The Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine is devoted to biomedical research with the aim of understanding the molecular basis of health and disease and translating findings as quickly as possible into clinical applications. Better prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases are the ultimate goals.
Cytokine storms may affect the severity of COVID-19 cases by lowering T cell counts, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Immunology. Researchers studying coronavirus cases in China found that sick patients had a significantly low number of T cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a crucial role in immune response, and that T cell counts were negatively correlated with case severity.
Interestingly, they also found a high concentration of cytokines, a protein that normally helps fight off infection. Too many cytokines can trigger an excessive inflammatory response known as a cytokine storm, which causes the proteins to attack healthy cells. The study suggests that coronavirus does not attack T cells directly, but rather triggers the cytokine release, which then drives the depletion and exhaustion of T cells.
The findings offer clues on how to target treatment for COVID-19, which has become a worldwide pandemic and a widespread threat to human health in the past few months. “We should pay more attention to T cell counts and their function, rather than respiratory function of patients,” says author Dr. Yongwen Chen of Third Military Medical University in China, adding that “more urgent, early intervention may be required in patients with low T lymphocyte counts.”
ROBOTS will raise one in three children in the future, an AI expert says.
Dr Michelle Tempest says the droids will feed, exercise and teach kids.
They will also change nappies and tell stories and artificial uteruses will develop foetuses.
Dr Tempest says that by 2050 parenting will be “entirely optional”.
“just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.”
Biomedical research ultimately helps protect public health, Fauci argued. The Wuhan lab that received U.S. taxpayer money is suspected of playing a role in starting the Covid-19 pandemic.
With the curve finally flattening in the US, the ramping up of anti-viral and vaccine trials against SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes Covid-19—and the launch of antibody tests to screen for previous infection, it seems like science is rapidly moving towards the end game. How exactly the Covid-19 pandemic will finally bugger off into history is still anyone’s guess, but virologists and public health experts generally agree that immunity is key—either through widespread safe and effective vaccination, or when enough of our population has recovered from infections and gained herd immunity.
Well. That’s the hand-waving, shruggie emoji, “eh who knows” short answer.
Like most processes in biology, immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is complex and mysterious, with results that could rapidly diverge into many possible futures. It’s partly why estimates of how long Covid-19 sticks around to wreak havoc can vary enormously, from months to years to…well, seasonal and forever, similar to the flu.
Dr. Jason Williams discusses his decision to administer follistatin gene therapy, a myostatin inhibitor, to himself in 2015.
Visit Integrated Health Systems to learn more about follistatin gene therapy.
In November of 2019—likely, even earlier—a tiny entity measuring just a few hundred billionths of a meter in diameter began to tear apart human society on a global scale. Within a few months, the relentless voyager known as SARS-CoV-2 had made its way to every populated corner of the earth, leaving scientists and health authorities with too many questions and few answers.
Today, researchers are scrambling to understand where and how the novel coronavirus arose, what features account for the puzzling constellation of symptoms it can cause and how the wildfire of transmission may be brought under control. An important part of this quest will involve efforts to properly classify this emergent human pathogen and to understand how it relates to other viruses we may know more about.
In a consensus statement, Arvind Varsani, a molecular virologist with ASU’s Biodesign Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics and a host of international collaborators propose a new classification system, capable of situating coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 within the enormous web of viruses across the planet, known as the virosphere.
This is the seventh in a series on the impact of the coronavirus on China’s technology sector.
China’s robotics market is forecast to reach US$103.6 billion by 2023, driven by manufacturing, consumer, retail, health care and resource applications.
Chinese robotics companies have seen a surge in demand since the coronavirus outbreak but some believe robot tech is not mature enough for widespread use.
Existing electronic skin (e-skin) sensing platforms are equipped to monitor physical parameters using power from batteries or near-field communication. For e-skins to be applied in the next generation of robotics and medical devices, they must operate wirelessly and be self-powered. However, despite recent efforts to harvest energy from the human body, self-powered e-skin with the ability to perform biosensing with Bluetooth communication are limited because of the lack of a continuous energy source and limited power efficiency. Here, we report a flexible and fully perspiration-powered integrated electronic skin (PPES) for multiplexed metabolic sensing in situ. The battery-free e-skin contains multimodal sensors and highly efficient lactate biofuel cells that use a unique integration of zero- to three-dimensional nanomaterials to achieve high power intensity and long-term stability. The PPES delivered a record-breaking power density of 3.5 milliwatt·centimeter−2 for biofuel cells in untreated human body fluids (human sweat) and displayed a very stable performance during a 60-hour continuous operation. It selectively monitored key metabolic analytes (e.g., urea, NH4+, glucose, and pH) and the skin temperature during prolonged physical activities and wirelessly transmitted the data to the user interface using Bluetooth. The PPES was also able to monitor muscle contraction and work as a human-machine interface for human-prosthesis walking.
Recent advances in robotics have enabled soft electronic devices at different scales with excellent biocompatibility and mechanical properties; these advances have rendered novel robotic functionalities suitable for various medical applications, such as diagnosis and drug delivery, soft surgery tools, human-machine interaction (HMI), wearable computing, health monitoring, assistive robotics, and prosthesis (1–6). Electronic skin (e-skin) can have similar characteristics to human skin, such as mechanical durability and stretchability and the ability to measure various sensations such as temperature and pressure (7–11). Moreover, e-skin can be augmented with capabilities beyond those of the normal human skin by incorporating advanced bioelectronics materials and devices.