Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 689

Photoroom, An App That Generates AI Images In One Second, Is Now Worth $500 Million

Photoroom announced Tuesday that it has raised $43 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $500 million. London-based early-stage venture firm Balderton Capital and Aglaé Ventures, an investment firm backed by LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault and his family, led the round, with participation from Y Combinator. The new round brings the Photoroom’s total funding to $64 million. With more than 150 million app downloads and a subscription-based business model, the Paris-based startup has crossed $50 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Rouif.

Photoroom has also garnered the attention of brands like Netflix, Lionsgate and Warner Bros, who have used the startup’s API to promote films and shows including Barbie and Black Mirror. In October 2023, Photoroom partnered with Universal Music Group-owned record label, Republic Records, to create a custom selfie generator of Taylor Swift’s album 1989 that millions of fans used to create an album cover with their own faces.

Photoroom first gained traction in 2020, the same year it was accepted into Y Combinator. During the pandemic, entrepreneurs rushed to produce online catalogs of their products and without access to photographers and professional photo studios, they turned to photo editing tools like Photoroom. Before generative AI tools became mainstream, the startup’s most popular tools were a background remover tool, a tool called “magic retouch,” which removed unwanted objects from a photo as well as a feature that could blur backgrounds in two seconds. When more advanced AI tools became available in 2023, the startup expanded its offerings to include fully AI-generated backgrounds, where users could create background visuals from scratch through text prompts — now Photoroom’s most commonly used feature.

How early-stage cancer cells hide from the immune system

One of the immune system’s primary roles is to detect and kill cells that have acquired cancerous mutations. However, some early-stage cancer cells manage to evade this surveillance and develop into more advanced tumors.

A new study from MIT and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has identified one strategy that helps these avoid immune detection. The researchers found that early in colon cancer development, cells that turn on a gene called SOX17 can become essentially invisible to the immune system.

If scientists could find a way to block SOX17 function or the pathway that it activates, this may offer a new way to treat early-stage cancers before they grow into larger tumors, the researchers say.

Bioinformatics approach offers a step toward personalized immunotherapy for all

Most cancers are thought to evade the immune system. These cancers don’t carry very many mutations, and they aren’t infiltrated by cancer-fighting immune cells. Scientists call these cancers immunologically “cold.”

Now new research suggests such cancers aren’t as “cold” as once thought. Researchers from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, and UC San Diego, have found that patients with “cold” tumors actually do make cancer-fighting T cells.

This discovery opens the door to developing vaccines or therapies to increase T cell numbers and treat many more types of cancer than currently thought possible.

Sensory nerves appear to drive head and neck cancer growth

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus studying interactions between nerves and tumor microenvironments have found that commonly used drugs like botox may stop or slow the progression of certain head and neck cancers.

The study, published online today in the journal Med, examined how nerves within the tumor environment impact the immune system and cancer growth.

“We have long known that the intensity of nerve interactions within the are associated with worse outcomes in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma,” said the study’s lead author Laurel Darragh, an MD/Ph. D. student focused on radiation oncology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “This prompted us to investigate how these nerve interactions impact the adaptive immune system and tumor growth.”

Insulin-inhibitory receptor research offers hope for type 2 diabetes therapy

Research targeting the insulin-inhibitory receptor, or inceptor, unveils promising avenues for beta cell protection, offering hope for causal diabetes therapy.

A novel study in mice with diet-induced obesity demonstrates that the knock-out of inceptor enhances , prompting its further exploration as a for type 2 treatment.

These findings, led by Helmholtz Munich in collaboration with the German Center for Diabetes Research, the Technical University of Munich, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, drive advancements in diabetes research. They have been published in Nature Metabolism.

More than just neurons: Scientists create new model for studying human brain inflammation

The brain is typically depicted as a complex web of neurons sending and receiving messages. But neurons only make up half of the human brain. The other half—roughly 85 billion cells—are non-neuronal cells called glia.

The most common type of glial cells are , which are important for supporting neuronal health and activity. Despite this, most existing laboratory models of the human brain fail to include astrocytes at sufficient levels or at all, which limits the models’ utility for studying brain health and disease.

Now, Salk scientists have created a novel organoid model of the human brain—a three-dimensional collection of cells that mimics features of human tissues—that contains mature, functional astrocytes. With this astrocyte-rich model, researchers will be able to study inflammation and stress in aging and diseases like Alzheimer’s with greater clarity and depth than ever before.

Light stimulates a new twist for synthetic chemistry

Molecules that are induced by light to rotate bulky groups around central bonds could be developed into photo-activated bioactive systems, molecular switches, and more.

Researchers at Hokkaido University, led by Assistant Professor Akira Katsuyama and Professor Satoshi Ichikawa at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, have extended the toolkit of synthetic chemistry by making a new category of molecules that can be induced to undergo an internal rotation on interaction with . Similar processes are believed to be important in some natural biological systems.

Synthetic versions might be exploited to perform photochemical switching functions in molecular computing and sensing technologies or in bioactive molecules, including drugs. Their report is pending in Nature Chemistry.

/* */