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Category: biotech/medical

Live-cell tracking reveals dynamic interaction between protein folding helpers and newly produced proteins

Proteins are the molecular machines of cells. They are produced in protein factories called ribosomes based on their blueprint—the genetic information. Here, the basic building blocks of proteins, amino acids, are assembled into long protein chains. Like the building blocks of a machine, individual proteins must have a specific three-dimensional structure to properly fulfill their functions.

To achieve this, the newly produced protein chains in human cells are folded into their stable and functional form with the help of various protein folding helper proteins, known as chaperones, such as TRiC/PFD, or HSP70/40. The protein folding helpers isolate the amino acid chains, which have different chemical properties depending on the amino acid, from the cellular environment. This prevents the newly produced protein chains from clumping together and causing disease.

F.-Ulrich Hartl, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, has spent decades studying the mechanisms of protein folding. Niko Dalheimer, a scientist in Hartl’s department and one of the two lead authors of a new study published in Nature, explains: Much of what we know about protein folding has been learned from studies conducted in test tubes. However, it is virtually impossible to faithfully replicate the cellular environment in vitro.

Faster enzyme screening could cut biocatalysis bottlenecks in drug development

A team of biochemists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed a faster way to identify molecules in the lab that could lead to more effective pharmaceuticals. The discovery advances the rapidly growing field of biocatalysis, which depends on generating large, genetically diverse libraries of enzymes, and then screening those variants to find ones that perform a desired chemical task best.

This strategy has attracted major investment, particularly from drugmakers, because it promises quicker routes to complex, high-value molecules. However, traditional approaches to finding new biologically beneficial molecules often require “lots of shots on goal,” where researchers test enormous numbers of candidates through slow and inefficient workflows.

The method developed by the UC Santa Cruz team aims to significantly shorten that process by introducing smarter and faster decision-making tools that help researchers identify promising enzyme variants much earlier. The researchers detail their new approach in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

CRISPR screen maps 250 genes essential for human muscle fiber formation

Muscles make up nearly 40% of the human body and power every move we make, from a child’s first steps to recovery after injury. For some, however, muscle development goes awry, leading to weakness, delayed motor milestones or lifelong disabilities. New research from the University of Georgia is shedding light on why.

UGA researchers have created a first-of-its-kind CRISPR screening platform for human muscle cells, identifying hundreds of genes critical to skeletal muscle formation and uncovering the potential cause of a rare genetic disorder. The findings come from two companion papers published in Nature Communications, one describing the large-scale screen and a second digging into a particular gene’s role in muscle development.

Together, the studies provide a comprehensive genetic map of how human muscle fibers are built and lend insights into the effects of genetic mutations on developmental muscle defects. By linking specific genes to the muscle-building process, this genetic roadmap gives clinicians a practical shortlist to more quickly pinpoint the likely genetic causes of a patient’s muscle-development disorder. It also provides researchers with clear targets to prioritize future drug or gene therapy approaches.

Surgery for quantum bits: Bit-flip errors corrected during superconducting qubit operations

Quantum computers hold great promise for exciting applications in the future, but for now they keep presenting physicists and engineers with a series of challenges and conundrums. One of them relates to decoherence and the errors that result from it: bit flips and phase flips. Such errors mean that the logical unit of a quantum computer, the qubit, can suddenly and unpredictably change its state from “0” to “1,” or that the relative phase of a superposition state can jump from positive to negative.

These errors can be held at bay by building a logical qubit out of many physical qubits and constantly applying error correction protocols. This approach takes care of storing the quantum information relatively safely over time. However, at some point it becomes necessary to exit storage mode and do something useful with the qubit—like applying a quantum gate, which is the building block of quantum algorithms.

The research group led by D-PHYS Professor Andreas Wallraff, in collaboration with the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and the theory team of Professor Markus Müller at RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, has now demonstrated a technique that makes it possible to perform a quantum operation between superconducting logical qubits while correcting for potential errors occurring during the operation. The researchers have just published their results in Nature Physics.

Next-generation immune profiling — beyond blood cancer cells

Why immunoscores work in solid tumors—but not yet in blood cancers👇

✅In solid tumors, immune profiling has reached a high level of standardization. Clear tumor boundaries allow quantification of immune cell infiltration, particularly CD3⁺ and CD8⁺ T cells, using immunohistochemistry. This has led to the development of validated immunoscores that stratify tumors as “hot,” “cold,” or “very cold,” providing robust prognostic and predictive value for immunotherapy response.

✅These immunoscores work because solid tumors are spatially organized. Immune cells can be classified as infiltrating or excluded, and their density within defined tumor regions directly correlates with clinical outcome. As a result, immune cell infiltration has become a reliable biomarker to guide treatment decisions in cancers such as colon carcinoma.

✅In contrast, hematologic malignancies lack these defining features. Leukemias and lymphomas are systemic diseases without clear tumor borders, making spatial immune assessment fundamentally challenging. Malignant and nonmalignant immune cells coexist within the same compartments, blurring the distinction between tumor cells and the immune microenvironment.

✅Current immune profiling in hematologic cancers relies on baseline physiological levels of circulating or tissue-resident immune cells, including monocytes, neutrophils, T cells, NK cells, and B cells. While techniques such as flow cytometry, histology, and bulk or single-cell RNA sequencing provide rich datasets, they do not yet translate into a unified, clinically actionable immune score.

✅This lack of standardization creates uncertainty in predicting immunotherapy responses. Metrics such as inflammation, cytotoxicity, or immune infiltration are difficult to interpret consistently across patients and disease subtypes, especially given systemic involvement and tissue-specific immune contexts.

