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Category: biotech/medical – Page 67

This New Treatment Can Adjust to Parkinson’s Symptoms in Real Time

Starting today, people with Parkinson’s disease will have a new treatment option, thanks to U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of groundbreaking new technology.

The therapy, known as adaptive deep brain stimulation, or aDBS, uses an implanted device that continuously monitors the brain for signs that Parkinson’s symptoms are developing. When it detects specific patterns of brain activity, it delivers precisely calibrated electric pulses to keep symptoms at bay.

The FDA approval covers two treatment algorithms that run on a device made by Medtronic, a medical device company. Both work by monitoring the same part of the brain, called the subthalamic nucleus. But they respond in different ways.

The FDA has approved an adaptive deep brain stimulation (aDBS) treatment for people with with Parkinson’s disease, making this groundbreaking technology available to people nationwide.

Cell therapy weekly: FDA exemptions and Breakthrough Therapy designations

This week: The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA; MD, USA) has granted a special exemption for an iPSC-derived cell therapy targeting Parkinson’s disease, along with Breakthrough Therapy designations for a CAR-T therapy for a pediatric brain tumor and a gene therapy for Huntington’s disease.

The FDA has granted XellSmart Biopharmaceutical (Suzhou, China) a special exemption to support a clinical trial of XS-411 Injection, the company’s allogeneic, off-the-shelf iPSC-derived dopaminergic neural progenitor cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease. This follows an Investigational New Drug submission in January 2025. In parallel, China’s National Medical Products Administration has approved XS-411 to enter Phase I clinical trials.

Additionally, the FDA has cleared XellSmart’s XS228, an allogeneic, off-the-shelf, clinical-grade iPSC-derived cell therapy for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), to begin Phase I trials, marking it as the first-in-class regenerative neural cell therapy for the disease.

The FDA has granted a special exemption for a cell therapy and Breakthrough Therapy designations for a CAR-T therapy and a gene therapy.

Association of Medication Use and 8-Year Mortality Risk in Patients With Parkinson DiseaseDrug-Wide Trial Emulation

Background and ObjectivesThere are currently no treatments that can halt or slow the progression of Parkinson disease (PD). The aim of this study was to identify new drug repurposing candidates for PD among existing prescription drugs that could be used…

Computational exploration of global venoms for antimicrobial discovery with Venomics artificial intelligence

Researchers used artificial intelligence to mine global venom proteomes and discovered novel peptides with antimicrobial activity. Several candidates showed efficacy against drug-resistant bacteria in laboratory and animal tests.

Surprising finding could pave way for universal cancer vaccine

An experimental mRNA vaccine boosted the tumor-fighting effects of immunotherapy in a mouse-model study, bringing researchers one step closer to their goal of developing a universal vaccine to “wake up” the immune system against cancer.

Published today in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the University of Florida study showed that like a one-two punch, pairing the test vaccine with common anticancer drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors triggered a strong antitumor response.

A surprising element, researchers said, was that they achieved the promising results not by attacking a specific target protein expressed in the tumor, but by simply revving up the immune system — spurring it to respond as if fighting a virus. They did this by stimulating the expression of a protein called PD-L1 inside of tumors, making them more receptive to treatment. The research was supported by multiple federal agencies and foundations, including the National Institutes of Health.

Sc: What research can be furthered?

What has not yet been tried? These are the questions that Inserm research director Nicolas L’Heureux has asked himself every day for a long time, « like a game ». Which means that from very early on he had the idea of pushing the limits of vascular tissue engineering – a field in which he had begun working when doing his M.Sc. « When performing a cardiac or other type of bypass, preference is given to using the patient’s own vessels that are taken from one place and transplanted into another, more critical, one. An autologous graft continues to remain the best solution, but it is a limited resource. » Diseases such as stroke, hyperlipidemia, and thrombosis, which have the particularity of being systemic – in which they attack all vessels to varying degrees –, as well as aging, weaken our vessels. And the earlier the need for surgery, the greater the likelihood of a second intervention. « A transplanted artery will withstand an average of ten years and a vein six to seven years. » Which just leaves synthetic grafts. https://www.inserm.fr/en/news/nicolas-lheureux-artificial-bl…iological/

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Computational clock identifies compounds that may rejuvenate aging brain cells

What if there was a way to make aging brain cells younger again? An international research team from Spain and Luxembourg recently set out to address this question. After developing an aging clock capable of assessing the biological age of the brain, they used it to identify possible brain-rejuvenating interventions. The computational tool they created, recently presented in the journal Advanced Science, constitutes a valuable resource to find compounds with therapeutic potential for neurodegenerative diseases.

As the world population is aging rapidly, with over two billion people projected to be above the age of 60 by 2050, age-related brain disorders are on the rise. Living longer but in is not only a daunting prospect, it also places a substantial burden on health care systems worldwide. The idea of being able to counteract the functional decline of our brain through rejuvenating interventions therefore sounds promising.

The question is, how can we identify compounds that have the potential to efficiently rejuvenate brain cells and to protect the from neurodegeneration? Prof. Antonio Del Sol and his teams of computational biologists, based both at CIC bioGUNE, member of BRTA, and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) from the University of Luxembourg, used their machine learning expertise to tackle the challenge.

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