Lifeboat Foundation

“The ORFAN study is an expanding global registry which will include long-term clinical and outcome data for 250,000 patients from around the world, and we are very pleased to publish these initial results,” said Keith Channon, MD, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at University of Oxford, Caristo Chief Medical Officer, and co-author of The Lancet publication.

“Coronary inflammation is a crucial piece of the puzzle in predicting heart attack risk. We are excited to discover that CaRi-Heart results performed exceptionally well in predicting patient cardiac events. This tool is well positioned to help clinicians identify high-risk patients with seemingly ‘normal’ CCTA scans.”

Ron Blankstein, MD, Professor of Medicine and Radiology at Harvard Medical School, Director of Cardiac Computed Tomography at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and co-author of the publication, applauded The Lancet for publishing results from one of the largest studies in the field of CCTA.

Cellular Origins and the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult (CGT Catapult) have announced a new collaboration to demonstrate universal automation of CGT manufacturing.

Duarte et al. report that common genetic variants linked to psychiatric disorders influence the regulation of ancient retroviruses integrated into the genome. This suggests ancient viruses acquired millions of years ago may have shaped modern human brain function.

Comprehensive mapping of pathogen populations points way to precision treatments to improve outcomes.

Immunotherapy is a form of cancer treatment that harnesses the immune system to recognize and target the tumor. In most cancers, the immune system fails to detect the rapid proliferation of tumor cells. Lack of immune cell detection is due to the tumor polarizing or reprogramming immune cells to promote cancer progression and suppress the immune system. This is done through variety of ways including the release of proteins or cytokines that direct immune cell development and function. Current immunotherapies target these polarized immune cells to switch them back toward an anti-tumor function. Although there are many ways to redirect immune cells to attack cancer, immunotherapies maintain limited efficacy due to the immunosuppressive mechanisms within the tumor microenvironment (TME). In addition, heightened toxicity associated with immunotherapy also pose challenges when prescribing treatments to patients.

One immunotherapy that has demonstrated significant promise in cancer patients is chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells are immune cells within the body that are responsible for killing or lysing invading pathogens, including cancer. The immune system orchestrates a response by employing T cells to recognize an infection, in healthy individuals. In the context of cancer, T cells cannot recognize that the tumor is deleterious to the body. Therefore, CAR T cells are generated to reprogram the cell’s ability to recognize and lyse the tumor. CAR T cell therapy takes the patient’s T cells and engineers them to target specific surface markers on the tumor. They are then grown in a dish and expanded before being intravenously reinfused in the patient. CAR T cell therapy is commonly associated with lymphoma, but unfortunately neurotoxicity can be an adverse side effect which limits efficacy.

Accurate high-speed measurements of wavelength are fundamental to optical research and industrial applications, such as environmental monitoring, biomedical analysis, and material characterization.

While threats and violence against pre-K to 12th-grade teachers and other school personnel in the United States declined during the pandemic, after the restrictions were lifted, incidents rebounded to levels equal to or exceeding those prior to the pandemic, according to research published in American Psychologist.

As a result, the percentage of teachers expressing intentions to resign or transfer rose from 49% during the pandemic to 57% afterward, the researchers found.

“Aggression and violence against educators and school personnel are major concerns that affect the well-being of school personnel and the students and families they serve. This study highlights a growing crisis in our schools that needs to be addressed nationally,” said lead author Susan Dvorak McMahon, Ph.D., of DePaul University, chair of the APA Task Force on Violence Against Educators and School Personnel. The task force conducted two surveys in collaboration with national education and related organizations.

With advances in genomics research, personalized medicine, and sequencing-based technologies, there is a necessity for purification of high-quality genomic DNA from large volumes of blood. The rapidly growing landscape of biorepositories that store large amounts of DNA from an enormous number of biospecimens further fuels this need to find optimized solutions for reliable purification of DNA. The information derived from the purified DNA is crucial to health science research and facilitates drug discovery, biomarker discovery, clinical implementation projects, etc. For the success of these analyses and to derive relevant information, DNA extraction is the most critical step and must meet the criteria of extraction speed, yield and quality, as well as reproducibility. Many nucleic acid purification kits and automation workflows for processing blood samples in the volume range of 100–250 μL exist, but not many convenient, automated options exist for volumes as high as 2 mL without sample splitting. To fill this opening, Omega Bio-tek has developed a semi-automated solution on the MagBinder^® Fit²⁴ to extract DNA from large volumes of fresh or frozen blood. Here, we provide background information on biobanks, as well as present the solution Omega Bio-tek has developed for DNA extraction from large volumes of whole blood.

A biobank is a specialized repository that systematically collects, processes, stores, and manages biological samples for use in medical research and treatments. The primary purpose of a biobank is to provide a centralized and organized resource of high-quality biological materials, such as blood or tissue, along with relevant clinical and demographic data¹. These invaluable assets are at the center of advancements in cancer treatments, biomarker discovery, and understanding genetic factors for disease. At a high level, biobanks can be classified by two categories¹:

It’s long been assumed that as cells divide in the human body, the genome is faithfully replicated in the resulting daughter cells. While errors are known to arise, there is machinery in the cell that can detect these genetic errors, and can often repair them. When mutations remain in the genome, it raises the risk that disease will arise.

But the human genome is made up of about 6 billion bases, and the human body contains billions, even trillions of cells. And it seems that errors and variations in the genome could actually arise far more often than we knew, according to a new study reported in Nature Genetics that analyzed blood stem cells. The research used advanced sequencing techniques to show that humans are made up of cells whose genomes may be far more heterogeneous that assumed. And these variations between cells are not always small. The research determined that about one out of every forty blood stem cells in healthy people carry major chromosomal alterations in their DNA. These chromosomal changes included copy number variations and rearrangements, but did not seem to cause any deleterious effect.