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Category: biotech/medical – Page 43

Is Altos Labs gearing up for clinical trials?

Longevity biotech giant Altos Labs has appointed Dr Joan Mannick as its Chief Medical Officer and head of product development, signaling a shift toward advancing clinical programs based on the company’s cellular rejuvenation technology. As Life Biosciences reportedly prepares to enter clinical trials with its partial epigenetic reprogramming candidate, is Altos about to join the party?

Altos, which launched with $3 billion in funding in 2022, is focused on reversing disease and age-related decline by restoring cellular health through partial epigenetic reprogramming, a technique inspired by the work of Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka and Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte. The company’s approach, which reverts cells toward a youthful state without altering their identity, has demonstrated benefits in animal models, extending both lifespan and healthspan in mice.

Although Altos has not yet launched human trials, the appointment of Mannick, who has significant experience designing and running clinical programs in aging biology, indicates the company is shifting into clinical applications of its technology. She will operate within Altos’ Institute of Medicine, collaborating with discovery and development teams to shape the clinical direction of its therapies.

Cardiac resident macrophages in cardiovascular disease: from physiology to pathology

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death and disease burden worldwide. Macrophages are important components of the internal immune cells, which profoundly affects the internal environmental homeostasis and repair after injury. Cardiac resident macrophages have been shown to regulate a variety of myocardial physiology and pathological activities. Homeostatic resident macrophages in the heart promote angiogenesis, remove ageing and dying cells and participate in cardiac electrical conduction. However, the role of cardiac resident macrophages is still not fully understood despite the growing attention they have received. This review provides an overview of macrophage biology and highlights prominent and emerging interrelationships and functions between cardiac resident macrophages and CVD, aiming to prove a description of the functional diversity of cardiac resident macrophages in different CVD to explore potential options to regulate them. This may provide opportunities for successful therapeutic interventions to improve the prognosis of patients with CVD.

Experiments add to evidence of links between amyloid deposits in brain and bone marrow

A recent study led by a team of researchers at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine examining aging mice has provided what is believed to be the first evidence that amyloid beta protein—small, sticky protein fragment found in people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD)—particles build up in the bone marrow of the animals, although not in the exact same form as the large, dense plaques found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Although amyloid buildup has been found in organs outside the brain—such as the heart, kidneys, and nerves—it remains unclear whether similar deposits form in bone or with aging or in Alzheimer’s disease,” says contributing study author Mei Wan, Ph.D., professor of the department of Orthopedic Surgery.

“While brain amyloid has been extensively studied for its role in memory loss and neurodegeneration, far less is known about amyloid elsewhere in the body. In fact, almost nothing is known about whether amyloid forms in the skeleton or how it might contribute to age-related .”

Neoadjuvant vs Adjuvant Immunotherapy in Stage III Colon Cancer

Adjuvant immunotherapy plus chemotherapy has yet to square off against neoadjuvant immunotherapy in a head-to-head trial. Even if that trial doesn’t happen, post hoc analyses of ATOMIC and the neoadjuvant NICHE-2 studies may clarify whether a one-size-fits-all approach is appropriate and help determine which patients benefit more from one approach over the other, according to Christopher Lieu, MD, an investigator in the ATOMIC study.

The ATOMIC study showed that adding adjuvant immunotherapy to standard-of-care chemotherapy following resection reduced the risk for disease recurrence or death by 50% compared with chemotherapy alone in the 355 patients with stage III colon cancer with mismatch repair deficiency (dMMR), who received adjuvant atezolizumab along with fluorouracil, leucovorin, and oxaliplatin (FOLFOX) chemotherapy, providing those in the pro-adjuvant camp with important data. In addition, 3-year disease-free survival (DFS) was 86.4% with the combination compared with 76.6% with chemotherapy alone. The results of this trial were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2025.

Experts debate which patients with stage III dMMR colon cancer will benefit from the two treatment approaches.

2025 UP.Partners Moving World Report

Emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, drones, and humanoid robotics, are rapidly transforming industries and revolutionizing transportation, logistics, and other sectors, driven by decreasing costs, economic incentives, and significant investments.

Questions to inspire discussion.

