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Category: biotech/medical – Page 52

Cutting-Edge Gene Therapy Restores Hearing Within Weeks

“This is a huge step forward in the genetic treatment of deafness, one that can be life-changing for children and adults,” says Maoli Duan, consultant and docent at the Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, and one of the study’s corresponding authors.

Gene therapy involved a synthetic adeno-associated virus (AAV) to deliver a functional version of the OTOF gene to the inner ear via a single injection through a membrane at the base of the cochlea called the round window. The injections were to target mutations in OTOF that can cause deficiencies of the otoferlin protein, that plays key roles in transmitting auditory signals.

According to the researchers, the effects of the gene therapy were rapid, and the majority of the participants recovered some hearing after one month. At a 6-month follow-up, all participants showed considerable improvements, with the average perceptible volume of sound improving from 106 decibels to 52 decibels.

Hiatus and pelvic floor failure patterns in pelvic organ prolapse: a 3D MRI study of structural interactions using a level III conceptual model

A large urogenital hiatus in level III results in a higher risk of developing pelvic organ prolapse after birth and failure after prolapse surgery. Deepening of the pelvic floor and downward rotation of the levator plate have also been linked to prolapse. Currently we lack data that evaluates how these measures relate to one another and to prolapse occurrence and size.

New breakthrough in preventing chemotherapy-induced hair loss

Researchers in Sheffield Hallam University’s Biomolecular Sciences Research Centre, in partnership with Paxman, have discovered that combining scalp cooling treatment with antioxidants can significantly reduce or even prevent the damage to hair follicles caused by chemotherapy drugs. This breakthrough has the potential to enhance and standardise scalp cooling efficacy levels, potentially transforming it into a more consistent and universally reliable method.

Led by Dr Nik Georgopoulos, the study uses human keratinocytes and hair follicle cultures to test the effects of cooling and antioxidants on chemotherapy-treated cells. The research was the culmination of years of work in partnership with the Paxman Scalp Cooling Research Centre.

The paper, which has been published today (Tuesday 8 July) in the journal Frontiers of Pharmacology, showed for the first time that.

New breakthrough in preventing chemotherapy-induced hair loss and could make a real difference to the lives of cancer patients worldwide.

People with ‘young brains’ outlive ‘old-brained’ peers, Stanford Medicine scientists find

By Bruce Goldman

A blood-test analysis developed at Stanford Medicine can determine the “biological ages” of 11 separate organ systems in individuals’ bodies and predict the health consequences.

Chemicals from turmeric and rhubarb could help fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria lurking in wastewater

When people take antibiotics, some of the dose is excreted with urine and feces and ends up in our wastewater. The presence of this low dose of antibiotic creates an opportunity for resistant bacteria to evolve.

Scientists studying antibiotic-resistant bacteria in wastewater at a treatment plant discovered multi-drug-resistant strains of bacterial species which are usually not dangerous to healthy people, but which could transmit genes for antibiotic resistance to much more dangerous bacteria like E. coli.

The scientists then challenged the bacteria with natural compounds which could potentially be included in to kill off bacteria and fight antibiotic resistance. The most effective were curcumin, which comes from turmeric, and emodin, from rhubarb.

The brain can selectively recognize glucose, offering clues to treat obesity and diabetes

Starting with the question “How does our brain distinguish glucose from the many nutrients absorbed in the gut?” a KAIST research team has demonstrated that the brain can selectively recognize specific nutrients—particularly glucose—beyond simply detecting total calorie content. Their study, published in Neuron, is expected to offer a new paradigm for appetite control and the treatment of metabolic diseases.

Professor Greg S.B. Suh’s team in the Department of Biological Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Young-Gyun Park’s team (BarNeuro), Professor Seung-Hee Lee’s team (Department of Biological Sciences), and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, have identified the existence of a gut– circuit that allows animals in a hungry state to selectively detect and prefer glucose in the gut.

Organisms derive energy from various nutrients, including sugars, proteins, and fats. Previous studies have shown that total caloric information in the gut suppresses hunger neurons in the hypothalamus to regulate appetite. However, the existence of a gut–brain circuit that specifically responds to glucose and corresponding brain cells had not been demonstrated until now.

How bacteria grow: Evolutionary differences point to new ways to combat infection

With colleagues from his department as well as the Institut national de la recherche scientifique and Indiana University, Brun’s research team used advanced microscopy techniques and fluorescent probes to track .

The results reveal an unexpected diversity in wall elongation patterns, centered on peptidoglycan synthesis—an important target of several classes of antibiotics, including penicillin.

“What was thought to be a relatively uniform process actually appears to be much more variable, even between very closely related species,” said Brun, the study’s senior author. “This variability may represent new points of fragility that could be exploited to develop new antibiotics.”

Formal guidelines can enable AI to precisely maneuver and position medical needles

Imagine a physician attempting to reach a cancerous nodule deep within a patient’s lung—a target the size of a pea, hidden behind a maze of critical blood vessels and airways that shift with every breath. Straying one millimeter off course could puncture a major artery, and falling short could mean missing the cancer entirely, allowing it to spread untreated.

This is the high-stakes reality physicians face in thousands of procedures daily, where accuracy is critical and the task is complicated by anatomical obstacles that are non-penetrable or sensitive. Can artificial intelligence (AI) and robots help address these challenges and improve patient outcomes?

“A new era of “AI guidance” is dawning in medicine,” says Ron Alterovitz, Lawrence Grossberg Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science. “Robots with advanced AI can assist physicians and automate certain tasks, enabling unprecedented levels of accuracy and making complex procedures safer and more effective.”

Computational models explore how regions of the visual cortex jointly represent visual information

Understanding how the human brain represents the information picked up by the senses is a longstanding objective of neuroscience and psychology studies. Most past studies focusing on the visual cortex, the network of regions in the brain’s outer layer known to process visual information, have focused on the contribution of individual regions, as opposed to their collective representation of visual stimuli.

Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin recently carried out a study aimed at shedding new light on how regions across the human visual cortex collectively encode and process visual information, by simulating their contribution using computational models. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behaviour, highlight specific rules that could govern the relations between these different regions of the visual cortex.

“Most of us take seeing for granted, but the process is surprisingly complex,” Alessandro Gifford, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “When we look at the world, it’s not just our eyes doing the work—it’s our brain, specifically an area at the back called the visual cortex. Think of the visual cortex as a team of specialists. Each member of the team (or brain region) handles a different aspect of what we see—one might focus on shapes, another on motion, another on faces.”

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