Lifeboat Foundation

One year of treatment with the targeted drug olaparib improves long-term survival in women with high-risk, early-stage breast cancer with mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, new results from a major clinical trial show.

Ten years since the first patient was recruited, new findings from the phase III OlympiA trial – presented at San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) 2024 – show that adding olaparib to standard treatment cuts the risk of cancer coming back by 35 per cent, and the risk of women dying by 28 per cent.

After six years, 87.5 per cent of patients who were treated with the drug were still alive compared with 83.2 per cent of those who were given the placebo pills.

Continue reading “Major trial shows prolonged benefit of olaparib in early-stage inherited breast cancer” »

When people say moons and Uranus it is phonetically a bit nasty, but, even but sounds a bit strange.

Instead, they may have oceans, and the moons may even be capable of supporting life, scientists say. Much of what we know about them was gathered by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft which visited nearly 40 years ago.

S visit coincided with a powerful solar storm, which led to a misleading idea of what the Uranian system is really like. +Uranus is a beautiful, icy ringed world in the outer reaches of our solar system. It is among the coldest of all the planets. It is also tilted on its side compared to all the other worlds – as if it had been knocked over – making it arguably the weirdest.

Continue reading “New research prompts rethink on chances of life on Uranus moons” »

Matuskey, D., Yang, Y., Naganawa, M. et al. ¹¹ C-UCB-J PET imaging is consistent with lower synaptic density in autistic adults. Mol Psychiatry (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02776-2

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Generating water from thin air can solve water woes for remote communities and arid regions but the technology is too expensive for them to afford it.

Solar-driven atmospheric water extraction (SAWE) systems have the potential to address the ongoing freshwater scarcity, but they can only produce water intermittently. Here the authors developed a SAWE system with optimised architecture to achieve continuous freshwater production under sunlight.

Large-scale protein and gene profiling have massively expanded the landscape of cancer-associated proteins and gene mutations, but it has been difficult to discern whether they play an active role in the disease or are innocent bystanders.

In a study published in Nature Cancer, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine revealed a powerful and unbiased machine learning-based approach called FunMap for assessing the role of cancer-associated mutations and understudied proteins, with broad implications for advancing cancer biology and informing therapeutic strategies.

“Gaining functional information on the genes and proteins associated with cancer is an important step toward better understanding the disease and identifying potential therapeutic targets,” said corresponding author Dr. Bing Zhang, professor of molecular and human genetics and part of the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center at Baylor.

The newly found ORC, designated ORC J0219–0505, was discovered in data from the MIGHTEE survey conducted by the MeerKAT radio telescope located in the Meerkat National Park in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The 371,600 light-year-wide ORC seems to be associated with the elliptical galaxy WISEA J021912.43–050501.8. It has features that seem to set it apart from other ORCs, including the fact that it appears fainter and that details of its structure reveal it leans to one side.

“Odd Radio Circles: Circles of radio emission found around distant galaxies that we still don’t understand,” lead researcher and Western Sydney University astronomer Ray Norris told Space.com. “It’s a completely unexpected discovery, not predicted by the physics we already know, and therefore revealing a gap in our knowledge.

So we hope these will tell us something new about how galaxies form and interact.

Cells in the immune system don’t always fight; they often rest and wait for threats, like viruses or bacteria. When such threats emerge, the cells activate to defend the body. This delicate balance between rest and activation is crucial to our health—immune cells must be poised for activation to protect against threats, but if they’re overly active, autoimmune diseases can result.

But what controls this important balance?

In a new study published in Nature, scientists from Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF) focused on T cells—which serve a vital role in the immune system—and pinpointed how a network of different proteins controls rest and activation.

The arrival of Paxlovid in December 2021 marked another turning point in the COVID-19 pandemic—an effective antiviral that has since successfully treated millions. But like many antivirals before it, scientists know that at some point, Paxlovid is likely to lose some efficacy due to drug resistance. Researchers working to stay ahead of such emerging threats have now identified a wholly new way to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections—work that may have even broader implications.

In fact, a new study by the Tuschl laboratory introduces a proof-of-concept for a novel class of antivirals that would target a type of enzyme essential not just to SARS, but also many RNA viruses, including Ebola and dengue, as well as cytosolic-replicating DNA viruses, including Pox viruses. The findings may pave the way for a faster and more robust response to future pandemics.

“Nobody has found a way to inhibit this enzyme before,” says Thomas Tuschl, the F. M. Al Akl and Margaret Al Akl professor at Rockefeller. “Our work establishes cap methyl transferase enzymes as therapeutic targets and opens the door to many more antiviral developments against pathogens that until now we’ve had only limited tools to fight.”