Emerging Technologies 🚁 Q: How are drones revolutionizing delivery services? A: Drones are delivering millions of goods with insane energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and convenience, exemplified by Google’s Wing program partnering with Walmart and DoorDash, and Zipline saving half a million lives delivering medicine worldwide. 🤖 Q: What roles can humanoid robots fill in the workforce?

Scientists Discovered a Way to Reverse Time—and Possibly Erase Mistakes

In the subatomic universe of quantum physics, you can achieve things considered impossible in our flesh-and-blood physical world. Things like superposition, entanglement, and even teleportation all seem possible when things go quantum. Now, scientists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and University of Vienna are adding a kind of time travel to the list.

In a series of papers published on preprint servers and in various online journals (including Optica, arXiv, and Quantum), researchers including ÖAW’s Miguel Navascués and University of Vienna’s Philip Walther explain the possibility of speeding up, slowing down, and even reversing the flow of time within a quantum system.

Newly found mechanism can supercharge the immune system against cancers

New research has uncovered a novel mechanism that may help explain why some people with cancer respond remarkably well to immunotherapy while others don’t.

Researchers from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and UNSW Sydney have uncovered that less active versions of a gene called NOD2, in combination with radiotherapy or immunotherapy, may help supercharge the immune system’s ability to attack cancer.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could pave the way for more personalized and effective immunotherapy treatments against a range of cancers.

Exposure to nanoplastics could induce spread of Alzheimer’s disease from the brain to other organs

A new preclinical study has found exposure to nanoplastics may contribute to the rapid progression of Alzheimer’s disease and subsequent spread from the brain to other key organs such as the liver, heart and gut.

The research, “Cerebral to Systemic Representations of Alzheimer’s Pathogenesis Stimulated by Polystyrene Nanoplastics,” is published in the journal Environment & Health.

The study, co-led by Monash University and South China University of Technology, investigated how environmental-level polystyrene exposure influences the progression of Alzheimer’s disease from the brain to other parts of the body. Studies in mice revealed that nanoplastic-induced neurological damage is not confined within the brain, but expands systemically through the gut–liver–brain axis.

Detecting early-stage tumors with a blood sample

Current methods for cancer diagnosis are based on identifying biomarkers — molecules that reveal a particular state or process in the body – produced by the tumor or associated proteins. Not surprisingly, these markers are more abundant once the tumor has already developed significantly. And the more advanced the tumor, the more difficult it is to find effective treatment options.

Now, a research team has developed a test that can detect early-stage solid tumors with just a blood sample. In addition, the test also provides information relevant to the choice of treatment.

To achieve this early detection, the team focused the test not on the markers produced by the tumor, but on the body’s defensive reaction to the cancer. Since the 19th century it has been known that the emergence of cancer cells causes changes in the immune system, and it was also known that these changes are more intense in cancer’s earliest stages. But they had never been used for diagnosis. The new study focuses on them, specifically on the changes in blood proteins derived from cancer’s disruption of the immune system.

But this approach posed a problem to the team: human blood contains more than 5,000 proteins, which makes it extremely difficult to analyze. So they used bioinformatics analysis and narrowed the scope of the study to five amino acids: lysine, tryptophan, tyrosine, cysteine and cysteine not bound to disulphide bonds.

They then subjected the sample to reactions that emit fluorescence when light is applied to them — fluorogenic reactions — and revealed the exact concentration of each of these amino acids in the plasma. Using the artificial intelligence tool machine learning, they identified patterns in these concentrations that could be translated into diagnostic signals.

As they explain in the published article, they applied this technique to samples from 170 patients and were able to identify 78% of cancers with a 0% false positive rate.

Human CLOCK gene enhances brain connectivity and mental flexibility in mice, study finds

Clock genes are a set of genes known to contribute to the regulation of the human body’s internal 24-hour cycle, also known as the circadian rhythm. One of these genes is the so-called CLOCK gene, a protein that regulates the activity of other genes, contributing to recurrent patterns of sleep and wakefulness.

Past findings suggest that this gene is also expressed in the neocortex, a brain region that supports important cognitive abilities, including reasoning, decision-making and the processing of language. However, the gene’s possible contribution to these specific brain functions remains poorly understood.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center recently carried out a study on genetically modified mice aimed at better understanding how the expression of the CLOCK gene in the human neocortex influences cognitive functions. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that the gene plays a role in the formation of connections between neurons, which in turn influence mental and behavioral flexibility.

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