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Category: biotech/medical – Page 483

Bowel cancer trial sees all patients disease-free in huge breakthrough

A bowel cancer trial has seen all participants emerge cancer-free, indicating “extremely positive” development for treatment.

Bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the UK, with cases in under-50s seeing a rise in recent years. Thanks to campaigners like Dame Deborah James, more people are having bowel cancer checks – important, as chances of survival are greater when caught early.

When caught in the early stages, 90 per cent of those treated with stage one bowel cancer will survive for five or more years. The figure falls to 65 per cent at stage three, and to 10 per cent at stage four.

New filtration system removes ‘forever chemicals’ from water

A breakthrough filtration system developed by MIT researchers offers hope for removing harmful “forever chemicals” — dangerous pollutants that have plagued water supplies globally for decades.

These long-lasting pollutants, known as PFAS, persist in the environment and have contaminated water sources worldwide.

A recent study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that 98% of people tested had detectable levels of PFAS in their bloodstream, highlighting the severity of the contamination.

How the brain’s inner chamber governs our state of consciousness

In hospital operating rooms and intensive care units, propofol is a drug of choice, widely used to sedate patients for their comfort or render them fully unconscious for invasive…

Propofol works quickly and is tolerated well by most patients when administered by an anesthesiologist.

But what’s happening inside the brain when patients are put under and what does this reveal about consciousness itself?

Investigators at Michigan Medicine, who are studying the nature of consciousness, have successfully used the drug to identify the intricate brain geometry behind the unconscious state, offering an unprecedented look at brain structures that have traditionally been difficult to study.

Molecular jackhammers: A breakthrough in cancer treatment

Cancer treatment has reached a new milestone with the development of an innovative method to destroy cancer cells using molecular jackhammers, offering hope for more targeted and efficient therapies.

This cutting-edge approach utilizes advanced molecular science to disrupt cancer cells in a way that could minimize harm to healthy tissue.

A collaborative team of scientists has found that stimulating aminocyanine molecules with near-infrared light causes them to vibrate in sync, producing enough force to effectively rupture the membranes of cancer cells without invasive procedures.

AI is the next frontier in cancer treatment

In the ongoing battle against cancer, a new AI approach is being explored that holds the potential to revolutionize the future of personalized cancer treatments.

The technology, which is an amalgamation of artificial intelligence, molecular dynamics simulations, and network analysis, aims to predict the binding sites on cancer-related proteins. This will pave the way for a faster development of treatments tailored for individual cancer patients.

The study was led by Dr. Rafael Bernardi, an associate professor of biophysics in the Department of Physics at Auburn University. As part of a collaborative effort with the University of Basel and ETH Zurich, the team is breaking barriers on how we understand and fight cancer.

Genetic associations with human longevity are enriched for oncogenic genes

Human lifespan is shaped by both genetic and environmental exposures and their interaction. To enable precision health, it is essential to understand how genetic variants contribute to earlier death or prolonged survival. In this study, we tested the association of common genetic variants and the burden of rare non-synonymous variants in a survival analysis, using age-at-death (N = 35,551, median [min, max] = 72.4 [40.9, 85.2]), and last-known-age (N = 358,282, median [min, max] = 71.9 [52.6, 88.7]), in European ancestry participants of the UK Biobank. The associations we identified seemed predominantly driven by cancer, likely due to the age range of the cohort. Common variant analysis highlighted three longevity-associated loci: APOE, ZSCAN23, and MUC5B. We identified six genes whose burden of loss-of-function variants is significantly associated with reduced lifespan: TET2, ATM, BRCA2, CKMT1B, BRCA1 and ASXL1. Additionally, in eight genes, the burden of pathogenic missense variants was associated with reduced lifespan: DNMT3A, SF3B1, CHL1, TET2, PTEN, SOX21, TP53 and SRSF2. Most of these genes have previously been linked to oncogenic-related pathways and some are linked to and are known to harbor somatic variants that predispose to clonal hematopoiesis. A direction-agnostic (SKAT-O) approach additionally identified significant associations with C1orf52, TERT, IDH2, and RLIM, highlighting a link between telomerase function and longevity as well as identifying additional oncogenic genes.

Our results emphasize the importance of understanding genetic factors driving the most prevalent causes of mortality at a population level, highlighting the potential of early genetic testing to identify germline and somatic variants increasing one’s susceptibility to cancer and/or early death.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

How context-specific factors control gene activity

Every cell in our body contains the same DNA, yet liver cells are different from brain cells, and skin cells differ from muscle cells. What determines these differences? It all comes down to gene regulation; essentially how and when genes are turned on and off to meet the cell’s demands. But gene regulation is quite complex, especially because it is itself regulated by other parts of DNA.