New types of aerogels are suitable for energy storage, biomedicine, cosmetics, and more.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 4
Groove is in the brain: Music supercharges brain stimulation
Music affects us so deeply that it can essentially take control of our brain waves and get our bodies moving. Now, neuroscientists at Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute are taking advantage of music’s power to synchronize brain waves to boost the effectiveness of a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a promising tool for both basic brain research and treating neuropsychiatric disorders.
Specifically, institute affiliate Jessica Ross and colleagues used TMS pulses to induce movements in people’s hands—a common testing ground for new ideas in the field. By carefully timing those pulses to music, the team found they could double the impact of TMS.
“Because there’s this really strong connection to movement, music can engage motor pathways in the brain. If you’re listening to a certain kind of rhythm, there are going to be very specific times at which your brain is most ready for the TMS effect,” said Ross, an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford Medicine.
Smart device uses AI and bioelectronics to speed up wound healing process
As a wound heals, it goes through several stages: clotting to stop bleeding, immune system response, scabbing, and scarring. A wearable device called “a-Heal,” designed by engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, aims to optimize each stage of the process. The system uses a tiny camera and AI to detect the stage of healing and deliver a treatment in the form of medication or an electric field. The system responds to the unique healing process of the patient, offering personalized treatment.
The portable, wireless device could make wound therapy more accessible to patients in remote areas or with limited mobility. Initial preclinical results, published in the journal npj Biomedical Innovations, show the device successfully speeds up the healing process.
Cytokine Profile in Predicting the Effectiveness of Advanced Therapy for Ulcerative Colitis: A Narrative Review
Cytokine-targeted therapies have shown efficacy in treating patients with ulcerative colitis (UC), but responses to these advanced therapies can vary. This variability may be due to differences in cytokine profiles among patients with UC. While the etiology of UC is not fully understood, abnormalities of the cytokine profiles are deeply involved in its pathophysiology. Therefore, an approach focused on the cytokine profile of individual patients with UC is ideal. Recent studies have demonstrated that molecular analysis of cytokine profiles in UC can predict response to each advanced therapy. This narrative review summarizes the molecules involved in the efficacy of various advanced therapies for UC. Understanding these associations may be helpful in selecting optimal therapeutic agents.
A more precise CRISPR platform enables large-scale gene screening in live mouse brains
Over the past few decades, biomedical researchers and neuroscientists have devised increasingly advanced techniques to study and alter neurophysiological processes. These include CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a sophisticated tool to edit specific genes in some animals, including mice, rats, zebrafish and fruit flies.
Researchers at University of California, San Francisco led by Martin Kampmann recently introduced a more precise CRISPR screening platform that can be applied directly in living tissue, enabling the screening of a larger number of genes at once. The new technique, called CRISPR screening by AAV episome sequencing (CrAAVe-seq), was introduced in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience.
“Human cell-based systems are valuable but cannot fully capture the complexity of the brain,” Biswa Ramani, co-first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “Mice often remain the most effective model for many neurological diseases because their brains preserve the diversity and organization of cell types that cannot be replicated in a dish.”
Novel gene therapy for hereditary hearing loss developed at Tel Aviv University
Scientists from the Gray Faculty of Medical & Health Sciences at Tel Aviv University introduced an innovative gene therapy method to treat impairments in hearing and balance caused by inner ear dysfunction. According to the researchers, “This treatment constitutes an improvement over existing strategies, demonstrating enhanced efficiency and holds promise for treating a wide range of mutations that cause hearing loss.”
The study was led by Prof. Karen Avraham, Dean of the Gray Faculty of Medical & Health Sciences, and Roni Hahn, a PhD student from the Department of Human Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry. The study was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Jeffrey Holt and Dr. Gwenaëlle Géléoc from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and was supported by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), the National Institutes of Health/NIDCD and the Israel Science Foundation Breakthrough Research Program. The study was featured on the cover of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine.
Prof. Avraham explains: “The inner ear consists of two highly coordinated systems: the auditory system, which detects, processes, and transmits sound signals to the brain, and the vestibular system, which enables spatial orientation and balance. A wide range of genetic variants in DNA can affect the function of these systems, leading to sensorineural hearing loss and balance problems. Indeed, hearing loss is the most common sensory impairment worldwide, with over half of congenital cases caused by genetic factors. In this study, we aimed to investigate an effective gene therapy for these cases using an approach that has not been applied in this context before.”
Pest resistance threatens corn industry’s newest biotech defense, study warns
Corn rootworms, pests responsible for billions of dollars in yearly crop losses, are evolving resistance that weakens even the latest biotechnology controls, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Drawing on decades of data across multiple states, University of Arizona entomologists found that field-evolved resistance to Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, is undermining the effectiveness of corn that targets rootworms with the combination of Bt and RNA interference, or RNAi, a new biotech control that turns the rootworms’ own genetic instructions against them.
The research team analyzed extensive field data collected over the past two decades in 12 previous studies, including millions of rootworms evaluated across the Corn Belt, which extends from western Ohio to eastern Nebraska and northeastern Kansas.
Beyond BMI: Analysis links fat distribution to distinct brain aging patterns
Research led by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University finds that regional fat distribution exerts distinct effects on brain structure, connectivity and cognition, revealing patterns not explained by body mass index (BMI).
Obesity has been associated with structural and functional changes in the brain, including reductions in gray matter, disruptions in white matter and impaired connectivity, which have been associated with cognitive decline.
Previous studies frequently used BMI as the central measure of obesity, a highly generalized metric that cannot capture the biological differences in fat depots. Adipose tissue in different body regions is known to affect metabolic and inflammatory pathways differently, and earlier work has suggested that visceral (around organs in the abdominal cavity) and leg fat contribute unequally to disease risk.
Not Spiral. Not Elliptical. So What Exactly Is This Galaxy?
The Hubble Space Telescope has released a new Picture of the Week, and this time the spotlight is on a galaxy that refuses to fit neatly into any category. The subject, known as NGC 2,775, is located about 67 million light-years away in the constellation Cancer (The Crab). At its center lies a smooth, gas-free core that looks strikingly similar to an elliptical galaxy. Surrounding it, however, is a dusty ring sprinkled with uneven clusters of young stars, giving it the appearance of a spiral galaxy. So what is it exactly: spiral, elliptical — or something in between?
Because astronomers can only observe NGC 2,775 from a single perspective, its true nature remains uncertain. Some scientists argue that it should be considered a spiral galaxy due to its delicate ring of dust and stars. Others, however, classify it as a lenticular galaxy, a transitional type that shares characteristics of both spirals and ellipticals.