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A peripheral glial niche orchestrates the early stages of skin wound healing

Tissue repair involves extensive communication between the different cellular components of the skin. Among them, nerve innervation is critical for a successful repair process.12,13,14,55 However, only in recent years has the pro-reparative contribution of peripheral glial cells been acknowledged.56,57 For instance, peripheral glia support progenitor cell proliferation by secreting growth factors such as newt anterior gradient protein in the amphibian blastema58 and oncostatin M (OSM) and PDGFα in the digit tip blastema.49 Previous work from our group and others has shown that peripheral glial cells promote skin repair, as depletion of these cells decreased dermal and epidermal cell proliferation,49 reduced myofibroblast numbers,18 and, ultimately, impaired skin wound healing.

Here, we found that peripheral glial cells, primarily residing in NBs, constitute a pro-reparative niche, enriched in inflammatory cells, fibroblasts, and high cell proliferation, essential for the healing process of acute skin wounds. Pro-reparative niches have previously been described in the skin epithelium and in the skeletal muscle, where local stem cell microenvironments support tissue homeostasis.59 In addition, non-myelinating glial cells were shown to be part of a stem cell niche sustaining hemopoietic stem cell dormancy by secreting TGF-β.60 Moreover, enteric glial cells were recently identified to regulate intestinal stem cell turnover by secreting wingless int-1 (WNTs) and were shown to envelop the intestinal stem cells by forming a web-like structure around the intestinal crypts.61,62 This close association of the enteric glia cells and the intestinal crypt also points toward the formation of a spatially organized niche critical for intestine homeostasis.

The Scientist Behind Moderna on How Engineering Revolutionizes Medicine

What does it take to turn bold ideas into life-saving medicine?

In this episode of The Big Question, we sit down with @MIT’s Dr. Robert Langer, one of the founding figures of bioengineering and among the most cited scientists in the world, to explore how engineering has reshaped modern healthcare. From early failures and rejected grants to breakthroughs that changed medicine, Langer reflects on a career built around persistence and problem-solving. His work helped lay the foundation for technologies that deliver large biological molecules, like proteins and RNA, into the body, a challenge once thought impossible. Those advances now underpin everything from targeted cancer therapies to the mRNA vaccines that transformed the COVID-19 response.

The conversation looks forward as well as back, diving into the future of medicine through engineered solutions such as artificial skin for burn victims, FDA-approved synthetic blood vessels, and organs-on-chips that mimic human biology to speed up drug testing while reducing reliance on animal models. Langer explains how nanoparticles safely carry genetic instructions into cells, how mRNA vaccines train the immune system without altering DNA, and why engineering delivery, getting the right treatment to the right place in the body, remains one of medicine’s biggest challenges. From personalized cancer vaccines to tissue engineering and rapid drug development, this episode reveals how science, persistence, and engineering come together to push the boundaries of what medicine can do next.

#Science #Medicine #Biotech #Health #LifeSciences.

Chapters:
00:00 Engineering the Future of Medicine.
01:55 Failure, Persistence, and Scientific Breakthroughs.
05:30 From Chemical Engineering to Patient Care.
08:40 Solving the Drug Delivery Problem.
11:20 Delivering Proteins, RNA, and DNA
14:10 The Origins of mRNA Technology.
17:30 How mRNA Vaccines Work.
20:40 Speed and Scale in Vaccine Development.
23:30 What mRNA Makes Possible Next.
26:10 Trust, Misinformation, and Vaccine Science.
28:50 Engineering Tissues and Organs.
31:20 Artificial Skin and Synthetic Blood Vessels.
33:40 Organs on Chips and Drug Testing.
36:10 Why Science Always Moves Forward.

The Big Question with the Museum of Science:

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Lung cancer hijacks the brain to trick the immune system

For years, scientists have viewed cancer as a localized glitch in which cells refuse to stop dividing. But a new study suggests that, in certain organs, tumors actively communicate with the brain to trick it into protecting them.

Scientists have long known that nerves grow into some tumors and that tumors containing lots of nerves usually lead to a worse prognosis. But they didn’t know exactly why. “Prior to our study, most of the focus has been this local interaction between the nerve [endings] and the tumor,” says Chengcheng Jin, an assistant professor of cancer biology at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the study, which was published on Wednesday in Nature.

Jin and her colleagues discovered that lung cancer tumors in mice can use these nerve endings to communicate way beyond their close vicinity and send signals to the brain through a complex neuroimmune circuit. They also confirmed the circuit exists in humans.

✍️: Jacek Krywko 📸: BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Lung cancer tumor cells in mice communicate with the brain, sending signals to deactivate the body’s immune response, a study finds.

By Jacek Krywko edited by Tanya Lewis.

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4D-printed vascular stent deploys at body temperature, eliminating external heating

Next-generation vascular stents can make cardiovascular therapies minimally invasive and vascular treatments safe and less burdensome. In a new advancement, researchers from Japan and China have successfully proposed a novel adaptive 4D-printed vascular stent based on shape-memory polymer composite. The stent exhibits mechanical flexibility, radial strength, biomechanical compliance, and cytocompatibility in in vitro and in vivo experiments, making them promising for future clinical applications.

Cardiovascular diseases constitute a major global health concern. Various complications that affect normal blood flow in arteries and veins, such as stroke, blood clot formation in veins, blood vessel rupture, and coronary artery disease, often require vascular treatments. However, existing vascular stent devices often require complex, invasive deployment procedures, making it necessary to explore novel materials and manufacturing technologies that could enable such medical devices to work more naturally with the human body.

Moreover, the development of patient-specific, adaptively deployable vascular stents is crucial to further advance minimally invasive cardiovascular therapies and make vascular treatments safe and less burdensome for both patients and health care providers.

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