Lessons from COVID vaccine development and approval can aid the process.
According to Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the founders of the German company BioNTech, mRNA vaccines that can help target cancer could be ready for use before the end of this decade, The Guardian.
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BioNTech’s big pivot.
A team of researchers at Northwestern University has devised a new platform for gene editing that could inform the future application of a near-limitless library of CRISPR-based therapeutics.
Using chemical design and synthesis, the team brought together the Nobel-prize winning technology with therapeutic technology born in their own lab to overcome a critical limitation of CRISPR. Specifically, the groundbreaking work provides a system to deliver the cargo required for generating the gene editing machine known as CRISPR-Cas9. The team developed a way to transform the Cas-9 protein into a spherical nucleic acid (SNA) and load it with critical components as required to access a broad range of tissue and cell types, as well as the intracellular compartments required for gene editing.
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This is not a knock on caffeine by any means. There’s a reason people have been consuming it for thousands of years. It works by blocking the neurotransmitters in the brain that produce drowsiness. This keeps your neurons firing at full speed, which makes you feel awake. And studies show it is very effective at boosting mood. But what if you could do more for your brain than simply tricking it into being awake? What if you could give your brain nutrients that help it work better all the time? Well, with a well-designed nootropics supplement, you can.
Nootropics are often marketed as “smart drugs,” which gives the impression that they’re going to boost your IQ and turn you into a rocket scientist or brain surgeon. But that is not actually the case. Nootropics are simply chemical compounds that help create the biological conditions necessary for optimal brain function. They include things like amino acids, vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and even stimulants such as caffeine. Some of these compounds serve as fuel for cognition. Others modulate various processes involved in neurotransmission.
Fellow webinar participant Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, argued that gene-hacking astronauts could even be a moral imperative.
“And are we maybe ethically bound to do so?” Mason said. “I think if it’s a long enough mission, you might have to do something, assuming it’s safe, which we can’t say yet.”
Short cycles of a low-calorie diet that mimics fasting appeared to lower inflammation and delay cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s disease is a disease that attacks the brain, causing a decline in mental ability that worsens over time. It is the most common form of dementia and accounts for 60 to 80 percent of dementia cases. There is no current cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but there are medications that can help ease the symptoms.
Self-organizing lumps of human brain tissue grown in the laboratory have been successfully transplanted into the nervous systems of newborn rats in a step towards finding new ways to treat neuropsychiatric disorders.
The 3D organoids, developed from stem cells to resemble a simplified model of the human cortex, connected and integrated with the surrounding tissue in each rat’s cortex to form a functional part of the rodent’s own brain, displaying activity related to sensory perception.
This, according to a team of researchers led by neuroscientist Sergiu Pașca of Stanford University, overcomes the limitations of dish-grown organoids, and gives us a new platform for modeling human brain development and disease in a living system.
Cancer has the terrifying ability to spread from any part of the body to another – and it’s part of what has always made these debilitating diseases so deadly. This process, known as metastasis, has always baffled scientists. Now, though, a new study may have pointed researchers in the right direction to help them understand how cancer spreads, which could also lead to new treatment options in the future.
From a platypus to a blue whale, all living mammals today are descended from a common ancestor that existed some 180 million years ago. Although we don’t know a lot about this animal, a global team of experts has recently computationally reconstructed the organization of its genome. The findings were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Our results have important implications for understanding the evolution of mammals and for conservation efforts,” said Harris Lewin, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, and senior author on the paper.
The researchers used high-quality genome sequences from 32 living species, spanning 23 of the 26 known mammalian orders. Humans and chimpanzees were among these species, as were wombats and rabbits, manatees, domestic cattle, rhinos, bats, and pangolins. The chicken and Chinese alligator genomes were also used as comparison groups in the analysis. Some of these genomes are being produced as part of the Earth BioGenome Project and other large-scale biodiversity genome sequencing initiatives. Lewin is the chair of the Earth BioGenome Project’s Working Group.
A new technology that incorporates flexible fiber sensors into shoes has been developed by the National Nanotechnology Research Center (UNAM) at Bilkent University and is able to identify a number of health issues, including Parkinson’s disease and gait disorders.
Project manager Mustafa Ordu, who specialized in the production and characterization of fiber cables that can generate electricity for wearable devices, explained that the technology developed at UNAM is loaded with smart sensors that can monitor body movements and determine issues and diseases, with the potential to diagnose many health problems.
Further explaining the cutting-edge technology, he said that it can be woven into body wear or incorporated into footwear since by knitting these cables together like a type of threaded fabric, they can be incorporated into clothing as fibers. “This is what makes our team stand out among the existing laboratories in the world; we make smart sensors with flexible fiber and two-dimensional materials,” said Ordu.
New research in mice illuminates how pain neurons shield the gut from damage.
Pain is one of evolution’s most effective mechanisms for detecting injury and letting us know that something is wrong. It acts as a warning system, telling us to stop and pay attention to our body.
But what if pain is more than just a mere alarm signal? What if pain is in itself a form of protection?