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Summary: Since 2010, there has been an absolute rise in mortality for adults without a college degree. For those with higher education experience, mortality rates have decreased during the same time period.

Source: Princeton University.

Life expectancy in the United States dropped in 2020 due to COVID-19, but, for American adults without a college degree, the increase in mortality in adulthood occurred even earlier, according to a new study authored by Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton of Princeton University.

Doctors take a microscopic craft loaded with cancer-killing chemicals, inject it into the human body, and drive it to a malignant tumor to deliver its payload before making a quick exit. The plan is to move to clinical trials by 2023.

Chemotherapy and radiation can cause too much collateral damage to treat some brain tumors. Crumb-sized robots could be the solution.

Biotechnology companies and researchers are studying treatments that could help patients with spinal-cord injuries recover abilities to move and function that they have lost.

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Now scientists are hoping to use the knowledge about CRISPR systems to engineering phages to destroy dangerous bacteria.

As the world fights the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic, another group of dangerous pathogens looms in the background.

In the study, the researchers found that when AML cells were exposed to chemotherapy, a subset of the cells went into a state of hibernation, or senescence, while at the same time assuming a condition that looked very much like inflammation. They looked similar to cells that have undergone an injury and need to promote wound healing—shutting down the majority of their functions while recruiting immune cells to nurse them back to health.

Cancer cells can dodge chemotherapy by entering a state that bears similarity to certain kinds of senescence, a type of “active hibernation” that enables them to weather the stress induced by aggressive treatments aimed at destroying them, according to a new study by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine. These findings have implications for developing new drug combinations that could block senescence and make chemotherapy more effective.

In a study published Jan. 26 in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, the investigators reported that this biologic process could help explain why cancers so often recur after treatment. The research was done in both organoids and mouse models made from patients’ samples of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) tumors. The findings were also verified by looking at samples from AML patients that were collected throughout the course of treatment and relapse.

Continue reading “Study finds cancer cells may evade chemotherapy” »

“3D printing—I think the majority of what it does is allow us to make individualized treatment, when we never had that opportunity to do it before,” Ripley explained. “And I think we’re going to just keep growing with that.”

It’s rooted in the patient’s unique idea to use a drinking straw to open up his hearing pathway.

Studies in mammals have shown that the ‘memories’ of various environmental effects – such as diet, weight, and stress – are being passed on from dads to offspring, despite these states not being coded for in the DNA sequences carried by sperm. Now, we have a new explanation for how it’s possible.

The story has much to do with epigenetics. Molecules that attach themselves to DNA can act like on-off switches that control which sections of DNA get used – but until now we haven’t known which of these molecules can carry the settings marked by a father’s life experiences, to be incorporated into an embryo via sperm.

“The big breakthrough with this study is that it has identified a non-DNA-based means by which sperm remember a father’s environment (diet) and transmit that information to the embryo,” said McGill University epigeneticist Sarah Kimmins.

An ex vivo gene-edited cell therapy for sickle cell disease (SCD) being developed by Sangamo Therapeutics and Sanofi has generated positive early Phase I/II results in three patients—data that persuaded a committee of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to support an orphan designation for the drug candidate.

The EMA’s Committee for Orphan Medicinal Products (COMP) has adopted a positive opinion for the orphan designation for BIVV003 (autologous CD34+ hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells transfected with zinc finger nuclease mRNAs SB-mRENH1 and SB-mRENH2) following its meeting of January 19–21— minutes of which were posted this month on the EMA’s website.

COMP based its recommendation on data showing that the first three patients with sickle cell disease ended up “without recurrence of previous SCD symptoms” following treatment with BIVV003 in the Phase I/II PRECIZN-1 trial (NCT03653247).

Using an improved version of the gene editing tool CRISPR/Cas9, researchers knocked out up to twelve genes in plants in a single blow. Until now, this had only been possible for single or small groups of genes. The approach was developed by researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB). The method makes it easier to investigate the interaction of various genes. The study appeared in The Plant Journal.

The inheritance of traits in plants is rarely as simple and straightforward as Gregor Mendel described. The monk, whose experiments in the 19th century on trait inheritance in peas laid the foundation of genetics, in fact got lucky. “In the traits that Mendel studied, the rule that only one gene determines a specific trait, for example the color of the peas, happened to apply,” says plant geneticist Dr. Johannes Stuttmann from the Institute of Biology at MLU. According to the researcher, things are often much more complicated. Frequently there are different genes that, through their interaction with one another, result in certain traits or they are partly redundant, in other words they result in the same trait. In this case, when only one of these genes is switched off, the effects are not visible in the plants.

The scientists at MLU and IPB have now developed a way to study this complex phenomenon in a more targeted way by improving CRISPR/Cas9. These gene editing tools can be used to cut the DNA of organisms at specific sites. The team built on the work of biologist Dr. Sylvestre Marillonnet who developed an optimized building block for the CRISPR/Cas9 system at the IPB. “This building block helps to produce significantly more Cas9 enzyme in the plants, which acts as a scissor for the genetic material,” explains Stuttmann. The researchers added up to 24 different guide RNAs which guide the scissor enzyme to the desired locations in the genetic material. Experiments on thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) and the wild tobacco plant Nicotiana benthamiana proved that the approach works. Up to eight genes could be switched off simultaneously in the tobacco plants while, in the thale cress, up to twelve genes could be switched off in some cases.