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Category: biotech/medical

How an HIV/AIDS tragedy spurred human evolution

Researchers show that a type of AI known as a large language model often outperformed physicians at diagnosing complex and potentially life-threatening conditions, including decreased blood flow to the heart, even in the fast-moving stages of real ER care when information is limited.

In early ER cases, the model identified the correct or a very close diagnosis in about 67% of cases, compared with roughly 50% to 55% for physicians. And the technology is only getting better.

Before antiretroviral (ARV) drugs started to become widely available in KwaZulu-Natal in 2005, there was “kind of the perfect storm,” with several unusual factors coalescing to drive a devastating epidemic, says Philip Goulder, an immunologist at the University of Oxford who led the study, which appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. HIV had made few inroads into South Africa until the early 1990s, when an epidemic exploded in the heterosexual population, infecting about 40% of pregnant women in KwaZulu-Natal. (That astonishingly high prevalence persists today.) Because of a mix of genetics, limited health care, and possibly the viral subtype in circulation, infected people developed AIDS—when the destruction of the immune system threatens survival—exceptionally quickly, within about 4.5 years versus 10 years in North America.

Other studies have shown how infectious diseases, including malaria and tuberculosis, have altered the human genome. But those changes took thousands of years. “That’s what is quite exciting about this: You can see how rapidly evolution actually can occur,” Goulder says.

Similar evolutionary forces may have been at work in North America and Europe, but they are more difficult to see—and less likely to affect future generations. HIV prevalence in those regions is below 1%, and the hardest-hit group is men who have sex with men. “They are generally not a population that’s leaving behind as many offspring,” Worobey notes.

Neutrophils manufacture schizophrenia-linked protein, according to new research

The most common white blood cells in your body—immune cells called neutrophils—can make a protein nobody knew they were making, Stanford Medicine investigators have discovered. That unexpected sighting joins a growing list of hints tying schizophrenia, a disorder of the brain, to events occurring elsewhere in our bodies. The findings are summarized in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The newly noticed neutrophil nexus, as a source of the protein called C4A, links a long list of other observations that are somewhat puzzling when looked at in isolation: For example, large-scale population-genetic studies have identified C4A, already known to be produced mainly in the liver, as a pronounced risk factor in schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia tend to have increased numbers of neutrophils in their blood. And the most effective medication for schizophrenia inhibits neutrophils.

Schizophrenia affects one in every 100 persons globally almost without variation by geography or ethnicity. Its most noticeable symptoms are hallucinations, delusions and fixations. A fundamental feature of the disease is cognitive impairment: inability to think clearly, reduced working memory, disorganized thinking and behavior.

SIRT6 protein could protect against age-related breakdown in chromatin, possibly help reverse aging

Researchers at Bar-Ilan University have successfully restored youthful patterns of DNA organization in the livers of old mice, reversing key molecular features associated with aging. The study, published in Nature Communications, identifies the protein SIRT6 as a powerful protector against age-related breakdown in chromatin, the complex system that packages DNA and controls how genes are switched on and off.

The findings suggest that aging is not simply a passive process of wear and tear, but may be driven in part by reversible changes in the way DNA is organized inside cells.

DNA inside cells is tightly folded and packaged into chromatin, a structure that acts like a biological control system for gene activity. Using advanced tools to study DNA organization and gene activity, the researchers examined multiple molecular changes in the livers of young and old mice. What they discovered was dramatic: aging disrupts chromatin architecture in the liver, causing inflammatory pathways to become overactive while weakening the metabolic programs that define healthy liver tissue.

Chemists use sea sponge bacteria to create new molecules for drug discovery

Florida State University chemists have synthesized new molecules derived from bacteria found in a Pacific Ocean sea sponge, a breakthrough for the future of drug development, particularly for rare forms of cancer.

“Around 50% of approved drugs are either natural products or derivatives of natural products,” said Zackary Firestone, a fourth-year doctoral student in FSU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the study’s lead author. “Synthetic access to these molecules is important because it allows for easier procurement for biological testing as well as the making of new derivatives.”

