Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can be used to generate brain organoids containing an eye structure called the optic cup, according to a study published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
“So many genes are involved in DNA maintenance, FOXO3 for example, which is very interesting, but it cannot be a therapeutic target because it will trigger a lot of other things,” he explains. “SIRT6 is coding for only one protein and, because it’s a small protein, the cargo size is not too big and it can be easily delivered into cells, so it’s possible to use it as a gene therapy target.”
Some of the other factors that play in Genflow’s favour, says Leire, are that the world has reached a better understanding of the biology of aging, but also that gene therapy has also progressed well over the years.
It seems everyday more and more information is being uncovered about trees and the many mysteries within them. We know that they are alive, but it seems they are even more alive than we may have thought. Trees are interconnected underground, we also now know that trees can communicate with one another, but recently scientists have discovered that trees actually have a sort of heartbeat, it is just so slow that they’ve never noticed before.
Up until recently scientists had thought that water moved through trees by the process of osmosis, in a sort of continuous matter, but now they’ve discovered that the trunks and branches of the trees are actually contracting and expanding and essentially pumping water up from the roots to the leaves, kind of like how our heart pumps blood throughout our bodies.
Continue reading “Scientists Discover That Trees Have A ‘Heartbeat’ Too” »
But one idea that hasn’t gotten enough attention from the AI community is how the brain creates itself, argues Peter Robin Hiesinger, Professor of Neurobiology at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin).
In his book The Self-Assembling Brain, Hiesinger suggests that instead of looking at the brain from an endpoint perspective, we should study how information encoded in the genome is transformed to become the brain as we grow. This line of study might help discover new ideas and directions of research for the AI community.
Continue reading “What AI researchers can learn from the self-assembling brain” »
New gene therapy in trials for Danon disease.
“The only available treatment option for Danon disease is a heart transplant. Currently, there are no specific therapies available for the treatment of Danon disease.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lifted the clinical hold it placed on Rocket Pharmaceuticals’ experimental gene therapy for Danon disease. Patient enrollment in the Phase I study will resume, the company announced this morning.
Continue reading “Rocket Relaunches Gene Therapy Program as FDA Lifts Clinical Hold” »
Summary: In order to understand life’s full range of forms, new theoretical frameworks must be developed, researchers say.
Source: Santa Fe Institute.
The history of life on Earth has often been likened to a four-billion-year-old torch relay. One flame, lit at the beginning of the chain, continues to pass on life in the same form all the way down. But what if life is better understood on the analogy of the eye, a convergent organ that evolved from independent origins? What if life evolved not just once, but multiple times independently?
By Susan Ip-Jewell## **Space Medicine, Health and MedTech Innovations, a lecture by Susan Ip-Jewell**
In the frame of the new Space Renaissance Academy Webinar Series programme, chaired by the optimum Sabine Heinz, a quite interesting and rich lecture was given yesterday by Dr. Susan Ip Jewell.
Continue reading “Space Medicine, Health and MedTech Innovations, a lecture” »
Quick vid and a reminder of the 4th conference of Lifespan.io is this weekend.
Gene editing can make stem cells invisible to the immune system, making it possible to carry out cell therapy transplants without suppressing the patients’ immune response. Scientists in the US and Germany used immune engineering to develop universal cell products that could be used in all transplant patients. The idea is to create stem cells that evade the immune system; these hypoimmune stem cells are then used to generate cells of the desired type that can be transplanted into any patient without the need for immunosuppression, since the cells won’t elicit an immune response. They used CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out two genes involved in the major histocompatibility complex, which is used for self/non-self discrimination. They also increased the expression of a protein that acts as a “don’t eat me” signal to protect cells from macrophages. Together, these changes made the stem cells look less foreign and avoid clearance by macrophages. The team then differentiated endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes from the engineered stem cells, and they used these to treat three different diseases in mice. Cell therapy treatments using the hypoimmune cells were effective in rescuing hindlimbs from vascular blockage, preventing lung damage in an engineered mouse model, and maintaining heart function following a myocardial infarction. Immunosuppression poses obvious risks to a patient, and generating custom cells for transplant therapy is often prohibitively expensive. The development of universal donor cells that can be used as therapeutics could bring the cost down significantly, making cellular therapeutics available to many more patients in a much safer way.
The material properties of these protein droplets are important because they play pivotal roles in neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The basic idea is that liquid droplets of certain proteins can change to clogs, or aggregates of molecules, which are hallmarks of these diseases.
Summary: Researchers have developed a new technique to quantify protein droplets associated with a range of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS.
Source: Rutgers University
Continue reading “A New Way to Study Neurodegenerative Diseases” »
What’s confusing is that some of the modifications we’re now considering could have been achieved years ago through traditional methods, so our views depend on what we think about the safety of new editing technologies, but also how desperate we are to address environmental degradation.
A process that began centuries ago with selective breeding has developed into genetic modification. We explore the consequences of these controversial tools.
