A revolutionary 60-minute therapy for high blood pressure could allow patients to throw their tablets away for good.
The unlikely remedy involves blasting nerves in the kidneys with sound waves to stop them sending signals to the brain that drive up blood pressure.
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More drugmakers are betting gene therapies will have a big impact on patients and profits, with Pfizer Inc. last month agreeing to collaborate with Paris-based Vivet Therapeutics on a treatment for a rare liver disorder. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration forecasts as many as 20 cell- and gene-therapy approvals each year by 2025. Doubts remain about whether the treatments will sustain their dramatic results, making it difficult to determine their value.
Dozens of revolutionary gene therapies that mend faulty strands of DNA are on their way, bringing the power to eliminate lethal childhood diseases, rare blood disorders and other severe illnesses.
Beneath the excitement about these potential cures lies an important catch: no one knows how much to charge for them.
Continue reading “Gene Therapy Was Hailed as a Revolution. Then Came the Bill” »
A resupply mission for the International Space Station, Progress MS-11, took off yesterday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, eventually docking with the space station and providing its inhabitants with over 5,400 pounds of supplies. In many ways it was exactly like the countless resupply missions carried out before it, but in one way it was very special.
The mission, which was carried out by Russian space agency Roscosmos, took just three hours and 21 minutes to go from Earth to a successful docking with the ISS. That’s incredibly fast, and it’s actually now the fastest trip to the International Space Station ever, beating out the previous record (also set by a Progress resupply spacecraft) by a solid 19 minutes.
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The world, it seems, is soon to see the first picture of a black hole.
On Wednesday, astronomers across the globe will hold “six major press conferences” simultaneously to announce the first results of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which was designed precisely for that purpose.
It has been a long wait.
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Usually, this kind of surgery involves cutting and suturing, which is painful and leaves scars. Now, researchers at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the University of California, Irvine, have reshaped tissue with no incisions or scarring, and minimal recovery time.
It could be useful for cosmetic surgery – such as reshaping a nose or ear – but also for problems such as immobile joints and poor eyesight.
