Lifeboat Foundation

Genome engineering may be the future of medicine, but it relies on evolutionary advances made billions of years ago in primordial bacteria, the original masters of gene editing.

Modern day genome engineers like Columbia’s Sam Sternberg are always looking forward, modifying these ancient systems and pushing them to perform ever more complex feats of gene editing.

But to uncover new tools, it sometimes pays to look backward in time to understand how bacteria first created the original systems, and why.

A new CRISPR-based gene-editing tool has been developed which could lead to better treatments for patients with genetic disorders. The tool is an enzyme, AsCas12f, which has been modified to offer the same effectiveness but at one-third the size of the Cas9 enzyme commonly used for gene editing. The compact size means that more of it can be packed into carrier viruses and delivered into living cells, making it more efficient.

Researchers created a library of possible AsCas12f mutations and then combined selected ones to engineer an AsCas12f enzyme with 10 times more editing ability than the original unmutated type. This engineered AsCas12f has already been successfully tested in mice and has the potential to be used for new, more effective treatments for patients in the future.

By now you have probably heard of CRISPR, the gene-editing tool which enables researchers to replace and alter segments of DNA. Like genetic tailors, scientists have been experimenting with “snipping away” the genes that make mosquitoes malaria carriers, altering food crops to be more nutritious and delicious, and in recent years begun human trials to overcome some of the most challenging diseases and genetic disorders.

Stem cells from the human stomach can be converted into cells that secrete insulin in response to rising blood sugar levels, offering a promising approach to treating diabetes, according to a preclinical study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine.

In the study, which appeared April 27 in Nature Cell Biology, the researchers showed that they could take stem cells obtained from human stomach tissue and reprogram them directly—with strikingly high efficiency—into cells that closely resemble pancreatic insulin-secreting cells known as beta cells. Transplants of small groups of these cells reversed disease signs in a mouse model of diabetes.

“This is a proof-of-concept study that gives us a solid foundation for developing a treatment, based on patients’ own cells, for type 1 diabetes and severe type 2 diabetes,” said study senior author Dr. Joe Zhou, an associate professor of regenerative medicine and a member of the Hartman Institute for Therapeutic Organ Regeneration at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Ageing has always been inevitable but fasting, epigenetic reprogramming and parabiosis are just some of the scientific techniques that seem to help people stay young. Might the Peter Pan dream become real?

00:00 — Can science turn back the clock?
01:01 — Centenarians.
02:51 — What is ageing?
04:51 — Dietary restriction.
06:00 — Roundworms.
07:55 — Epigenetics.
09:43 — Blood and guts.
11:40 — Senolytics.
12:38 — Metformin.
13:51 — Anti-ageing treatments are coming.

Continue reading “Longevity: can ageing be reversed?” »

September is Thyroid Cancer Awareness Month, which makes this a good time to learn about treating thyroid cancer.

Nearly 44,000 new cases of thyroid cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year, and more than 2,000 people will die of the disease, according to the American Cancer Society.

Thyroid cancer occurs in the cells of the thyroid, a butterfly-shaped gland at the base of your neck. Your thyroid produces hormones that regulate your heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature and weight.

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a molecule which is present in cells and made of genetic material to help build proteins necessary for cell function. RNA provides a template for the construction of proteins and is essential for cell and organism life. Immune cells rely on these proteins, including CD8⁺ or cytotoxic T cells which are responsible for killing invading pathogens. Importantly, cytotoxic T cells are a major component of the memory immune response. A pool of T cells specifically designed to recognize an invader is stored for future invasion of that particular pathogen. For example, once these cells are exposed to an invading antigen or protein, the immune system will expand T cells specific to that antigen and remember the antigen next time it enters the body. Vaccines work in a similar way by introducing a foreign antigen to the body, so the immune system is ready if the pathogen ever enters your body in the future. Only a small set of T cells that expand survive and it is unclear how this process occurs.

Recently a team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) demonstrated that a single strand of RNA governs a T cells ability to recognize and kill tumors. The single strand of RNA is known as let-7 and is a microRNA, which is responsible for gene expression regulation. The recent discovery may improve vaccine development and cellular memory to enhance immunotherapy against cancers. Immunotherapy is a general term referring to cancer therapies that try to activate the immune system to kill the tumor compared to other drugs that try to directly kill the tumor with chemicals, such as chemotherapy.

The report published in Nature Communications identified that the microRNA, let-7, may enhance memory of T cells. Researchers led by Dr. Leonid Pobezinsky, Associate Professor of Veterinary and Animal Sciences at UMass, further built on our understanding of how T cells form immune memory. Pobezinsky and colleagues found that a small piece of microRNA that has been present throughout evolution is expressed in memory cells. Additionally, they found that more let-7 a cell has, the more likely that cell will recognize a cancer cell and kill it. The increased let-7 also indicates that the cell will turn into a memory cell after being exposed to an antigen. The regulation of enhanced memory T cells by let-7 is an integral process key to fight infections. This is a critical finding, especially because memory cells retain stem-like characteristics and can survive for decades.

Surge in allergic disorders unexplained by the hygiene hypothesis, challenging assumptions about early-life microbial exposure and its role in allergies. | Health And Medicine.

Hospital nurseries routinely place soft bands around the tiny wrists of newborns that hold important identifying information such as name, sex, mother, and birth date. Researchers at Rockefeller University are taking the same approach with newborn brain cells—but these neonates will keep their ID tags for life, so that scientists can track how they grow and mature, as a means for better understanding the brain’s aging process.

As described in a new paper in Cell, the new method developed by Rockefeller geneticist Junyue Cao and his colleagues is called TrackerSci (pronounced “sky”). This low-cost, high-throughput approach has already revealed that while newborn cells continue to be produced through life, the kinds of cells being produced greatly vary in different ages. This groundbreaking work, led by co-first authors Ziyu Lu and Melissa Zhang from Cao’s lab, promises to influence not only the study of the brain but also broader aspects of aging and disease across the human body.

“The cell is the basic functional unit of our body, so changes to the cell essentially underlie virtually every disease and the aging process,” says Cao, head of the Laboratory of Single-Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics. “If we can systematically characterize the different cells and their dynamics using this novel technique, we may get a panoramic view of the mechanisms of many diseases and the enigma of aging.”

A new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College London and The University of Melbourne has found that people can learn to use supernumerary robotic arms as effectively as working with a partner in just one hour of training.

The study, published in the IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, investigated the potential of supernumerary robotic arms to help people perform tasks that require more than two hands. The idea of human augmentation with additional artificial limbs has long been featured in science fiction, like in Doctor Octopus in The Amazing Spider-Man (1963).

“Many tasks in daily life, such as opening a door while carrying a big package, require more than two hands,” said Dr. Ekaterina Ivanova, lead author of the study from Queen Mary University of London. “Supernumerary robotic arms have been proposed as a way to allow people to do these tasks more easily, but until now, it was not clear how easy they would be to use.”