The research team is the first to successfully synthesize two new marine natural products: tetradehydrohalicyclamine B and epi-tetradehydrohalicyclamine B. Both were isolated from bacteria that lives in symbiosis with Acanthostrongylophora ingens, a Pacific-dwelling sea sponge.

Migrating charges unlock hard-to-reach C-H bond edits in organic molecules

A team at the University of Vienna, led by chemist Nuno Maulide, has developed a new method for controlling chemical reactions in a more targeted and efficient manner. At the heart of this is the concept of “cation sampling”: specially selected groups (ketones), in a sense, function as molecular signposts for randomly migrating positive charges, enabling reactions to take place at sites on a molecule that were previously difficult to access. The method allows carbon-hydrogen bonds (C–H bonds) to be specifically modified. The study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Organic molecules form the basis of almost all biological processes. They consist mainly of carbon and hydrogen—and hydrogen atoms in particular are very common in such molecules. “If you want to alter the properties of a molecule, you often have to specifically replace individual hydrogen atoms,” explains Philipp Spieß, a former Ph.D. student in the Maulide group and one of the study’s lead authors.

The precise modification of C–H bonds is therefore considered one of the key challenges of modern synthetic chemistry. It plays an important role in the development of new drugs, functional materials and more efficient chemical processes.

Quantum-centric supercomputing simulates 12,635-atom protein

The scale of chemistry simulations with quantum computing has increased dramatically in just the last few months. In the latest milestone for the field, researchers from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM used a quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework to calculate the electronic structure of a pair of large protein-ligand complexes, reaching a scale of 12,635 atoms in the largest simulation.

The molecules were T4-Lysozyme, a protein from a family of proteins involved in the immune system degradation of peptidoglycans in bacterial membranes, and Trypsin, produced in the pancreas and used in digestion. The team simulated these proteins binding to molecules they interact with in nature and immersed in a liquid water solution, at scales of 11,608 atoms and 12,635 atoms respectively. Bringing together an international team of researchers from across the United States and Japan made it possible to develop the necessary algorithm and workflow enhancements to reach this milestone.

The researchers achieved this scale just four months after modeling the 303-atom miniprotein Trp-cage using quantum computing for the first time. Today’s new result not only demonstrates a 40-fold increase in system size compared to the Trp-cage result, it represents a 210-times improvement in accuracy from previous state-of-the-art QCSC approaches in a specific step of the workflow.

Your Eyes Could Reveal Your Risk of Osteoporosis, Study Finds

The eyes are a window into our deeper health.

As the only outward extension of the central nervous system, these sensory organs may reflect not only the state of our brain and blood vessels, but also our very bones.

Population studies in Singapore and the UK have now revealed that a person’s risk of osteoporosis may be associated with how quickly their eyes are aging.

Brain ‘Zaps’ From Contact Lenses May Help Ease Depression, Mouse Study Shows

Scientists in South Korea have developed experimental contact lenses designed to send electrical signals through the retina and into brain regions linked to mood. In mice, the technology appeared to improve depression-like behaviour.

The idea sounds futuristic: a contact lens that could one day help treat depression by stimulating the brain through the eye. The work is still at a very early stage, with findings so far limited to a single mouse study.

The eye is already one of the body’s most useful access points for medical technology.

Isomorphic Labs announces Series B investment round

Isomorphic Labs announces it has raised $2.1 Billion in Series B funding. The financing round is led by Thrive Capital, and includes participation from existing backers Alphabet and GV alongside new investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, significantly expanding Isomorphic Labs’ global capital base.

Isomorphic Labs was founded with the ambition to leverage the power of AI to reimagine and accelerate drug discovery to bring much-needed treatments to millions of patients globally. The company aims to apply its pioneering AI drug design engine (IsoDDE) to deliver biomedical breakthroughs and is advancing drug design programs across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities.

Read more in the news release below.

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