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Category: biotech/medical – Page 456

Cloning, a topic that has captured the imagination of many, continues to be a subject of scientific interest, ethical debates, and speculative musings. While its various forms and implications have been widely discussed, this article aims to provide an overview of cloning, present examples of successful cloning in different organisms, explore the mechanisms involved, and address the reports and speculations surrounding possible human cloning.

Understanding Cloning: Cloning is the process of creating an organism that is genetically identical to another individual. It can occur naturally, such as with identical twins, or it can be achieved artificially through scientific techniques. Artificial cloning techniques include somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), where the nucleus of a donor cell is transferred into an enucleated egg cell, and reproductive cloning, which aims to create a living copy of an existing organism.

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A recent study conducted by Oregon State University has unveiled new insights into how certain polyunsaturated fatty acids, specifically omega 3, combat a severe liver condition. This discovery paves the way for novel drug research for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a disease currently without any FDA-approved treatments.

Scientists led by Oregon State’s Natalia Shulzhenko, Andrey Morgun and Donald Jump used a technique known as multi-omic network analysis to identify the mechanism through which dietary omega 3 supplements alleviated nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, usually abbreviated to NASH.

The mechanism involves betacellulin, a protein growth factor that plays multiple positive roles in the body but also contributes to liver fibrosis, or scarring, and the progression to cirrhosis and liver cancer.

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A stroke happens when blood flow is lost to part of the brain. Your brain cells cannot get the oxygen and nutrients they need from blood, and they start to die in a few minutes. This can cause lasting brain damage, long-term disability, or even death.

A stroke can occur when an obstruction such as a blood clot travels from another part of the body and lodges inside an artery in the brain.

When an arterial wall becomes damaged, various types of emboli, or obstructions, can form. Emboli can be made up of various substances such as platelets, elements in the blood that help it clot, blood clots that form elsewhere and pass to the damaged area, cholesterol, or a combination of things.

For example, an embolism is formed in the carotid artery and breaks loose, traveling towards the brain where it will eventually lodge, blocking the blood the brain needs. The blocked artery deprives the brain of oxygen, which cause damage to the surrounding tissue. The result is a stroke.

Continue reading “Stroke — Health Video: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia” | >

Headquartered in Oxford, UK, MitoRx is working on orally delivered mitochondrial protective therapeutics targeting mitochondrial dysfunction linked to the progression of conditions such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Huntington’s disease, along with other neurodegenerative diseases. The company says the new funding will be allocated towards its preclinical work in Huntington’s disease, activating its first neurodegenerative disease program, and exploring research collaborations and partnerships.

MitoRx anticipates delivering preclinical results in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s disease, and COPD next year.

“Interim results in our Duchenne program demonstrate that our muscle-penetrative lead asset preserves strength in oxidative muscle, and confirms mitochondrial modulation,” said Dr Christine Charman, Chief Development Officer at MitoRx. “These results will be presented at the Muscular Dystrophy Association Clinical and Scientific Conference in Orlando during March 2024.”

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Artificial intelligence tools hold promise for applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to the interpretation of medical images. However, a new study finds these AI tools are more vulnerable than previously thought to targeted attacks that effectively force AI systems to make bad decisions.

At issue are so-called “adversarial attacks,” in which someone manipulates the data being fed into an AI system in order to confuse it. For example, someone might know that putting a specific type of sticker at a specific spot on a stop sign could effectively make the stop sign invisible to an AI system. Or a hacker could install code on an X-ray machine that alters the image data in a way that causes an AI system to make inaccurate diagnoses.

“For the most part, you can make all sorts of changes to a stop sign, and an AI that has been trained to identify stop signs will still know it’s a stop sign,” says Tianfu Wu, co-author of a paper on the new work and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “However, if the AI has a vulnerability, and an attacker knows the vulnerability, the attacker could take advantage of the vulnerability and cause an accident.”

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Worldwide, more than one billion people are obese. Obesity is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers. But permanently losing weight isn’t easy: complex interactions between body systems such as gut physiology, hormones, and the brain are known to work against it. One method for weight loss is intermittent energy restriction (IER), where days of relative fasting alternate with days of eating normally.

“Here we show that an IER diet changes the human brain-gut-microbiome axis. The observed changes in the gut microbiome and in the activity in addition-related brain regions during and after weight loss are highly dynamic and coupled over time,” said last author Dr. Qiang Zeng, a researcher at the Health Management Institute of the PLA General Hospital in Beijing. The study has been published in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.

The authors used metagenomics on stool samples, blood measurements, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study changes in the composition of the gut microbiome, physiological parameters and serum composition, and brain activity in 25 obese Chinese women and men on an IER diet. Participants were on average 27 years old, with a BMI between 28 and 45.

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Progression independent of relapse activity (PIRA) has been increasingly recognized in people with multiple sclerosis (MS; NEJM JW Neurol May 24 2022 and JAMA Neurol 2022; 79:682). To learn more about PIRA, investigators used data from the Italian MS Register on 16,130 patients with relapsing-remitting MS, including 1,383 with pediatric-onset MS (POMS; median age at onset, 16), 14,113 with adult-onset MS (AOMS; median age at onset, 29), and 634 with late-onset MS (LOMS; median age at onset, 52).

Compared with patients with POMS, patients with LOMS had the highest incidence of PIRA (hazard ratio

, 2.98), followed by those with AOMS (HR, 1.42). Compared with the POMS patient group, the LOMS patient group had the lowest risk for relapse-associated worsening (HR, 0.69), followed by the AOMS group (HR, 0.88). Cumulative PIRA incidence was 1.3% of patients at age 20 years, increased rapidly between ages 21 and 30 (9%), and rose progressively from 40 to 70 (from 22% to 79%). Cumulative incidence of relapse-associated worsening showed a different pattern of increases over time (e.g., 0.5% at age 20; 7.8% at age 40; 14.4% at age 50; 24.1% at age 60; 27.7% at age 70).

These authors provide data supporting the notion that MS pathophysiology is different between patients with PIRA and those with relapse-associated worsening. While relapse-associated worsening seems to increase gradually and reach a plateau, PIRA begins in the 20s and continues to increase. PIRA encompasses accumulating neurodegenerative processes, supporting the concept that a subset of patients experience progression even within the relapsing-remitting phase of the disease.

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People may be more than two times likelier to develop schizophrenia-related disorders if they owned cats during childhood than if they didn’t:

Living with cats as a child has once again been linked to mental health disorders, because our furry friends apparently can’t catch a break.

In a new meta-analysis published in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin, Australian researchers identified 17 studies between 1980 and 2023 that seemed to associate cat ownership in childhood with schizophrenia-related disorders — a sample size narrowed down from a whopping 1,915 studies that dealt with cats during that 43-year time period.

As anyone who’s read anything about cats and mental health knows, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that infection from the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, which is found in cat feces and undercooked red meat, may be linked to all sorts of surprising things. From mental illness to an interest in BDSM or a propensity for car crashes, toxoplasmosis — that’s the infection that comes from t. gondii exposure — has been thought of as a massive risk factor for decades now, which is why doctors now advise pregnant people not to clean cat litter or eat undercooked meat.

Continue reading “Childhood Cat Exposure Once Again Linked to Schizophrenia” | >