Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 552

The hypertension drug rilmenidine has been shown to slow down aging in worms, an effect that in humans could hypothetically help us live longer and keep us healthier in our latter years.

Previous research has shown rilmenidine mimics the effects of caloric restriction on a cellular level. Reducing available energy while maintaining nutrition within the body has been shown to extend lifespans in several animal models.

Whether this translates to human biology, or is a potential risk to our health, is a topic of ongoing debate. Finding ways to achieve the same benefits without the costs of extreme calorie cutting could lead to new ways to improve health in old age.

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An international team of researchers has used time-resolved ultrafast crystallography to follow the progress of DNA repair by a photolyase enzyme. The work is ‘the first structural characterisation of a full enzyme reaction cycle,’ says Manuel Maestre-Reyna, who led the research.

Photolyases repair DNA damage caused by ultraviolet light in bacteria, fungi, plants and some animals including marsupials. Humans and other mammals don’t contain these enzymes, but we too incur light-induced damage. One common outcome is the formation of cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPDs), where two adjacent pyrimidine bases (thymine or cytosine) fuse together via a four-membered cyclobutane ring. ‘CPD formation is the main cause of skin cancer, and sunburnt skin always contains CPD lesions’, says Maestre-Reyna, a biochemist at the Institute of Biological Chemistry in Taipei, Taiwan.

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A tiny but prolific world of microbes encompasses everything around us, both inside and out. Microbiomes, which are comprised of diverse communities of microbes, play a pivotal role in shaping human health, yet the intricacies of how different microbial compositions influence our well-being remain largely unknown.

In a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign describe a new framework they have created to predict how species within microbiomes interact with each other to create unique compositions.

“Microbes can be used in medicine, aka ‘bugs as drugs,’ and these microbial therapeutics hold the possibility of being the answer to many of the diseases we face today,” said Shreya Arya, a graduate student in the O’Dwyer lab.

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Limits of large language models in precision medicine. Treating cancer is becoming increasingly complex, but also offers more and more possibilities. After all, the better a tumor’s biology and genetic features are understood, the more treatment approaches there are. To be able to offer patients personalized therapies tailored to their disease, laborious and time-consuming analysis and interpretation of various data is required. Researchers at Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have now studied whether generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT can help with this step. This is one of many projects at Charité analyzing the opportunities unlocked by AI in patient care.

If the body can no longer repair certain genetic mutations itself, cells begin to grow unchecked, producing a tumor.

The crucial factor in this phenomenon is an imbalance of growth-inducing and growth-inhibiting factors, which can result from changes in oncogenes — genes with the potential to cause cancer — for example.

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Summary: Researchers developed ‘Anthrobots,’ microscopic biological robots made from human tracheal cells, demonstrating potential in healing and regenerative medicine.

These self-assembling multicellular robots, ranging from hair-width to pencil-point size, show remarkable healing effects, particularly in neuron growth across damaged areas in lab conditions.

Building on earlier Xenobot research, this study reveals that Anthrobots can be created from adult human cells without genetic modification, offering a new approach to patient-specific therapeutic tools.

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The researchers are excited by the potential of how cells cooperate and communicate in the body and how they can be reprogrammed to create new structures and functions.

With the help of Simon Garnier at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the team characterized the different types of Anthrobots that were produced.

They observed that bots fell into a few discrete categories of shape and movement, ranging in size from 30 to 500 micrometers (from the thickness of a human hair to the point of a sharpened pencil), filling an important niche between nanotechnology and larger engineered devices.

Some were spherical and fully covered in cilia, and some were irregular or football-shaped with more patchy coverage of cilia or just covered with cilia on one side. They traveled in straight lines, moved in tight circles, combined those movements, or just sat around and wiggled.

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The accelerator, an advanced wakefield laser accelerator, is under 20 feet long, generating a 10 billion electron-volt (10 GeV) electron beam.

Bjorn “Manuel” Hegelich, associate professor of physics at UT and CEO of TAU Systems, alluding to the size of the chamber where the beam was produced stated: “We can now reach those energies in 10 centimeters.”

Scientists are aiming to use this technology for assessing the resilience of space-bound electronics against radiation, capturing the 3D internal configurations of emerging semiconductor chip designs, and potentially pioneering new cancer treatments and advanced medical imaging methodologies.

Furthermore, the statement noted that this accelerator could also be used to drive another device called an X-ray free electron laser, which could take slow-motion movies of processes on the atomic or molecular scale.

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Summary: Researchers used AI to select and generate images for studying brain’s visual processing. Functional MRI (fMRI) recorded heightened brain activity in response to these images, surpassing control images.

The approach enabled tuning visual models to individual responses, enhancing the study of brain’s reaction to visual stimuli. This method, offering an unbiased, systematic view of visual processing, could revolutionize neuroscience and therapeutic approaches.

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