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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,159

Tiny Robots Detect and Treat Cancer by Traveling Deep into the Lungs

A tiny robot which can travel deep into the lungs to detect and treat the first signs of cancer has been developed by researchers at the University of Leeds. The ultra-soft tentacle, which measures just two millimeters in diameter, and is controlled by magnets, can reach some of the smallest bronchial tubes and could transform the treatment of lung cancer. The researchers tested the magnetic tentacle robot on the lungs of a cadaver and found that it can travel 37 percent deeper than the standard equipment and leads to less tissue damage. It paves the way for a more accurate, tailored, and far less invasive approach to treatment.

The work is published in Nature Engineering Communications in the paper, “Magnetic personalized tentacles for targeted photothermal cancer therapy in peripheral lungs.”

“This new approach has the advantage of being specific to the anatomy, softer than the anatomy and fully-shape controllable via magnetics,” notes Pietro Valdastri, PhD, director of the Science and Technologies Of Robotics in Medicine (STORM) Lab at the University of Leeds. “These three main features have the potential to revolutionize navigation inside the body.”

Stanford Medicine researchers take part in HuBMAP, showing what healthy human tissue looks like

More often than not, studies of human biology are conducted when the body is under duress from infection or disease. Now, as part of a larger effort to delineate what “healthy” looks like, two Stanford Medicine teams have unfurled detailed molecular maps of healthy human intestinal and placental tissues. The maps, which capture cell types, cell quantity and other cellular nuances, are just two of a collection of maps that will establish a cellular baseline for the majority of the human body, including where cells in certain tissues congregate, how tissues develop during pregnancy and how cell-to-cell interactions drive human biology.

The studies, which published in Nature on July 19, are part of a larger effort spearheaded by the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program — called HuBMAP — funded by the National Institutes of Health. It aims to fill gaps in our knowledge of how the human body works when it’s in tip-top shape. Dozens of teams from the United States and Europe contribute to the HuBMAP consortium.

“In research, we have a habit of studying things that are abnormal without really understanding what normal looks like,” said Michael Angelo, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pathology who is also the co-chair of the HuBMAP steering committee. “That’s created a big gap in our knowledge. HuBMAP is the only effort that is systematically focusing on the spatial architecture of these tissues.”

Simple Brain Hack Could Boost Learning and Improve Mental Health

Adopting a curious mindset over a high-pressure one can enhance memory, according to recent research from Duke University. The study showed that participants who envisioned themselves as a thief planning a heist in a virtual art museum demonstrated better recall of the paintings they encountered than those who imagined executing the heist on the spot while playing the same computer game.

The slight variation in motivations — the urgent need to achieve immediate goals versus the curious exploration for future objectives — could have significant implications in real-life scenarios. These include incentivizing people to receive a vaccine, prompting action against climate change, and potentially providing new treatments for psychiatric conditions.

The findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Boning Up on the Unique Genetics of the Human Skeletal System

Humans have a distinctive skeleton, and are the only bipedal great apes (the great ape species are bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans). While the evolution of the human skeleton enabled us to walk upright, it also led to the rise of musculoskeletal disease. It’s thought that cognitive development began to accelerate in humans once we started to move around, adapt to new environments, and make use of tools. Researchers have now used advanced computational tools and a trove of human genetic data in the UK Biobank to outline the genetic changes that occurred as primates started to walk upright for the first time.

These findings, which were reported in Science, have suggested that natural selection had a strong influence on the genetic changes that altered our anatomy, and gave early humans an evolutionary leg up.

Study explains link to increased cardiovascular risks for people with obstructive sleep apnea

Researchers have found that people with obstructive sleep apnea have an increased cardiovascular risk due to reduced blood oxygen levels, largely explained by interrupted breathing. Obstructive sleep apnea has long been associated with increased risk of cardiovascular issues, including heart attack, stroke, and death, but the findings from this study, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, show the mechanism mostly responsible for the link.

“These findings will help better characterize high-risk versions of obstructive ,” said Ali Azarbarzin, Ph.D., a study author and director of the Sleep Apnea Health Outcomes Research Group at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston. “We think that including a higher-risk version of obstructive sleep apnea in a would hopefully show that treating sleep apnea could help prevent future cardiovascular outcomes.”

Researchers reviewed data from more than 4,500 middle-aged and older adults who participated in the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS) and the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), and sought to identify features of obstructive sleep apnea that could explain why some people were more likely than others to develop cardiovascular disease or related death.

Brain single-cell study reveals genes that may be involved in post-traumatic stress and major depressive disorders

An international team led by investigators at McLean Hospital has analyzed the genes expressed in approximately 575,000 individual cells from the brains of people with and without post-traumatic stress and major depressive disorders (PTSD and MDD), revealing new insights into the mechanisms behind the brain’s stress response in these conditions.

The findings, which are published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, could lead to novel markers of PTSD and MDD and well as new therapeutic targets.

Because studies have implicated the (DLPFC) region of the brain in PTSD and MDD, the scientists compared the expressed in cells in DLPFC samples collected postmortem from 11 individuals with PTSD, 10 with MDD, and 11 without either of these conditions with a replication dataset half the size. The researchers detected which genes were expressed by which cells—including eight different types of cells—through a technique called single-cell RNA sequencing.

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