Robert C Williams performed genetic analysis to understand how the HLA and SLC16A11 genes affect Type 2 diabetes in Indigenous Americans.
Category: genetics – Page 60
GC Therapeutics’ plug-and-play stem cell programming platform aims to reduce cell therapy development time by up to 100 times.
Cell therapies have revolutionized the treatment of certain disease areas; however, challenges in scaling these therapies…
Cell therapy startup GC Therapeutics (GCTx) has emerged from the lab of renowned geneticist George Church, securing a $65 million Series A funding round that brings the total raised by the company to a cool $75 million. The company is on a mission to enable the next generation of cell therapies through its proprietary TFome platform, which GCTx claims is the first plug-and-play induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) cellular programming platform.
Developed by a team of scientists in Professor Church’s lab of at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute, TFome aims to help streamline the complex, error-prone and costly process of cell therapy development by accelerating production and enhancing the quality of cell therapies across a wide range of disease areas. The power of the platform lies in its ability to harness transcription factors, the proteins that regulate gene expression and determine cell fate. By precisely controlling these factors, the platform can guide stem cells to differentiate into any desired cell type in a highly efficient and scalable manner.
Offering a single-step process that enables the efficient differentiation of iPSCs into various functional cell types with over 90% efficiency in just four days, GCTx claims that TFome has the potential to reduce the time associated with cell therapy development by up to 100 times compared with conventional methods, while also improving the potency, efficiency, and quality of the resulting cells. The company aims to leverage the platform to develop off-the-shelf iPSC-based medicines, which can be produced quickly and at a lower cost than current alternatives.
RNA interference (RNAi) technology has gradually become a cutting-edge technology for treating diseases such as genetic disorders and cancer due to its huge potential in gene expression regulation. However, the efficient delivery and safety of short interfering RNA (siRNA) remain key challenges for its clinical application.
The Intelligence Age
Posted in genetics, robotics/AI
In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.
This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.
We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.
Summary: The largest and most diverse study on recessive genetic changes in developmental disorders reveals that over 80% of cases caused by recessive variants are linked to known genes. Researchers analyzed data from nearly 30,000 families and found that a shift in focus from gene discovery to interpreting changes in known genes could double diagnosis rates.
The study highlights the importance of genetic background in diagnosis and suggests that some patients may have multiple contributing genetic factors. These findings could lead to more personalized and accurate diagnoses for families affected by developmental disorders.
Model grounded in biology reveals the tissue structures linked to the disorder. A researcher’s mathematical modeling approach for brain imaging analysis reveals links between genes, brain structure and autism.
A multi-university research team co-led by University of Virginia engineering professor Gustavo K. Rohde has developed a system that can spot genetic markers of autism in brain images with 89 to 95% accuracy.
Their findings suggest doctors may one day see, classify and treat autism and related neurological conditions with this method, without having to rely on, or wait for, behavioral cues. And that means this truly personalized medicine could result in earlier interventions.
Year 2022 Solar powered mitochondria could enable humans to use light to recharge their mitochondria and extend life also their bodies would be recharged by fuel from the sun.
Using light to optogenetically power mitochondria, this study shows that opposing the age-related decline in mitochondrial membrane potential leads to increased healthspan and lifespan in Caenorhabditis elegans. This result points to mitochondrial charge as a fundamental regulator of biological aging.
Randal Koene discusses Whole Brain Emulation on the H+ Magazine podcast. He touches on the subjects of connectomics, neural mapping, optogenetics, and neural prosthesis.
Murine T cells that survived at least four host lifetimes offer insights into immunological senescence.
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a vital biological molecule that plays a significant role in the genetics of organisms and is essential to the origin and evolution of life. Structurally similar to DNA, RNA carries out various biological functions, largely determined by its spatial conformation, i.e. the way the molecule folds in on itself.
Now, a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describes for the first time how the process of RNA folding at low temperatures may open up a novel perspective on primordial biochemistry and the evolution of life on the planet.
The study is led by Professor Fèlix Ritort, from the Faculty of Physics and the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (IN2UB) of the University of Barcelona, and is also signed by UB experts Paolo Rissone, Aurélien Severino, and Isabel Pastor.