Varda Space Industries’ W-1 capsule landed in Utah Wednesday (Feb. 21) after nearly eight months in orbit.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 451
Stimulating gamma brain waves may protect cancer patients from memory impairment and other cognitive effects of chemotherapy.
Patients undergoing chemotherapy often experience cognitive effects such as memory impairment and difficulty concentrating — a condition commonly known as “chemo brain.”
MIT…
A noninvasive treatment may help to counter “chemo brain” impairment often seen in chemotherapy patients: Exposure to light and sound with a frequency of 40 hertz protected brain cells from chemotherapy-induced damage in mice, MIT researchers found.
Recent research challenges the long-standing understanding of the end-replication problem in DNA, revealing two distinct issues rather than one.
Half a century ago, scientists Jim Watson and Alexey Olovnikov independently realized that there was a problem with how our DNA gets copied. A quirk of linear DNA replication dictated that telomeres that protect the ends of chromosomes should have been growing shorter with each round of replication, a phenomenon known as the end-replication problem.
Telomerase: A Solution Emerges
Water determines life: humans are three-quarters water. An international research team led by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has now discovered how water also determines the structure of the material that holds us together: collagen.
In a paper published in PNAS, the researchers elucidate the role of water in the molecular self-assembly of collagen. They show that by replacing water with its ‘twin molecule’ heavy water (D2O), one can ‘tune’ the interaction between collagen molecules, and thus influence the process of collagen self-assembly. The findings will help to better understand the tissue failures resulting from heritable collagen-related diseases, such as brittle bone disease (osteogenesis imperfecta).
As lead author Dr. Giulia Giubertoni of the UvA’s Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences (HIMS) puts it, “In studying these and other collagen diseases, many researchers, including myself, … have always missed an important part of the puzzle, and the possibility that tissue failure might be partly due to water-collagen interaction was not taken very seriously. We now show that perturbing the water layer around the protein, even very slightly, has dramatic effects on collagen assembly.”
As it stands, the draft policy would undermine the long-standing Bayh-Dole Act, with unintended consequences for innovation.
On the way to rejuvenation using AI and multidisciplinary knowledge!
An AI-generated small-molecule inhibitor treats fibrosis in vivo and in phase I clinical trials.
“If you look at the brain chemically, it’s like a soup with a bunch of ingredients,” said Dr. Fan Lam.
Can we map the brain to show its behavior patterns when a patient is healthy and sick? This is what a recent study published in Nature Methods hopes to address as a team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign used a $3 million grant obtained from the National Institute of Aging to develop a novel approach to mapping brain behavior when a patient is both healthy and sick. This study holds the potential to help researchers, medical professionals, and patients better understand how to treat diseases.
“If you look at the brain chemically, it’s like a soup with a bunch of ingredients,” said Dr. Fan Lam, who is an assistant professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a co-author on the study. “Understanding the biochemistry of the brain, how it organizes spatiotemporally, and how those chemical reactions support computing is critical to having a better idea of how the brain functions in health as well as during disease.”
For the study, the researchers used a type of technology called spatial omics and combined this with deep learning to produce 3D datasets to unveil the brain’s myriad of characteristics down to the molecular level. Through this, the team has developed a novel method in monitoring brain activity when a patient is both healthy and sick, including the ability to identify complex neurological diseases.
Is there a connection between vaping cigarettes or cannabis, irregular mealtimes, and frequent headaches in individuals under 18 years of age? This is what a recent study published in the journal Neurology hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Calgary investigated how lifestyle choices combined with vaping could result in frequent headaches among youth. This study holds the potential to help researchers, medical professionals, and the public better understand the short-and long-term health risks associated with vaping cigarettes or cannabis.
For the study, the researchers enlisted 4,978,370 participants aged between 5 and 17 years for a health survey with the goal of ascertaining a connection between lifestyle choices—vaping, irregular mealtimes, and extended periods of screen time—and the frequency of headaches they reported as part of the survey. In the end, the researchers found that 6.1 percent of the participants experienced frequent headaches who also exhibited the aforementioned lifestyle choices, specifically including e-cigarettes and smoking in the house.
“These results are important because there is surprisingly little research looking at lifestyle and headaches in kids and teens,” said Dr. Serena Orr, MD, who is an assistant professor of pediatrics, community health sciences, and clinical neurosciences at the University of Calgary and a co-author on the study. “As a headache neurologist, I think that it’s critical to understand the role that lifestyle factors play, because prescribing medication alone is not the ideal way of treating headaches at any age.”
This new treatment uses silver diamine fluoride (SDF), which is an inexpensive liquid that prevents cavities.
Dental cavities are a distressing sensation that, if left untreated, can result in terrifying pain, swelling, and restless nights.
Multimodal #AI for better prevention and treatment of cardiometabolic diseases.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized various scientific fields, particularly in medicine, where it has enabled the modeling of complex relationships from massive datasets. Initially, AI algorithms focused on improved interpretation of diagnostic studies such as chest X-rays and electrocardiograms in addition to predicting patient outcomes and future disease onset. However, AI has evolved with the introduction of transformer models, allowing analysis of the diverse, multimodal data sources existing in medicine today.