Molecular Medicine and founding director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Scripps Research. “This lays the groundwork for future experiments in space, in which we can include other parts of the brain that are affected by neurodegenerative disease.”
On Earth, the team used stem cells to create organoids consisting of either cortical or dopaminergic neurons, which are the neuronal populations impacted in multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease—diseases that Loring has studied for decades. Some organoids also included microglia, a type of immune cell that is resident within the brain, to examine the impact of microgravity on inflammation.
Mount Sinai researchers discovered that harmine, a beta cell regenerative drug, may transform alpha cells into beta cells, offering scalable diabetes treatment options for millions.
Researchers and bioinformaticians at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have unveiled new insights into the mechanisms behind human beta cell regenerative drugs, offering a potential breakthrough for the over 500 million people worldwide living with diabetes. These findings, recently published in Cell Reports Medicine, could mark a significant step forward in diabetes treatment.
Diabetes occurs when pancreatic beta cells lose their ability to produce insulin, a hormone critical for maintaining healthy blood sugar levels. Despite significant advancements, there are still no widely scalable therapeutic solutions capable of addressing the global diabetes crisis.
USA-based clinical-stage biopharma Traws Pharma (Nasdaq: TRAW) saw its shares leap more than 150% to $12.57 as it announced progress in the development of its investigational one-dose influenza (flu) investigational therapy, tivoxavir marboxil for treatment of H5N1 bird flu. A Phase I trial tested tivoxavir marboxil in healthy adults who didn’t have the flu.
Traws Pharma expects to begin a Phase II study in the first half of 2025 as it expands its influenza program in response to the bird flu threat. The virus has been detected in dairy cattle in the USA. since March 2024, resulting in infections in over 60 people across eight states.
“The spread of avian influenza in wild and domestic animal populations including mammals, brings increasing risk for adaptation to humans and subsequent spread in the population” said Traws Pharma’s chief medical officer Dr Robert Redfield, a former Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Bird flu is an occupational hazard for poultry and dairy workers. With increasing numbers of human infections and recent reports of severe cases, we should be alert to the rising potential for epidemic or pandemic spread of bird flu,” he added.
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have been awarded a $21 million grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to further advance understanding of an aging-related hormone known as follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), including its potential role in obesity, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s disease. The work could lead to the development of new treatments for these and other conditions involving aging.
This is a collaborative effort with the NIA, led by Mone Zaidi, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology at Icahn Mount Sinai, and Clifford J. Rosen, MD, at the MaineHealth Institute for Research in Scarborough, Maine. Dr. Zaidi and Dr. Rosen are Program Directors, and principal investigators of individual projects are Anne Schafer, MD, at the University of California in San Francisco, as well as scientists at Icahn Mount Sinai, including Tony Yuen, PhD, Associate Professor and Research Director of the Center for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology, and Daria Lizneva, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Pharmacological Sciences. Together, the investigators will work toward translating their findings into viable treatments for patients.
“We are delighted that the NIH has recognized the potential of our work by awarding this generous grant,” says Dr. Zaidi, the Mount Sinai Professor of Clinical Medicine at Icahn Mount Sinai. “Our focus for more than 25 years has been on identifying actionable targets for major public health diseases. This research offers the potential for a new drug for menopause and could also possibly help advance treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, and osteoporosis, affecting millions of people worldwide.”
The active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, a drug called semaglutide, can have direct beneficial effects on the heart within weeks, in addition to the longer-term benefits of losing weight, an animal study has shown.
The finding suggests that people with heart disease who don’t have type 2 diabetes or obesity, which semaglutide is primarily used to treat, might also benefit from taking this kind of drug. “It may be that we’re missing a large population of people that could benefit,” says Christopher Stone at Brown University in Rhode Island.
The findings also suggest that people undergoing heart surgery could benefit if given GLP-1 agonists, the class of drugs that semaglutide belongs to, for at least a few weeks after their operation.
A new study by Tel Aviv University reveals how bacterial defense mechanisms can be neutralized, enabling the efficient transfer of genetic material between bacteria. The researchers believe this discovery could pave the way for developing tools to address the antibiotic resistance crisis and promote more effective genetic manipulation methods for medical, industrial, and environmental purposes.
The study was led by Ph.D. student Bruria Samuel from the lab of Prof. David Burstein at the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at Tel Aviv University’s Wise Faculty of Life Sciences. Other contributors to the research include Dr. Karin Mittelman, Shirly Croitoru, and Maya Ben-Haim from Prof. Burstein’s lab. The findings were published in the journal Nature.
The researchers explain that genetic diversity is essential for the survival and adaptation of different species in response to environmental changes. For humans and many other organisms, sexual reproduction is the primary driver of the genetic diversity required for survival. However, bacteria and other microorganisms lack such a reproduction mechanism.
RNA in cells performs an astounding number of functions. Messenger RNA carries the sequences of active genes to cellular machinery that turns it into proteins. And transfer RNA molecules are an essential part of the construction of those proteins. RNA molecules that have nothing to do with proteins can also help regulate genes and perform other cellular functions. Researchers have now shown that some RNA in cells also helps defend against viral infection, by aiding in the control of antiviral signaling. The findings have been reported in Science.
The researchers noted that RNA can be seen not only as a drug target, but also as a drug. RNA presents an opportunity for treating infections, or autoimmune diseases, they suggested.
