The new version of the human genome could lead to better diagnostics and treatment of genetic diseases.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 776
Great overview of progress in the field of oncolytic viruses. Take home message: it’s super important to develop viruses that not only attack tumors directly, but also stimulate immune strong responses against the cancer. #genetherapy #biotechnology
Cancer treatments known as oncolytic viruses are being tested in clinical trials, and one, T-VEC or Imlygic®, has been approved by the FDA. Research now suggests that these treatments work not only by infecting and killing tumor cells, but that they may also be a form of cancer immunotherapy.
The early detection and treatment of dementia such as Alzheimer’s is still one of the great challenges of modern medicine. It is already known that certain proteins in the cerebrospinal fluid can be used to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. However, the current detection methods for such biomarkers by means of biochemical tests can only confirm and quantify the presence of such pathological proteins. No conclusions can be drawn about their original morphology of the proteins using biochemical assays, which holds information on disease stages.
However, such information if obtained directly in a label-free manner could allow conclusions to be drawn about the stage of the disease and evaluate the efficiency of a prescribed treatment. A team from the Transport at Nanoscale Interfaces Laboratory at Empa and the Department of Neurology at the Cantonal Hospital in St. Gallen has now used atomic force microscopy (AFM) to visualize the proteins that are indicative of Alzheimer’s disease under conditions that are as close to reality as possible. The researchers recently published their results in the journal Communications Biology.
With the new study, the researchers add another piece of the puzzle to their insights into Alzheimer’s development and diagnosis.
Researchers from Uppsala University have developed a method that helps immune cells exit from blood vessels into a tumor to kill cancer cells. The goal is to improve treatment of aggressive brain tumors. The study has been published in the journal Cancer Cell.
Glioblastoma is an aggressive brain tumor that lacks efficient treatment. This is in part due to the ability of the tumor to suppress or evade the body’s natural anti-cancer immune response. Immunotherapy, using checkpoint inhibitors, can reactivate the immune system against cancer. However, for this type of treatment to be effective, specific immune cells known as killer T cells must be present within the tumor.
Unfortunately, blood vessels in brain cancer are dysfunctional and act as a barrier, preventing killer T cells from reaching the tumor. As a result, this form of immunotherapy, which is effective against many forms of cancer, is ineffective against brain cancers.
Two cases of highly contagious, drug-resistant ringworm infections have been detected in New York City — the first such cases reported in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.
The infection was first identified in a 47-year-old woman who had developed a bad case of ringworm, also known as tinea, while traveling in Bangladesh.
A rash had erupted across most of her body and typical antifungal creams did nothing to alleviate it.
The brain is assumed to be hypoactive during cardiac arrest. However, animal models of cardiac and respiratory arrest demonstrate a surge of gamma oscillations and functional connectivity. To investigate whether these preclinical findings translate to humans, we analyzed electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram signals in four comatose dying patients before and after the withdrawal of ventilatory support. Two of the four patients exhibited a rapid and marked surge of gamma power, surge of cross-frequency coupling of gamma waves with slower oscillations, and increased interhemispheric functional and directed connectivity in gamma bands. High-frequency oscillations paralleled the activation of beta/gamma cross-frequency coupling within the somatosensory cortices. Importantly, both patients displayed surges of functional and directed connectivity at multiple frequency bands within the posterior cortical “hot zone,” a region postulated to be critical for conscious processing. This gamma activity was stimulated by global hypoxia and surged further as cardiac conditions deteriorated in the dying patients. These data demonstrate that the surge of gamma power and connectivity observed in animal models of cardiac arrest can be observed in select patients during the process of dying.
Researchers at Tufts University developed immortalized bovine muscle stem cells for cellular agriculture, potentially overcoming scaling challenges for meat production.
Andrew Stout, Tufts University.
Currently, it is difficult and expensive to produce cell-cultured meat because muscle and fat cells need to be able to grow and divide rapidly. Normal muscle stem cells can only divide about 50 times before they stop dividing and die. However, immortalized cells developed by the TUCCA team can divide indefinitely, which means they can produce much more meat.
This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features interviews with the chief executive of a.
Scientists have uncovered the inner workings of one of the most important and intricate “nanobots” operating within our cells by using cutting-edge microscopy for visualizing molecules almost at an atomic level.
Their new study published in Nature has unveiled the critical step that switches on the spliceosome —a piece of cellular machinery that enables cells to build complex proteins.
By uncovering in detail how the spliceosome is activated, scientists believe the discovery could pave the way to more effective designs for cancer drugs that target it.
Alix Burnard, 29, said she was so sick that she couldn’t leave the house without a cup to catch her phlegm and eventually couldn’t climb stairs.