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Category: biotech/medical

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) has recently become a buzzword in so many aspects of our lives, but it has been used to some degree in health care for a while. One area of health care where A.I. has made significant strides is the diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer.

“We are just at the tip of the iceberg of utilizing A.I. for prostate cancer,” says Dr. David D. Yang, a radiation oncologist with Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “So far, it has been shown to help improve the care for men with prostate cancer in limited, yet effective ways.”

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Dr Keith Siew, one of the study authors, says, “Nobody really likes talking about death, even cell death, which is perhaps why the physiology of death is so poorly understood. And in a way necrosis is death. If enough cells die, then tissues die, then we die. The question is what would happen if we could pause or stop necrosis.”

“Necrosis remains one of the last frontiers in medicine – a common thread across aging, disease, space biology, and scientific progress itself,” adds Dr Carina Kern, lead author of the study.

Necrosis occurs when cells are overwhelmed by injury, infection, or stress. The process floods cells with calcium, disrupting vital functions and causing the cell to rupture. This sudden collapse spills toxic molecules into surrounding tissue, triggering inflammation and accelerating damage.

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How sickle cell disease suppresses antitumor immunity.

Sickle cell disease (SCD) have a higher risk of developing certain cancers than the general population, but the mechanisms driving this increased risk remain unclear.

SCD inhibits CD8+ T cell function in the tumor microenvironment, potentially affecting cancer immunotherapy.

The researchers reveal that SCD alters the 3D genome architecture of CD8+ T cells, triggering ferroptosis and impairing antitumor response resulting in reduced expression of anti-ferroptotic genes, including SLC7A11 and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) biogenesis genes, thereby increasing susceptibility to ferroptosis.

They also demonstrate that hydrogen sulfide treatment rescued SLC7A11 expression, mitigated ferroptosis and enhanced immune and anti-tumor responses, thereby offering new avenues for precision immunotherapy in patients with inherited disorders. https://sciencemission.com/Sickle-cell-disease

Sickle cell disease (SCD) inhibits CD8+ T cell function in the tumor microenvironment, potentially affecting cancer immunotherapy. Zhao, Hu, Deng, et al. reveal that SCD alters the 3D genome architecture of CD8+ T cells, triggering ferroptosis and impairing anti-tumor responses, which can be reversed by hydrogen sulfide treatment, offering new avenues for precision immunotherapy in patients with inherited disorders.

Continue reading “Sickle cell disease induces chromatin introversion and ferroptosis in CD8+ T cells to suppress anti-tumor immunity” | >

A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry makes the case that symptom provocation may significantly improve the clinical effectiveness of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a noninvasive brain stimulation method used to treat depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and nicotine dependence.

The study was conceptualized, designed and supervised by Heather Burrell Ward, MD, assistant professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and director of Neuromodulation Research, in collaboration with Simon Vandekar, Ph.D., associate professor of Biostatistics and Daniel Bello and Megan Jones, two students in their respective labs.

This is the first large-scale meta-analysis to examine whether deliberately triggering symptoms immediately before administering rTMS enhances treatment outcomes.

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A team from Fudan University, the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Shaoxin Laboratory, all in China, has developed a retinal prosthesis woven from metal nanowires that partially restored vision in blind mice.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they created tellurium nanowires and interlaced them to create a . Eduardo Fernández, with University Miguel Hernández, in Spain, has published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team on this new effort.

Finding a way to cure blindness has been a major goal for scientists for many years, and such efforts have paid off for some types of blindness, such as those caused by cataracts. Other types of blindness associated with damage to the retina, however, have proven too difficult to overcome in most cases. For this research, the team in China tried a new approach to treating such types of blindness by building a mesh out of a semiconductor and affixing it to the back of the eye, where it could send signals to the .

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Plant DNA has become a frontier for artificial intelligence, with large language models turning genetic sequences into interpretable content for researchers. These tools treat bases like words, revealing hidden patterns that once eluded traditional methods.

A study published by Dr. Meiling Zou from Hainan University describes how language-based models interpret extensive plant genomes with remarkable precision.

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Not only can the drug metformin help to effectively manage type 2 diabetes, it may also give older women a better chance of living to the grand old age of 90, according to new research – thanks, it seems, to a variety of anti-aging effects.

The research used data from a long-term US study of postmenopausal women. Records on a total of 438 women were picked out – half who took metformin for their diabetes, and half who took a different diabetes drug, called sulfonylurea.

While there are a lot of caveats and asterisks to the study, those in the metformin group were calculated to have a 30 percent lower risk of dying before the age of 90 than those in the sulfonylurea group.

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Envision this possible future clinical scenario: a breast cancer patient and her physicians are deciding on the best possible treatment. Their decision is informed by a comprehensive molecular profile of the patient’s cancer samples that predicts the most likely response of the cancer to treatment.

If the profile predicts a high likelihood of a complete positive response and long-term freedom from relapse, then this treatment would be the preferred choice. But if the profile predicts that the tumor would likely be resistant to treatment, alternative treatments must be implemented.

Although this situation is not yet a reality, a team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard has taken significant steps in that direction. They report in Cell Reports Medicine that conducting an integrated proteogenomic profiling of cancer cells, which combines the analysis of DNA, RNA, protein and phosphoprotein data, revealed two novel indicators of tumor response to treatment and alternative therapeutic targets for treatment-resistant HER2+ .

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Critically ill patients with sepsis who are given statins may be more likely to survive, new research suggests.

Researchers set out to explore whether the cholesterol-busting drugs may bring additional benefits for patients.

The new study examined information on sepsis patients who received statins during a stint in intensive care and compared it with patients in a similar situation who did not receive statins.

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