A new chip re-creates the human vagina’s unique microbiome.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 932
A gene therapy gel for a blistering skin disease developed at Stanford Medicine has worked wonders in a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial.
The gel, called B-VEC, was intended to treat dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, a skin disease that results in large open wounds that last for decades. The condition is extremely painful, and the medical treatment is mostly limited to palliative care.
University of Southern California and the Cleveland Clinic Florida Research and Innovation Center researchers have published new research on GRP78, a protein implicated in both COVID-19.
First identified in 2019 in Wuhan, China, COVID-19, or Coronavirus disease 2019, (which was originally called “2019 novel coronavirus” or 2019-nCoV) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It has spread globally, resulting in the 2019–22 coronavirus pandemic.
Scientists are getting closer to producing prosthetic limbs that can sense touch. A team of researchers from Stanford University and Seoul National University have created an artificial nerve system that can not only sense differences in pressure but also read individual Braille letters. More amazingly still, they managed to hook the artificial nerves up to the leg of a cockroach and make the limb twitch.
“We take skin for granted but it’s a complex sensing, signaling and decision-making system,” says Stanford’s Zhenan Bao, co-author of the paper published in Science and whose lab has been developing the system, in a statement. “This artificial sensory nerve system is a step toward making skin-like sensory neural networks for all sorts of applications.”
The nerve circuit that the team developed is made up of three main components.
Researchers from Spain and Denmark have discovered a technique for attacking cancer cells in the production of one of the origin-of-life molecules.
The molecule that gave rise to life, RNA
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule similar to DNA that is essential in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation and expression of genes. Both are nucleic acids, but unlike DNA, RNA is single-stranded. An RNA strand has a backbone made of alternating sugar (ribose) and phosphate groups. Attached to each sugar is one of four bases—adenine (A), uracil (U), cytosine ©, or guanine (G). Different types of RNA exist in the cell: messenger RNA (mRNA), ribosomal RNA (rRNA), and transfer RNA (tRNA).
The innovation was inspired by the measles virus.
In a world-first, researchers at Tel Aviv University have conceived of a way to control the encapsulation and release of drug molecules by exposure to UV light, according to a press release by the institution published on Monday.
The scientists now hope that this new efficient encapsulation will allow for the high loading capacity of molecules leading to further development of delivery systems for the controlled release of biomolecules and drugs in the body by external stimuli using light.
New therapeutic has the potential to treat inflammatory bowel disease by targeting a molecule that keeps order in the intestines.
Salk Institute scientists have developed a new drug that acts like a master reset switch in the gut. Called FexD, the compound has previously been found to burn fat, lower cholesterol, and ward off colorectal cancer in mice. Now, the team reports that FexD can also prevent and reverse intestinal inflammation in mouse models of inflammatory bowel disease. The study was published on December 12, 2022, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The Salk-developed drug FexD provides a new way to restore balance to the digestive system and treat inflammatory diseases that are currently very difficult to manage,” says Salk Professor Ronald Evans, senior author of the study. Evans is also director of Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory and March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology.
Soft robots have phenomenally advanced in recent years. Microscale soft robots designated to navigate difficult paths and perform biological functions in the human body could have profound potential biomedical applications such as surgery, prosthetics, and pain relief.
Currently, the intrinsic functionalization of bio-inspired soft robots is based on elastomeric materials such as silica gel, which requires introducing bulky components and extensive processing steps. They have major limitations in their extent of deformability as compared to their natural biological counterparts.
A research team led by Professor Anderson H.C. Shum from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Professor Thomas P. Russell from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has invented an all-water robotic system that resolves these constraints through revolutionary scientific advances.
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Researchers from Japan reveal that they may just have found a way to repair cardiac damage in patients suffering from chronic heart attack and heart failure.
In a study published in Circulation, researchers from the University of Tsukuba have shown that changing heart cell programming by tweaking the expression of a few key genes can actually reverse the lasting damage caused by heart attacks.
Adult heart cells have very limited ability to form new heart tissue, so when the heart muscle is damaged by a heart attack, the damaged areas are filled in with inflexible scar tissue. The presence of scar tissue impairs heart function and leads to arrhythmias, progressive heart failure and eventual death.