Lifeboat Foundation

A COVID-19 vaccine that could provide protection against existing and future strains of the COVID-19 coronavirus, and other coronaviruses, and costs about $1 a dose has shown promising results in early animal testing.

Vaccines created by UVA Health’s Steven L. Zeichner, MD, PhD, and Virginia Tech’s Xiang-Jin Meng, MD, PhD, prevented pigs from being becoming ill with a pig model coronavirus, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV). The vaccine was developed using an innovative approach that Zeichner says might one day open the door to a universal vaccine for coronaviruses, including coronaviruses that previously threatened pandemics or perhaps even coronaviruses that cause some cases of the common cold.

Their coronavirus vaccine offers several advantages that could overcome major obstacles to global vaccination efforts. It would be easy to store and transport, even in remote areas of the world, and could be produced in mass quantities using existing vaccine-manufacturing factories.

Influenza, commonly known as the flu virus, places a substantial burden on public health in the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that influenza has resulted in about 9 million to 45 million diseases, 140000 to 810000 hospitalizations, and 12000 to 61000 deaths each year over the past decade.

Though flu vaccines are readily available to the public, they need to be remodeled and administered every year to combat new viral variants, which can undermine vaccine efficacy. Because of this, scientists have aimed to develop a universal vaccine that can protect against all influenza strains, and that can last for many years.

Now, researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) developed a universal flu vaccine candidate using small particles (nanoparticles), which can induce a long-lasting immune response.

This new species, Desulfovibrio diazotrophicus, is from a family of bacteria that survive and grow on sulfur-containing compounds. They are known as sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) and a biproduct of their activity is the release of the gas hydrogen sulfide, which has a characteristic ‘rotten egg’ smell. Whilst this is unpleasant for those around you, there is also some concern that it is detrimental for gut health; the presence of SRB has been associated with gut inflammation, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and colorectal cancer.

Despite this, evidence for a definitive link between SRB and chronic disease has never been established. For a start, they are very widespread; around half the human population have SRB in their gut, so maybe not all of them are bad? They may even have positive effects. They release energy and nutrients from the material that other bacteria produce when they are fermenting the food we eat.

This uncertainty triggered interest from the research community, including scientists from the Quadram Institute (QI), who want to understand exactly what SRB do in the microbiome and how they interact with food and the gut. Very few species have been characterized, most from Western countries. To broaden the picture, QI researchers have been working with Professor Chen Wei and colleagues from Jiangnan University, China to isolate and characterize SRB from the intestinal tract of healthy Chinese and British people. The research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, part of UKRI.

Implantable electronics are among the most promising healthcare technologies, as they can help to remotely monitor specific biological processes associated with a patient’s health. While researchers have developed a variety of implantable devices over the past decade or so, existing technologies have several limitations that can prevent their widespread use in clinical settings.

The first factor preventing the large-scale implementation of existing implantable technologies is the structural mismatch between these devices and most organs/tissues in the body, which typically have complex 1D or 3D structures. Secondly, reliably fixing soft electronic devices on organs that are moving or pulsating has so far proved to be highly challenging.

Researchers at Daegu-Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST) in South Korea and ETH Zürich have recently developed a new fiber-based strain-sensing device that could overcome the limitations of existing implantable electronics. This sensor, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, comprises a capacitive fiber strain sensor with an inductive coil for wireless readout.

These findings may have implications for brain disease, disorders.

Scientists at the Krembil Brain Institute, part of University Health Network (UHN), in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), have used precious and rare access to live human cortical tissue to identify functionally important features that make human neurons unique.

This experimental work is among the first of its kind on live human neurons and one of the largest studies of the diversity of human cortical pyramidal cells to date.

In diabetic nephropathy—a common cause of kidney disease—levels of NEDD4-2 are severely reduced. This is the case even when salt is not a factor.

University of South Australia researchers have identified an enzyme that may help to curb chronic kidney disease, which affects approximately 700 million people worldwide.

Continue reading “The enzyme that could help 700 million people worldwide” »

Summary: Morning bright light therapy improved both physical and mental health symptoms, including cognitive function and sleep quality, in veterans who suffered TBI.

Source: Experimental Biology.

A new study by researchers at the VA Portland Health Care System in Oregon found that augmenting traditional treatment for traumatic brain injury (TBI) with morning bright light therapy (MBLT) improved physical and mental symptoms for participants.

“In atopic dermatitis, the itching can be horrific, and it can aggravate disease,” said co-corresponding author K. Frank Austen, MD, a senior physician in the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at the Brigham.

Scientists pinpointed a key molecular player that could represent a new therapeutic target for intractable chronic itch.

Muscle stem cells enable our muscle to build up and regenerate over a lifetime through exercise. But if certain muscle genes are mutated, the opposite occurs. In patients suffering from muscular dystrophy, the skeletal muscle already starts to weaken in childhood. Suddenly, these children are no longer able to run, play the piano or climb the stairs, and often they are dependent on a wheelchair by the age of 15. Currently, no therapy for this condition exists.

“Now, we are able to access these patients’ gene mutations using CRISPR-Cas9 technology,” explains Professor Simone Spuler, head of the Myology Lab at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint institution of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association and Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin. “We care for more than 2000 patients at the Charité outpatient clinic for muscle disorders, and quickly recognized the potential of the new technology.” The researchers immediately started working with some of the affected families, and have now presented their results in the journal JCI Insight. In the families studied, the parents were healthy and had no idea they possessed a mutated gene. The children all inherited a copy of the disease mutation from both parents.