Researchers have built a device that helps users feel temperature through a prosthetic arm. A new study shows it works with high accuracy.
About a decade ago, researchers in UC Santa Barbara chemistry professor Guillermo Bazan’s lab began to observe a recurring challenge in their research: Some of the compounds they were developing to harness energy from bacteria were instead killing the microbes. Not good if the objective of the project was to harness the metabolism of living bacteria to produce electricity.
“We needed the bacteria to be alive,” said Alex Moreland, a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow who joined the Bazan research group as a graduate student in 2014, and currently works at UCSB’s Center for Polymers and Organic Solids. “While we were developing new molecules for that application, we found that some of them didn’t work because they were killing the bacteria.”
However, instead of brushing it off as a rather annoying laboratory curiosity, in subsequent research the team leaned into the apparent antimicrobial properties of these compounds, called conjugated oligoelectrolytes (COE). Fast-forward to today, and they now have the basis for a new class of antibiotics, one that not only shows promise against a broad array of bacterial infections but can also evade the dreaded resistance that has been rendering our current generation of first-line antibiotics ineffective.
Artificial intelligence could bring about “biological conflict,” said former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who co-chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.
Schmidt spoke with defense reporters Sept. 12 as he helped release a new paper from his tech-oriented nonprofit think tank, the Special Competitive Studies Project. Schmidt launched the think tank with staff from the commission in order to continue the commission’s work.
AI’s applicability to biological warfare is “something which we don’t talk about very much,” Schmidt said, but it poses grave risks. “It’s going to be possible for bad actors to take the large databases of how biology works and use it to generate things which hurt human beings,” Schmidt said, calling that risk “a very near-term concern.”
According to a study published in the BMJ, a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest while receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in a hospital is 22%, but that declines rapidly after only one minute to less than 1% after 39 minutes. The likelihood of leaving with no major brain damage is similar, declining from 15% after one minute of CPR to less than 1% after 32 minutes without a heartbeat.
Only around 25% of patients survive to hospital discharge after being admitted to the emergency department for cardiac arrest. This common catastrophic medical emergency with a high mortality rate is an important public health issue, affecting around 300,000 adults every year in America alone. Unfortunately, studies have shown that long resuscitation times are linked to lower odds of survival, but there are no specific recommendations on when to stop resuscitation.
Continue reading “Survival Chances For Cardiac Arrest During CPR” »
CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy seems feasible, safe, and efficacious for patients with different autoimmune diseases, according to a study published in the Feb. 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Fabian Müller, M.D., from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, and colleagues examined patients with severe systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), idiopathic inflammatory myositis, or systemic sclerosis (eight, three, and four patients, respectively) who received a single infusion of CD19 CAR T-cells after fludarabine and cyclophosphamide preconditioning.
Efficacy was assessed up to two years after CAR T-cell infusion, measured using the Definition of Remission in SLE (DORIS) remission criteria, American College of Rheumatology-European League against Rheumatism (ACR-EULAR) major clinical response, and the score on the European Scleroderma Trials and Research Group (EUSTAR) activity index.
“Lynch syndrome also known as HNPCC (Hereditary Non-Polyposis Colorectal Cancer) is an autosomal dominant condition that increases the risk of developing certain cancers, particularly bowel cancer. It results from mutations in genes that help to correct errors during DNA replication. Lynch syndrome patients have a higher incidence of bowel cancer in their lifetime and such other cancers as endometrial, ovarian, stomach and urinary tract cancers. These patients have an earlier presentation, i.e. younger age group. People with this condition face a much higher risk of developing colorectal cancer at ages below 50 years. This underscores the need for an early diagnosis through screening and surveillance in individuals having Lynch syndrome so that it can be detected rather earlier when it would be more easily treatable,” says Dr Tanveer Abdul Majeed, Consultant, Surgical Oncology, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital Navi Mumbai.
“To effectively tackle Lynch syndrome-related cancers, early detection is vital. Screening protocols typically involve genetic testing to identify individuals at risk and surveillance measures, such as regular colonoscopies, starting at a younger age. Genetic counselling plays a pivotal role in Lynch syndrome management, providing affected individuals and their families with personalized risk assessments, guidance on screening strategies, and support in making informed decisions regarding preventive measures, including prophylactic surgery,” says Dr Kanuj Malik, Sr. Consultant-Surgical Oncology, Yatharth Hospitals.
Researchers are working on ways to improve the effectiveness of currently approved bile duct cancer, also called cholangiocarcinoma, treatments and finding early success in the development of more targeted therapies. Read more on the AACR Blog:
To overcome this issue, researchers are exploring next-generation FGFR inhibitors. During the 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium in January 2024, phase II clinical trial results were announced for tinengotinib, a FGFR1-3 inhibitor that binds to FGFR in a way that blocks FGFR2 fusion and rearrangement, preventing the mutations that cause resistance to treatment. Of the patients in the trial whose tumors had developed resistance to a previous FGFR inhibitor, 37.5% demonstrated a partial response with tumor reductions ranging from 40.7% to 54.6%. A phase III trial for the drug candidate kicked off in December 2023.
Other next-generation FGFR inhibitors are in various stages of development, including RLY-4008 (phase I/II trial), erdafitinib (phase IIa), KIN-3248 (phase I/Ib), derazantinib (phase II), tasurgratinib (phase II), and HMPL-453 (phase II).
Continue reading “Finding the Right Targets to Treat Biliary Tract Cancers” »
Contrary to popular perception, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is not the reserve of car accidents and punishing contact sports; it’s surprisingly common. Up to 50 million new cases of traumatic brain injury are registered each year worldwide. Notably, 80% of TBI occurs in low-to middle-income countries, and it is also the leading cause of death and disability in young adults. Overall, the global economic burden of TBI is estimated at 400 billion USD.
Minimising the devastating effects of TBI doesn’t rely solely on reducing the risk of an injury; it’s also essential to improve treatment after one has happened. For that, physiological real-time monitoring of vital signals is critical. One inventor has made it his mission to create devices that can do this accurately, easily, anywhere, and what’s more, they are also non-invasive.
Professor Arminas Ragauskas is a founder and director of the Health Telematics Science Institute at Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania, which develops innovative industrial and physiological measurement and process monitoring technologies. He is particularly known for his work on non-invasive intracranial pressure and cerebral blood flow autoregulation measurement devices. He was also the national coordinator of the CENTER-TBI project, funded by the European Commission and the EU industry, with a budget of 40 million EUR, and focused European efforts to advance the care of patients with traumatic brain injury.
Dr. Jean Ristaino: “We searched those descriptions by keywords, and by doing that we were able to recreate the original outbreak maps using location coordinates mentioned in the documents. We were also trying to learn what people were thinking about the disease at the time and where it came from.”
Can plant diseases be tracked through analyzing past reports? This is what a recent study published in Scientific Reports hopes to address as a team of researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) attempted to ascertain the causes behind blight disease on plants, known as Phytophthora infestans, that resulted in the Irish potato famine during the 1840s. This study holds the potential to help scientists and farmers not only better understand the causes of blight disease in plants, but also how they might be able to predict them in the future.
Image of a blight lesion on a potato leaf. (Credit: Jean Ristaino, NC State University)
