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Category: biotech/medical – Page 662

Alzheimer’s-related synapse damage reversed by synthetic protein

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have developed a potentially transformative approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease, A team from the former Cellular and Molecular Synaptic Function Unit have reported significant progress in reversing cognitive decline and restoring memory in transgenic mice using a synthetic protein. The findings, published in Brain Research, offer hope for a viable treatment to alleviate the debilitating symptoms associated with this neurodegenerative condition.

“We successfully reversed the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in mice,” explained Dr Chia-Jung Chang, first author of the study and presently a member of the Neural Computation Unit at OIST. “We achieved this with a small, synthetic peptide, PHDP5, that can easily cross the blood-brain barrier to directly target the memory center in the brain [1].”

Longevity. Technology: There is a pressing need to find effective treatments for Alzheimer’s; along with other forms of dementia, this debilitating disease currently affects approximately 55 million people worldwide, and this number is predicted to nearly double every 20 years, reaching 78 million in 2030 and 139 million in 2050. As well as a health burden, Alzheimer’s is an economic burden – the annual global cost of dementia has now rocketed to more than US$1.3 trillion, with a projected rise to US$2.8 trillion by 2030 on the horizon [2].

When Antidepressants Are Ineffective: Personalized Magnetic Stimulation Could Help Treat Depression

Magnetic stimulation therapy could aid patients who don’t respond to antidepressants. Scientists from the University of Helsinki and Stanford University are refining techniques that may lead to personalized treatments in the future.

Not every patient with depression benefits from medication. Recent research highlights potential improvements in an alternative approach, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), for treating depression. TMS is distinct from electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), another treatment option for depression.

Researchers from the University of Helsinki and Stanford University investigated which factors in targeting TMS influence the brain’s electrical responses. They examined the behavior of a specific electrophysiological marker. This marker could potentially be used as a biomarker in the future to measure the efficacy of TMS treatment and thus help target and tailor the therapy.

AI Is Life

Lovely essay by Sara Walker on how tech is biology. She closely mirrors my own thinking on this. “The technologies we are and that we produce are part of the same ancient strand of information propagating through and structuring matter on our planet.”

Our best estimates place the origin of life on this planet at approximately 3.8 billion years ago. Biological beings alive today are part of a lineage of information that can be traced backward in time through genomes to the earliest life. But evolution produced information that is not just genomic. Evolution produced everything around us, including things not traditionally considered “life.” Human technology would not exist without humans, so it is therefore part of the same ancient lineage of information that emerged with the origin of life.

Technology, like biology, does not exist in the absence of evolution. Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.

It is important to separate what is meant by “life” here as distinct from “alive.” By “life,” I mean all objects that can only be produced in our universe through a process of evolution and selection. Being “alive,” by contrast, is the active implementation of the dynamics of evolution and selection. Some objects — like a dead cat — are representative of “life” (because they only emerge in the universe through evolution) but not themselves “alive.”

No CRISPR, no problem: ‘Jumping gene’ system could be bridge to complex gene editing

A new gene editing technique derived from bacterial “jumping genes” can add, remove, recombine and invert DNA sequences, potentially overcoming some of the limitations of CRISPR.

The approach is made possible by a molecule called bridge RNA, the discovery of which came about through a joint effort led by scientists at the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California, in collaboration with the University of Tokyo. They described their work in a pair of papers published June 26 in Nature.

Systemic Therapy Approaches for Advanced Prostate Cancer

As part of the 2024 Prostate Cancer Patient Conference, Dr. Eric Small discusses systemic therapy treatment in advanced prostate cancer, including AR-targeted therapy. The presentation includes definitions of disease states, categories of treatment types, and standards in treatment selection.
Recorded on 03/09/2024. [Show ID: 39768]

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More videos from: Prostate Cancer Patient Conference.
(https://www.uctv.tv/prostate-cancer-c…)

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Continue reading “Systemic Therapy Approaches for Advanced Prostate Cancer” | >

Altos rejuvenation research in mice signposts healthspan extension

So, they get very healthy but only live 24% longer no matter how many more times they use the treatment. I wonder what the telomere effect is. And what they are doing is not the same as what Aubrey’s mouse experiment is doing.

Altos Labs Co-founder and Chief Scientist Rick Klausner participated in a panel discussing efforts to increase human healthspan by combatting age-related diseases at this year’s Aspen Ideas Health conference.

In a panel that included Laura Deming and Kristen Fortney, Klausner discussed an Altos experiment in Spain (likely to be research conducted by Universidad Católica de Murcia and Altos Labs in collaboration with the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona), Klausner reported that if old kidneys are transplanted into young people they do not function nearly as well as transplanting young kidneys – but organ donations donors are getting older and older, and therein lies the rub.

We’ve been doing these experiments with the transplant team at Barcelona where we remove a kidney from different animals, and now we’re preparing to do this in the clinic. You take an old kidney and you transplant it into a young rat versus [transplanting] a young kidney and you see a tremendous difference in overall survival and kidney function. But when we take the old rat organ and we introduce these components that rejuvenate, this reprogramming cocktail, just for 45 minutes they’re exposed to it and then they survive as well if not better than the young organs that are transplanted.

Sugar Substitute Linked to Increased Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke, study finds

Xylitol is a common zero-calorie sweetener found in sugar-free candy and toothpaste. Cleveland Clinic researchers found higher amounts of the sugar alcohol xylitol are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke.

The team, led by Stanley Hazen, M.D., Ph.D., confirmed the association in a large-scale patient analysis, preclinical research models and a clinical intervention study. Findings were published today in the European Heart Journal.

Xylitol is a common sugar substitute used in sugar-free candy, gums, baked goods and oral products like toothpaste. Over the past decade, the use of sugar substitutes, including sugar alcohols and artificial sweeteners, has increased significantly in processed foods that are promoted as healthy alternatives.

Chinese researchers develop first open-source brain-on-chip interface system globally

Chinese researchers have developed an open-source “brain-on-chip” interface system, which is the first of its kind in the world. The system can instruct a robot to avoid obstacles, track, and grasp through “mind control,” the Science and Technology Daily reported on Wednesday.

The interface system was co-developed by research teams from Tianjin University and Southern University of Science and Technology.

The system uses an artificial brain cultivated in vitro – such as a “brain-like organ,” which can interact with external information through encoding, decoding and stimulus-feedback when coupled with electrode chips, according to the report.

AI Super-Human Eye Brings Scientists One Step Closer to Understanding the Most Complicated and Mysterious Dimension of Our Existence

The brain is the most complex organ ever created. Its functions are supported by a network of tens of billions of densely packed neurons, with trillions of connections exchanging information and performing calculations. Trying to understand the complexity of the brain can be dizzying. Nevertheless, if we ever hope to understand how the brain works, we need to be able to map neurons and study how they are wired.

Now, publishing in Nature Communications, researchers from Kyushu University have developed a new AI tool, which they call QDyeFinder, that can automatically identify and reconstruct individual neurons from images of the mouse brain. The process involves tagging neurons with a super-multicolor labeling protocol, and then letting the AI automatically identify the neuron’s structure by matching similar color combinations.

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