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Category: neuroscience – Page 185

This New Treatment Can Adjust to Parkinson’s Symptoms in Real Time

Starting today, people with Parkinson’s disease will have a new treatment option, thanks to U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of groundbreaking new technology.

The therapy, known as adaptive deep brain stimulation, or aDBS, uses an implanted device that continuously monitors the brain for signs that Parkinson’s symptoms are developing. When it detects specific patterns of brain activity, it delivers precisely calibrated electric pulses to keep symptoms at bay.

The FDA approval covers two treatment algorithms that run on a device made by Medtronic, a medical device company. Both work by monitoring the same part of the brain, called the subthalamic nucleus. But they respond in different ways.

The FDA has approved an adaptive deep brain stimulation (aDBS) treatment for people with with Parkinson’s disease, making this groundbreaking technology available to people nationwide.

Cell therapy weekly: FDA exemptions and Breakthrough Therapy designations

This week: The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA; MD, USA) has granted a special exemption for an iPSC-derived cell therapy targeting Parkinson’s disease, along with Breakthrough Therapy designations for a CAR-T therapy for a pediatric brain tumor and a gene therapy for Huntington’s disease.

The FDA has granted XellSmart Biopharmaceutical (Suzhou, China) a special exemption to support a clinical trial of XS-411 Injection, the company’s allogeneic, off-the-shelf iPSC-derived dopaminergic neural progenitor cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease. This follows an Investigational New Drug submission in January 2025. In parallel, China’s National Medical Products Administration has approved XS-411 to enter Phase I clinical trials.

Additionally, the FDA has cleared XellSmart’s XS228, an allogeneic, off-the-shelf, clinical-grade iPSC-derived cell therapy for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), to begin Phase I trials, marking it as the first-in-class regenerative neural cell therapy for the disease.

The FDA has granted a special exemption for a cell therapy and Breakthrough Therapy designations for a CAR-T therapy and a gene therapy.

Four-day work week benefits workers, employers, study says

A four-day work week can lead to happier and more productive, dedicated employees, a new global study found.

Workers at companies that instituted a four-day work week—essentially working 80% of their regular hours for the same pay—reported less burnout and better job satisfaction along with improved mental and physical health, researchers report in Nature Human Behavior.

“Across outcomes, the magnitude (of improvement) is larger for the two work-related measures—burnout and job satisfaction—followed by mental health, with the smallest changes reported in ,” wrote the research team co-led by Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College.

Why the Psychopathic Brain Struggles With Emotion and Control

At its core, psychopathy is not simply a matter of bad choices or poor upbringing — growing evidence suggests it has a biological foundation, shaped by the intricate wiring of the human brain.

Now, a new study offers fresh insights into how structural brain connectivity patterns are linked to psychopathic traits and the externalizing behaviors that often accompany them.

Optimists are alike, every pessimist has their own way

When thinking about future events, optimists’ brains work similarly, while pessimists’ brains show a much larger degree of individuality. The Kobe University finding offers an explanation why optimists are seen as more sociable—they may share a common vision of the future.

Optimists tend to be more satisfied with their and have wider social networks. Kobe University psychologist Yanagisawa Kuniaki says, “But what is the reason for this? Recent studies showed that the brains of people who occupy central social positions react to stimuli in similar ways. So it may be that people who share a similar attitude toward the future, too, truly envision it similarly in their brains and that this makes it easier for them to understand each other’s perspectives.”

To test this hypothesis, Yanagisawa assembled an interdisciplinary team from both the fields of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. “The main reason why this question has remained untouched until now is that it exists in a gap between social psychology and neuroscience. However, the intersection of these two fields enabled us to open this black box.”

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