Lifeboat Foundation

A new laser-based approach has been introduced to produce artificial cartilage using 3D printing technology.

In this approach, researchers from TU Wien printed living cells within tiny football-like spheroids.

The team hopes this technique could be used to cultivate lab-grown tissue capable of replacing damaged cartilage in humans. It is a strong connective tissue found in various parts of the body that protects our joints and bones.

New research from UBC Okanagan could make monitoring gut health easier and less painful by tapping into a common—yet often overlooked—source of information: the mucus in our digestive system that eventually becomes part of fecal matter.

Researcher Dr. Kirk Bergstrom and post-graduate student Noah Fancy of UBCO’s Biology department have discovered a non-invasive technique to study MUC2, a critical gut protein, from what we leave behind in the bathroom.

Theie findings are published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

A meta-analysis of 39 studies showed that circulating tumor DNA presence is a prognosis factor for solid tumors after curative therapy. ctDNA has high specificity but low sensitivity. It had better accuracy in surveillance compared to landmark analyses.

Results from phase two clinical trials at UT Southwestern Medical Center showed that a suspension of gold nanocrystals taken daily by patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) significantly reversed deficits of metabolites linked to energy activity in the brain and resulted in functional improvements.

The findings, published in the Journal of Nanobiotechnology (“Evidence of brain target engagement in Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis by the investigational nanomedicine, CNM-Au8, in the REPAIR phase 2 clinical trials”), could eventually help bring this treatment to patients with these and other neurodegenerative diseases, according to the authors.

Gold nanocrystals suspended in a water buffer represent a novel therapeutic agent developed by Clene Nanomedicine for neurodegenerative conditions. This nanomedicine, called CNM-Au8, is being investigated to treat patients with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease in clinical trials at UT Southwestern. (Illustration: Random 42/Source: Clene Nanomedicine)

Find out all about about RNA editing, as two candidates have just managed to reach the clinic for the first time.

Rhodopsin can kill cancer cells keeping the surrounding cells healthy 😤

Considerable time and funding are required in development of new medicines necessary for otherwise untreatable illnesses. Professor Yuki SUDO of Okayama University seeks an innovative form of treatment using rhodopsin, a protein with light-reactive qualities. By extracting it and artificially inserting it into affected cells, it could treat illness simply by exposure to a specific type of light. He has succeeded in using rhodopsin to eliminate cells from cancer, the first such accomplishment ever achieved in the world. In this episode, we introduce the research toward a “light switch” to cure disease.

An explainable deep learning model using a chemical substructure-based approach for the exploration of chemical compound libraries identified structural classes of compounds with antibiotic activity and low toxicity.

Researchers have engineered T cells with a cancer-derived mutation, boosting their potency against tumors over 100-fold without toxicity, marking a significant advancement in immunotherapy that could…

Nerve cells in the brain demand an enormous amount of energy to survive and maintain their connections for communicating with other nerve cells. In Alzheimer’s disease, the ability to make energy is compromised, and the connections between nerve cells (called synapses) eventually come apart and wither, causing new memories to fade and fail.

A Scripps Research team, reporting in the journal Advanced Science, has now identified the energetic reactions in brain cells that malfunction and lead to neurodegeneration. By using a small molecule to address the malfunction, which occurred in the mitochondria—the cell’s major energy producers—the researchers showed that many neuron-to-neuron connections were successfully restored in nerve cell models derived from human Alzheimer’s patient stem cells. These findings highlight that improving mitochondrial metabolism could be a promising therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s and related disorders.

“We thought that if we could repair metabolic activity in the mitochondria, maybe we could salvage the energy production,” says senior author Stuart Lipton, MD, Ph.D., Step Family Foundation Endowed Professor and Co-Director of the Neurodegeneration New Medicines Center at Scripps Research, and a clinical neurologist in La Jolla, Calif. “In using human neurons derived from people with Alzheimer’s, protecting the energy levels was sufficient to rescue a large number of neuronal connections.”