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Category: health – Page 132

A pilot trial by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham health care system, tested the nasal administration of the drug Foralumab, an anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody. Investigators found evidence that the drug dampened the inflammatory T cell response and decreased lung inflammation in patients with COVID-19. Further analysis showed the same gene expression modulation in patients with multiple sclerosis, who experienced decreased brain inflammation, suggesting that Foralumab could be used to treat other diseases. Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We discovered a way to shut down inflammation not only seen in COVID-19, but also in a patient with multiple sclerosis as well as in healthy patients,” said lead author Thais Moreira, Ph.D., an assistant scientist at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at BWH and an instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. “This is very exciting because not only does our study suggest that this new monoclonal antibody drug is safe and can modulate the without major side effects, but it can also decrease inflammation in multiple realms, so it may be useful for treating other diseases.”

“Inflammation is a major cause of many diseases,” said senior author Howard Weiner, MD, founder and director of the Brigham Multiple Sclerosis Center and co-director of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases. “Our center has spent decades looking for novel ways to treat disease where there is abnormal inflammation in a way that is safe and effective.”

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The health of the heart and blood vessels is vital to body function. Early screening can help people understand their risks and potentially prevent adverse health outcomes.

Testing cholesterol levels is important, but another test can further help identify the risk for cardiovascular disease: apolipoprotein B-100 (ApoB) levels. This protein helps transport cholesterol throughout the body.

Testing for the level of this protein in the blood may help identify people who are more at risk for cardiovascular disease, even when cholesterol levels are normal.

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The FBI is investigating a data breach affecting U.S. House of Representatives members and staff after their account and sensitive personal information was stolen from DC Health Link’s servers.

DC Health Link is the organization that administers the health care plans of U.S. House members, their staff, and their families.

Impacted individuals were notified today of the breach in an email from Catherine L. Szpindor, the U.S. House Chief Administrative Officer, as first reported by DailyCaller.

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With the rapid development of chatbots and other AI systems, questions about whether they will ever gain true understanding, become conscious, or even develop a feeling agency have become more pressing. When it comes to making sense of these qualities in humans, our ability for counterfactual thinking is key. The existence of alternative worlds where things happen differently, however, is not just an exercise in imagination – it’s a key prediction of quantum mechanics. Perhaps our brains are able to ponder how things could have been because in essence they are quantum computers, accessing information from alternative worlds, argues Tim Palmer.

Ask a chatbot “How many prime numbers are there?” and it will surely tell you that there are an infinite number. Ask the chatbot “How do we know?” and it will reply that there are many ways to show this, the original going back to the mathematician Euclid of ancient Greece. Ask the chatbot to describe Euclid’s proof and it will answer correctly [ii]. [ii.

Of course, the chatbot has got all this information from the internet. Additional software in the computer can check that each of the steps in Euclid’s proof is valid and hence can confirm that the proof is a good one. But the computer doesn’t understand the proof. Understanding is a kind of Aha! moment, when you see why the proof works, and why it wouldn’t work if a minor element in it was different (for example the proof in the footnotes doesn’t work if any number but 1 is added when creating the number Q). Chatbots don’t have Aha! moments, but we do. Why?

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Regeneration, Resuscitation & Biothreat Countermeasures — Commander Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien, MD, Ph.D., Program Manager, Biological Technology Office, DARPA

Commander Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien, MD, Ph.D. (https://www.darpa.mil/staff/cdr-jean-paul-chretien) is a Program Manager in the Biological Technology Office at DARPA, where his research interests include disease and injury prevention, operational medicine, and biothreat countermeasures. He is also responsible for running the DARPA Triage Challenge (https://triagechallenge.darpa.mil/).

Prior to coming to DARPA, CDR Dr. Chretien led the Pandemic Warning Team at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence, and as a naval medical officer, his previous assignments include senior policy advisor for biodefense in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; team lead for Innovation & Evaluation at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch; and director of force health protection for U.S. and NATO forces in southwestern Afghanistan.

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The term now covers all types of technology and innovation designed to address health issues that solely, or disproportionately, impact women’s health, from menstrual cycle tracking apps and sexual wellness products to cardiovascular medical devices and mental health therapies.

Giving FemTech its own name helped the community of people working in the sector to find each other, but also gave investors reassurance about where they were putting their money, Tin said.

“It’s a little easier to say you’re invested in FemTech than, you know, a company that helps women not pee their pants … It kind of bridged the gap over to men as well, which was important, still is important, because so many investors are men.”

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Dedicated to ending the HIV epidemic — dr. moupali das, MD, MPH, executive director, HIV clinical research, gilead sciences.

Dr. Moupali Das, MD, MPH, is Executive Director, HIV Clinical Research, in the Virology Therapeutic Area, at Gilead Sciences (https://www.gilead.com/), where she leads the pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinical drug development program, including evaluating the safety and efficacy of a long-acting, twice yearly, subcutaneous injection being studied for HIV prevention. Her responsibilities also include expanding the populations who may benefit from PrEP.

Dr. Das has led high-performing teams in academic medicine, public health, implementation science, and cross-functionally in drug development. She has successfully helped develop, implement, and evaluate how to better test, link to care, increase virologic suppression, and improve quality of life for people with HIV, and to prevent HIV in those who may benefit from PrEP.

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The soot produced by unburnt hydrocarbon flames is the second largest contributor to global warming, while also harming human health. Researchers have developed state-of-the-art, high-speed imaging techniques to study turbulent flames, yet they are limited to an imaging rate of million-frames-per-second. Physicists are therefore keen to obtain a complete picture of flame-laser interactions via single-pulse imaging.

In a new report published in Light: Science & Applications, Yogeshwar Nath Mishra and a research team at the Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, the NASA Jet propulsion lab, department of physics, and the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics in the U.S., and Germany, used single-shot laser-sheet comprised ultrafast photography per billion frames per second, for the first time, to observe the dynamics of laser-flames.

The team noted laser-induced incandescence, elastic light scattering and the fluorescence of soot precursors such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in , with a single nanosecond laser pulse. The research outcomes provide strong experimental evidence to support soot inception and growth mechanisms in flames. Mishra and the team combined a variety of techniques to probe the short-lived species in turbulent environments to unravel the mysteries of hot plasma, nuclear fusion and sonoluminescence.

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Rational Virology Research For Human Health & Pandemic Prevention — Dr. Felicia Goodrum Sterling, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Immunobiology, The University of Arizona.

Dr. Felicia Goodrum, Ph.D. (https://profiles.arizona.edu/person/fgoodrum) is Interim Associate Department Head and Professor of Immunobiology, as well as Professor, BIO5 Institute, Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Cancer Biology And Genetics Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs, at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Goodrum earned her Ph.D. from Wake Forest University School of Medicine studying cell cycle restrictions to adenovirus replication and then trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Shenk studying human cytomegalovirus latency.

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