Pitt researchers demonstrated that pigs can grow functioning auxiliary livers in their abdominal lymph nodes after their own hepatocytes are isolated and injected into them. Startup LyGenesis is working to bring the method into human clinical trials later this year.
This Video Explains the DNA Repair Mechanisms That Are Mismatched Repair System (MMR), Base Excision Repair (BER) And Nucleotide Excision Repair (NER).
Nov 2019 NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND
—In a handful of cities around the world, mosquitoes have been armed with a microscopic weapon against disease. The bacterium Wolbachia pipientis blocks the insects’ ability to spread fearsome viruses such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. Since 2011, researchers have been injecting Wolbachia into the eggs of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and releasing the hatched insects, which spread this protection to their offspring. But the field has been waiting for evidence that this approach actually reduces disease in people.
Field trials suggest public health benefit to spreading Wolbachia.
We’re all impatient for solid recommendations based on rigorous testing and established facts, but in a fast-moving field, that’s rarely possible. And someone always has to be the guinea pig. This was just as true 130 years ago when Niels Ryberg Finsen began experimenting with treating disease with UV light. He started by testing on himself.
Niels Ryberg Finsen pioneered therapeutic ultraviolet lamps and won himself a Nobel Prize.
Minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery, in which a surgeon uses tools and a tiny camera inserted into small incisions to perform operations, has made surgical procedures safer for both patients and doctors over the last half-century. Recently, surgical robots have started to appear in operating rooms to further assist surgeons by allowing them to manipulate multiple tools at once with greater precision, flexibility, and control than is possible with traditional techniques. However, these robotic systems are extremely large, often taking up an entire room, and their tools can be much larger than the delicate tissues and structures on which they operate.
A collaboration between Wyss Associate Faculty member Robert Wood, Ph.D. and Robotics Engineer Hiroyuki Suzuki of Sony Corporation has brought surgical robotics down to the microscale by creating a new, origami-inspired miniature remote center of motion manipulator (the “mini-RCM”). The robot is the size of a tennis ball, weighs about as much as a penny, and successfully performed a difficult mock surgical task, as described in a recent issue of Nature Machine Intelligence.
“The Wood lab’s unique technical capabilities for making micro-robots have led to a number of impressive inventions over the last few years, and I was convinced that it also had the potential to make a breakthrough in the field of medical manipulators as well,” said Suzuki, who began working with Wood on the mini-RCM in 2018 as part of a Harvard-Sony collaboration. “This project has been a great success.”
The plastic tips attached to the ends of shoelaces keep them from fraying. Telomeres are repetitive DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) sequences that serve a similar function at the end of chromosomes, protecting its accompanying genetic material against genome instability, preventing cancers and regulating the aging process.
Each time a cell divides in our body, the telomeres shorten, thus functioning like a molecular “clock” of the cell as the shortening increases progressively with aging. An accurate measure of the quantity and length of these telomeres, or “clocks,” can provide vital information if a cell is aging normally, or abnormally, as in the case of cancer.
To come up with an innovative way to diagnose telomere abnormalities, a research team led by Assistant Professor Cheow Lih Feng from the NUS Institute for Health Innovation & Technology (iHealthtech) has developed a novel method to measure the absolute telomere length of individual telomeres in less than three hours. This unique telomere profiling method can process up to 48 samples from low amounts (1 ng) of DNA.
Summary: An estimated 13.6% of deaths in the U.S could be attributed to dementia. The number is 2.7 times higher than the official reported dementia-related deaths. The underestimation varies greatly by race, with 7.1 times more older Black adults, and 4.1 times more Hispanic adults, dying from dementia that public records indicate.
Source: boston university school of medicine.
Dementia may be an underlying cause of nearly three times more deaths in the U.S. than official records show, according to a new Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) study.
Summary: Discovery reveals neurons can lose their individuality in some conditions. The findings contradict the conventional belief that neurons always stay separated and never fuse.
Source: University of Queensland
A discovery that could rewrite the textbooks on neurons could also help us understand the basis of some neurological diseases.
The imbalance of supply and demand during the pandemic has caused a variety of challenges for retailers. Here’s how artificial intelligence can help.
A new report from Microsoft suggests that cloud-based technologies and Zero Trust architecture will become mainstays of businesses’ cybersecurity investments going forward.
