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Archive for the ‘biotech/medical’ category: Page 399

Nov 16, 2023

U.K. Greenlights World’s First Crispr Gene Editing Therapy

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, genetics

The one-time treatment helped relieve symptoms of disease and could free patients from the need for bone marrow transplants or regular blood transfusions, Beach said, adding that the drug hopefully offers a permanent fix for the condition.

The MHRA said it identified no significant safety concerns during the trials and will continue to closely monitor Casgevy’s safety after approval.

Vertex CEO and President Reshma Kewalramanit celebrated Casgevy’s approval as “a historic day in science and medicine” and Samarth Kulkarni, CEO and Chairman of Crispr Therapeutics, said it will hopefully mark “the first of many applications of this Nobel Prize winning technology to benefit eligible patients with serious diseases.” The two companies are hoping for similarly positive decisions from the MHRA’s counterparts in the Europe Union and the U.S., which are in the process of evaluating Casgevy, also known as exa-cel. The Food and Drug Administration is expected to make a decision in early December and has a deadline of December 8. The agency appears poised to follow the MHRA and approve the treatment, with its advisors confident of the drug’s efficacy and benefit but wary of theoretical unintended consequences of genetic modifications.

Nov 16, 2023

Hackers Could Exploit Google Workspace and Cloud Platform for Ransomware Attacks

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cybercrime/malcode

A set of novel attack methods has been demonstrated against Google Workspace and the Google Cloud Platform that could be potentially leveraged by threat actors to conduct ransomware, data exfiltration, and password recovery attacks.

“Starting from a single compromised machine, threat actors could progress in several ways: they could move to other cloned machines with GCPW installed, gain access to the cloud platform with custom permissions, or decrypt locally stored passwords to continue their attack beyond the Google ecosystem,” Martin Zugec, technical solutions director at Bitdefender, said in a new report.

A prerequisite for these attacks is that the bad actor has already gained access to a local machine through other means, prompting Google to mark the bug as not eligible for fixing “since it’s outside of our threat model and the behavior is in line with Chrome’s practices of storing local data.”

Nov 16, 2023

AI improves diagnosis, treatment and survival among heart attack patients

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, education, robotics/AI

USA: Timely diagnosis and treatment are critical to restore blood flow and reduce injury to the heart muscle and increase a person’s chance of recovery after a heart attack.

A recent study has revealed that technology incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and electrocardiogram (EKG) testing for patients having a heart attack decreased the time to diagnose and send patients for treatment by almost 10 minutes. The findings from the late-breaking science study conducted in a hospital in Taiwan were presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2023 held from Nov. 11–13, in Philadelphia.

“Modern AI may now be as good as expert cardiologists in diagnosing serious heart attacks,” said lead study author Chin-Sheng Lin, M.D., Ph.D., a professor, director of the Medical Technology Education Center and vice dean at the School of Medicine, at the National Defense Medical Center, in Taipei, Taiwan. “Hospitals can use AI tools more to help front-line doctors, especially those with less experience. This could lead to faster treatment and less mistakes when it comes to treating patients who are experiencing heart attacks.”

Nov 16, 2023

Scientists Find the ‘On’ Switch for Energy-Burning Brown Fat

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The discovery could open the door to new treatments for obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Nov 16, 2023

Cutting 1 teaspoon of salt works as well as blood pressure meds, study finds

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Cutting 1 teaspoon of salt from your diet each day can lower your top blood pressure reading just as much as a typical hypertension medication, even if you don’t have high blood pressure, a new study found.

A teaspoon of salt is 2,300 milligrams — that’s the top daily limit for people over 14 recommended by the latest U.S. nutritional guidelines. However, the American Heart Association recommends a diet with less than 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day.

Nov 16, 2023

Fusion magnets could lead to improved microchip production

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, mobile phones

Swooping magnetic fields that confine plasma in doughnut-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks could help improve the efficiency of complex machines that produce microchips. This innovation could lead to more powerful computers and smart phones, near-essential devices that make modern society possible.

Engineers use high-energy light emitted by plasma, the electrically charged fourth state of matter, to create small structures on the surfaces of silicon wafers during their transformation into microchips. These tiny components enable a range of devices, including consumer electronics, video games, medical machinery, and telecommunications. Improving the generation of this light could extend the life of vital parts within the machines and make the manufacture of microchips more efficient.

“These findings could change the microchip industry,” said Ben Israeli, lead author of the paper publishing the results in Applied Physics Letters. Israeli is a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), which is managed by Princeton University.

Nov 15, 2023

Pulmonary edema: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Pulmonary edema is often caused by congestive heart failure. When the heart cannot pump efficiently, blood can back-up into the veins that take blood through the lungs. This causes shortness of breath.


Pulmonary edema is an abnormal buildup of fluid in the lungs. This buildup of fluid leads to shortness of breath.

Nov 15, 2023

Fecal microbiota transplantation boosts survival in metastatic colorectal cancer treatment

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, satellites

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In a recent study published in eClinicalMedicine, researchers assess the use of fecal microbiota transplantation to enhance the efficacy of anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) therapy for patients with microsatellite stable metastatic colorectal cancer.

Study: Fecal microbiota transplantation plus tislelizumab and fruquintinib in refractory microsatellite stable metastatic colorectal cancer: an open-label, single-arm, phase II trial (RENMIN215). Image Credit: Peakstock / Shutterstock.com.

Continue reading “Fecal microbiota transplantation boosts survival in metastatic colorectal cancer treatment” »

Nov 15, 2023

New ‘patch’ uses natural body motion to fix disk herniation

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A new biologic “patch” that is activated by a person’s natural motion could be the key to fixing herniated disks in people’s backs, according to researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the CMC VA Medical Center (CMCVAMC).

Combining years of work from many different projects, the “tension-activated repair patches” (TARPs) provide controlled release of an anti-inflammatory molecule called anakinra from microcapsules over time, which helped disks in a large animal model regain the tension they need to reverse herniation and prevent further degeneration. This pre-clinical research is detailed in a paper published in Science Translational Medicine.

“Currently there is no for disk herniation, and the best thing out there is just like sticking a plain rubber plug into a hole in a tire. It will stay for a while but it won’t make a great seal,” said co-senior author Robert Mauck, Ph.D., a professor in Orthopaedic Surgery and director of the McKay Laboratory for Orthopaedic Surgery Research at Penn and research career scientist and co-director of the Translational Musculoskeletal Research Center at the CMCVAMC.

Nov 15, 2023

Artificial sensor similar to a human fingerprint that can recognize fine fabric textures

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cyborgs, robotics/AI, virtual reality

An artificial sensory system that is able to recognize fine textures—such as twill, corduroy and wool—with a high resolution, similar to a human finger, is reported in a Nature Communications paper. The findings may help improve the subtle tactile sensation abilities of robots and human limb prosthetics and could be applied to virtual reality in the future, the authors suggest.

Humans can gently slide a finger on the surface of an object and identify it by capturing both static pressure and high-frequency vibrations. Previous approaches to create artificial tactile for sensing physical stimuli, such as pressure, have been limited in their ability to identify real-world objects upon touch, or they rely on multiple sensors. Creating a artificial sensory system with high spatiotemporal resolution and sensitivity has been challenging.

Chuan Fei Guo and colleagues present a flexible slip sensor that mimics the features of a human fingerprint to enable the system to recognize small features on surface textures when touching or sliding the sensor across the surface. The authors integrated the sensor onto a prosthetic human hand and added machine learning to the system.

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