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Category: biotech/medical – Page 41

Scientists map development of pancreas transport channels that deliver digestive enzymes

Organs often have fluid-filled spaces called lumens, which are crucial for organ function and serve as transport and delivery networks. Lumens in the pancreas form a complex ductal system, and its channels transport digestive enzymes to the small intestine. Understanding how this system forms in embryonic development is essential, both for normal organ formation and for diagnosing and treating pancreatic disorders.

Despite their importance, how lumens take certain shapes is not fully understood, as studies in other models have largely been limited to the formation of single, spherical lumens. Organoid models, which more closely mimic the physiological characteristics of real organs, can exhibit a range of lumen morphologies, such as complex networks of thin tubes.

Researchers in the group of Anne Grapin-Botton, director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, and also Honorary Professor at TU Dresden, teamed up with colleagues from the group of Masaki Sano at the University of Tokyo (Japan), Tetsuya Hiraiwa at the Institute of Physics of Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and with Daniel Rivéline at the Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire (France) to explore the processes involved in complex lumen formation.

Cancer Cells Paralyze Immune Cells

Immune cells work to fight infection and other diseases. Different subsets work together to elicit a healthy immune response; however, infections and disease can dysregulate cells and prevent effective immunity. Interestingly, cancer can use immune cells to its advantage.

Cancer employs various mechanisms to alter the immune system. Once established, tumor cells secrete proteins and molecules to generate a favorable environment. In this case, the tumor microenvironment (TME) becomes hypoxic due to a lack of oxygen with increased blood vessel growth to bring nutrients to the tumor and altered cell types that promote tumor progression. Specifically, tumor-secreted molecules polarize healthy immune cells, which allow cancer cells to proliferate and travel to distal tissues of the body.

T cells are specific immune cells responsible for identifying and targeting pathogens. Receptors on T cells recognize proteins on the surface of infected cells, which stimulate an immune response that eliminates the disease. These cells are critical for effective health and many immunotherapies aim to amplify or enhance T cell function. In the context of cancer, these T cells lose their function and, in some cases, promote tumor growth by inhibiting other immune cells. Unfortunately, treatment efficacy is limited to specific subsets of patients due to tumor type and stage of disease. Scientists are currently working to understand more about T cell biology and enhance immunotherapy.

From Single Cells to Targetable Immune Mechanisms in Congenital Heart Disease, Ischemic Heart Disease, and Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm

In the SURMOUNT-4 trial, 82.5% of adults with obesity regained ≥25% of initial weight lost within one year of tirzepatide withdrawal; most showed reversal of cardiometabolic improvements.

This post hoc analysis was performed on the modified intent-to-treat population, comprising all randomly assigned participants who were exposed to at least 1 dose of the study drug. The analysis only included tirzepatide-treated participants randomized to placebo who achieved 10% or more weight reduction at week 36 with the maximum tolerated dose of tirzepatide. The 10% cutoff was chosen to build an analysis population of clinically meaningful weight reduction. Most participants met this cutoff (308 of 335 participants). Only participants with a nonmissing week 36 weight measurement value and at least 1 nonmissing weight measurement value after week 36 were included in the analysis.

For the calculation of percentage of weight regain from week 36 to week 88 relative to week 36, missing weight measures at week 88 were imputed by predictions using observed data through a mixed model for repeated measures adjusted for week 0 value, week 36 value, country, sex, and maximum tolerated dose of tirzepatide at week 36. All outcomes were evaluated within each category of weight regain.

Baseline demographic and clinical characteristics (at week 0) and changes from week 0 to week 36 in clinical characteristics were assessed using descriptive summary statistics. Continuous variables were presented as means and SDs and categorical variables were presented as counts and percentages. P values for comparison among categories of weight regain from week 36 to week 88 were computed using analysis of variance in continuous data and χ2 test in categorical data.

Clinical Implications of Aberrant Retinoblastoma Signaling in Patients With Grade 4 IDH-Mutant AstrocytomaA Retrospective Cohort Study

Background and ObjectivesThe data on the prognostic factors of grade 4 isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH)–mutant astrocytoma remain limited since the 2021 update of the World Health Organization classification of CNS tumors. This study aimed to investigate…

How Inflammation Supercharges One of the Deadliest Cancers

Researchers have identified a previously unknown inflammatory mechanism that may drive the aggressiveness and relapse of small cell lung cancer. Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is among the most aggressive types of lung cancer and carries a five year survival rate of just five percent. Although man

The 2026 Timeline: AGI Arrival, Safety Concerns, Robotaxi Fleets & Hyperscaler Timelines | 221

The 2026 Timeline: AGI Arrival, Safety Concerns, Robotaxi Fleets & Hyperscaler Timelines ## The rapid advancement of AI and related technologies is expected to bring about a transformative turning point in human history by 2026, making traditional measures of economic growth, such as GDP, obsolete and requiring new metrics to track progress ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.

Measuring and Defining AGI

🤖 Q: How should we rigorously define and measure AGI capabilities? A: Use benchmarks to quantify specific capabilities rather than debating terminology, enabling clear communication about what AGI can actually do across multiple domains like marine biology, accounting, and art simultaneously.

🧠 Q: What makes AGI fundamentally different from human intelligence? A: AGI represents a complementary, orthogonal form of intelligence to human intelligence, not replicative, with potential to find cross-domain insights by combining expertise across fields humans typically can’t master simultaneously.

📊 Q: How can we measure AI self-awareness and moral status? A: Apply personhood benchmarks that quantify AI models’ self-awareness and requirements for moral treatment, with Opus 4.5 currently being state-of-the-art on these metrics for rigorous comparison across models.

AI Capabilities and Risks.

Continue reading “The 2026 Timeline: AGI Arrival, Safety Concerns, Robotaxi Fleets & Hyperscaler Timelines | 221” | >

Deep contrastive learning enables genome-wide virtual screening

Recent breakthroughs in protein structure prediction have opened new avenues for genome-wide drug discovery, yet existing virtual screening methods remain computationally prohibitive. We present DrugCLIP, a contrastive learning framework that achieves ultrafast and accurate virtual screening, up to 10 million times faster than docking, while consistently outperforming various baselines on in silico benchmarks. In wet-lab validations, DrugCLIP achieved a 15% hit rate for norepinephrine transporter, and structures of two identified inhibitors were determined in complex with the target protein. For thyroid hormone receptor interactor 12, a target that lacks holo structures and small-molecule binders, DrugCLIP achieved a 17.5% hit rate using only AlphaFold2-predicted structures.

AI Model for Imaging-Based Extranodal Extension Detection in Human HPV-Positive Oropharyngeal Cancer

An AI-powered pipeline accurately classified imaging-based extranodal extension from CT scans in HPV-positive oropharyngeal carcinoma and predicted worse oncologic outcomes, outperforming expert radiologist assessment and offering a promising prognostic tool for clinical decision-making.

Question Can an artificial intelligence (AI)−driven model predict imaging-based extranodal extension (iENE) and oncologic outcomes from pretreatment computed tomography scans of patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)−positive oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OPSCC)?

Findings In this single-center cohort study of 397 patients with HPV-positive cN+ OPSCC, an automated pipeline integrating lymph node segmentation and iENE classification achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.81. AI-predicted iENE was significantly associated with worse distant failure, recurrence-free survival, and overall survival, and outperformed expert radiologist assessment.

Meaning These findings suggest that automated iENE detection using AI models may offer a powerful prognostic tool to complement clinical decision-making in HPV-positive OPSCC and extend iENE interpretation capabilities to centers that lack specialized radiologists.

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