Lifeboat Foundation

A new study has identified a promising drug candidate that can protect neurons from degeneration in mouse models of Parkinson’s disease. The research is published in Science Translational Medicine.

Addressing an unmet need

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, and over the last 25 years, the prevalence of PD has doubled, presenting a large health burden across the globe.

— Two papers show that large language models, including ChatGPT, can pass the USMLE.

The ultraviolet nail polish drying devices used to cure gel manicures may pose more of a public health concern than previously thought. Researchers at the University of California San Diego studied these ultraviolet (UV) light emitting devices, and found that their use leads to cell death and cancer-causing mutations in human cells.

The devices are a common fixture in nail salons, and generally use a particular spectrum of UV light (340-395nm) to cure the chemicals used in gel manicures. While tanning beds use a different spectrum of UV light (280-400nm) that studies have conclusively proven to be carcinogenic, the spectrum used in the nail dryers has not been well studied.

“If you look at the way these devices are presented, they are marketed as safe, with nothing to be concerned about,” said Ludmil Alexandrov, a professor of bioengineering as well as cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego, and corresponding author of the study published Jan. 17 in Nature Communications. “But to the best of our knowledge, no one has actually studied these devices and how they affect human cells at the molecular and cellular levels until now.”

The approval was granted by the Singapore Food Agency, and means Good Meat is allowed to use synthetic processes to create its products.

Cultured meat is grown from animal cells and is biologically the same as meat that comes from an animal. The process starts with harvesting muscle cells from an animal, then feeding those cells a mixture of nutrients and naturally-occurring growth factors (or, as Good Meat’s process specifies, amino acids, fats, and vitamins) so that they multiply, differentiate, then grow to form muscle tissue, in much the same way muscle grows inside animals’ bodies.

Usually, getting animal cells to duplicate requires serum. One of the more common is fetal bovine serum, which is made from the blood of fetuses extracted from cows during slaughter. It sounds a bit brutal even for the non-squeamish carnivore. Figuring out how to replicate the serum’s effects with synthetic ingredients has been one of the biggest hurdles to making cultured meat viable.

Alphabet, parent holding company of Google, has announced that it’s cutting around 6% of its global workforce.

In an open letter published by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the narrative followed a similar trajectory to that of other companies that have downsized in recent months, noting that the company had “hired for a different economic reality” than what it’s up against today.

Put simply, it had bolstered its workforce during the pandemic-driven digital boom times, but it’s now having to reverse course as the world curtails its spending in the face of economic headwinds.

Summary: Researchers have developed a new family of nano-scale capsules capable of carrying CRISPR gene editing tools to different organs of the body before harmlessly dissolving. The capsules were able to enter the brains of mice and successfully edit a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gene therapies have the potential to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, but they face a common barrier — the blood-brain barrier.

Dual-action cell therapy engineered to eliminate established tumors and train the immune system to eradicate primary tumor and prevent cancer’s recurrence. Scientists are harnessing a new way to turn cancer cells into potent, anti-cancer agents. In the latest work from the lab of Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, investigators have developed a new cell therapy approach to eliminate established tumors and induce long-term immunity, training the immune system so that it can prevent cancer from recurring. The team tested their dual-action, cancer-killing vaccine in an advanced mouse model of the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma, with promising results. Findings are published in Science Translational Medicine.

For the first time since it was proposed more than 80 years ago, scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have demonstrated the phenomenon of “quantum recoil,” which describes how the particle nature of light has a major impact on electrons moving through materials. The research is published online today (January 19) in the journal Nature Photonics.

Making quantum recoil a practical reality should eventually allow businesses to more accurately produce X-rays of specific energy levels, leading to superior accuracy in healthcare and manufacturing applications such as medical imaging and flaw detection in semiconductor chips.

Quantum recoil was theorized by Russian physicist and Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg in 1940 to accurately account for radiation emitted when charged particles like electrons move through a medium, such as water, or materials with repeated patterns on the surface, including those on butterfly wings and graphite.

A ‘longevity protein’ discovered in the DNA of centenarians promises to rejuvenate the heart by at least 10 years. Hope comes from a preclinical study coordinated by Annibale Puca of the MultiMedica group in Milan and Paolo Madeddu of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, funded by the British Heart Foundation and the Italian Ministry of Health and published in ‘Cardiovascular Research’, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).