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Detecting multiple cancers and other diseases from a single blood sample

UCLA scientists have developed a simple and cost-effective blood test that, in early studies, shows promise in detecting multiple cancers, various liver conditions and organ abnormalities simultaneously by analyzing DNA fragments circulating in the bloodstream. The test, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could offer a powerful and more affordable approach to early disease detection and comprehensive health monitoring.

“Early detection is crucial,” said Dr. Jasmine Zhou, the study’s senior author, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and investigator at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Survival rates are far higher when cancers are caught before they spread. If you detect cancer at stage one, outcomes are dramatically better than at stage four.”

How the MethylScan blood test works The new method, called MethylScan, works by analyzing cell-free DNA (cfDNA), tiny fragments of genetic material released into the blood when cells die. Because cells from every organ shed DNA into the bloodstream, cfDNA carries molecular signals that reflect what is happening throughout the body.

The Digital 15-Minute City: Curing Internet Sprawl with Aggregated Artificial Intelligence

Aggregated AI represents a fundamental rezoning of this digital landscape. It is the architectural foundation of the ultimate digital 15-minute city.

Modern urban planners are increasingly rallying around a transformational concept known as the “15-minute city.” The philosophy is simple but profound: a neighborhood should be designed so that everything a resident needs for daily life—work, groceries, healthcare, education, and leisure—is accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. It is a direct rejection of the sprawling, car-centric metropolis that forces people to spend large fractions of their lives commuting from one isolated zone to another.

When you look at the architecture of the modern internet, it becomes painfully obvious that we are living in the digital equivalent of urban sprawl.

For the past two decades, we have built a digital environment defined by vast distances and fragmented zones. We have distinct destinations for every conceivable task. You commute to one platform to analyze data, travel to another to manage client relationships, drive over to a different interface to write code, and navigate a maze of disparate chat windows to communicate. The modern knowledge worker spends an inordinate amount of their day stuck in digital traffic, constantly context-switching, moving data between incompatible silos, and navigating a sprawling ecosystem that was built for the benefit of the platforms, not the people who inhabit them.

Bing Brunton on Connecting the Connectome to the Body | Mindscape 352

Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/.…

The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an important step to understanding how brains work, but a long way from the final answer. A big next step is understanding how neuronal circuits connect to and guide bodily behavior. Very recent work on mapping the fruit-fly connectome has brought us closer to that goal. I talk with neuroscientist Bing Brunton about the connectome, how we can study it to understand bodily motion in flies and other creatures, and where it’s all taking us.

Bing Wen Brunton received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Princeton University… She is currently a Professor of Biology and the Richard & Joan Komen University Chair at the University of Washington, with affiliations at the eScience Institute for Data Science, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and the Department of Applied Mathematics.

Mindscape Podcast playlist: • Mindscape Podcast
Sean Carroll channel: / seancarroll.

Attenuation of malignant phenotype of glioblastoma following a short course of the pro-oxidant combination of Resveratrol and Copper

Background We investigated a novel therapeutic approach to glioblastoma (GBM) that targets cell-free chromatin particles (cfChPs) that are released from dying GBM cells and aggravate the oncogenic phenotype of living GBM cells. cfChPs can be deactivated by oxygen radicals (OR) generated upon oral administration of the nutraceuticals Resveratrol ® and Copper (Cu).

Methods Ten patients with glioblastoma awaiting surgery were administered 5.6 mg of Resveratrol ® and 560 ng of Copper (Cu) four times a day for an average of 11.6 ± 5.37 days. Another ten patients who did not receive R-Cu acted as controls. A tissue sample was taken at operation for analysis.

Results R-Cu treatment led to marked deactivation of cfChPs that were present in the tumour microenvironment, which was accompanied by a highly significant down-regulation in Ki-67, nine hallmarks of cancer, six immune check-points and three stem cell biomarkers as revealed by immuno-fluorescence analysis. Transcriptome sequencing detected marked upregulation of pro-apoptotic and down-regulation of anti-apoptotic genes. Also detected was down-regulation of PVRIG-2P, a homologue of immune checkpoint receptor PVRIG, which is a functional analogue of PD-L1.

CNS infiltration by zamtocabtagene autoleucel tandem CD20/CD19 CAR T cells leading to complete remission in a patient with primary CNS lymphoma

CAR T cells in primary CNS lymphoma.

Treatment options for primary central nervous system (CNS) lymphoma remain limited, particularly in relapsed or refractory disease. This case report explores the activity and CNS trafficking of tandem CD20/CD19 CAR T cells (zamtocabtagene autoleucel), addressing key questions about cellular therapy in CNS lymphoma and the potential role of dual-target CAR T strategies.

CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell (CAR T) therapy is a well-established treatment for B-cell malignancies, but accessibility, toxicities, lack of persistence, modest anti-tumor activity, restricted trafficking and tumor antigen escape are among its limitations.1 Concern for excessive neurotoxicity led to exclusion of patients with central nervous system (CNS) involvement from clinical trials, and primary CNS lymphoma (PCNSL) is an exclusion on the approved products’ labeling. PCNSL is a highly aggressive lymphoma, with a favorable response to initial chemotherapy/radiation, but compared with lymphomas outside the CNS, relapses are common, and survival is inferior. Moreover, there is a lack of approved standard care beyond first-line therapy and the prognosis for these PCNSL patients remains poor.2

In approximately one third of all B-cell lymphoma patients, resistance to CAR T and relapses are accompanied by CD19 downregulation. Preclinical evidence suggests that dual antigen-targeting may overcome this problem.3 To address antigen escape, the investigational anti-CD20/ anti-CD19 CAR T product MB-CART2019.1 (zamtocabtagene autoleucel [zamto-cel]) was designed. Zamto-cel is a dual-targeting tandem-CAR construct with scFv regions of anti-CD19 and anti-CD20 linked in sequence by a flexible interchain linker, followed by CD8, 4-1BB and CD3 ζ domains.4 Our group and others have evaluated zamto-cel in a pivotal phase II clinical trial (DALY II USA/ MB-CART2019.1; clinicaltrials gov. Identifier: NCT04792489) for the treatment of DLBCL patients who received at least two lines of treatment.5 In addition to addressing antigen escape/relapse zamto-cel is non-cryopreserved with a vein-to-vein time of 14 days, improving cell yield and potency.

Extreme stability in ultrafast nanomagnetism aids the development of faster data storage

For the first time, researchers have mapped how the boundaries of magnetic nanostructures behave on extremely short timescales. The work of physicist Johan Mentink of Radboud University shows that these boundaries are much more stable than previously thought. This insight will aid the development of future ultra-fast and compact data storage.

Every magnet consists of tiny magnets, known as spins. When a material is magnetic, these spins all point in the same direction. Using ultra-short laser pulses, the spins in magnetic materials can change direction in a very short time. This so-called ultrafast nanomagnetism is important for, for example, hard drives, on which information is stored using magnetic bits. To make this storage faster and smaller, it is essential to understand exactly what happens at the nanoscale.

Using a new imaging technique capable of tracking processes down to the nanometer and femtosecond scale, Mentink and colleagues have researched the behavior of domain boundaries—thin walls of about 1 nanometer that separate magnetic domains. Multiple spins pointing in the same direction form a domain.

Alien comet carries record-heavy water, and its birthplace looks nothing like our cosmic neighborhood

Less than a year ago, astronomers discovered a comet soaring through our sky that was not from our solar system. Although we still don’t know where this interstellar object called 3I/ATLAS came from, research led by the University of Michigan has revealed new insights about its birthplace. Wherever that was, it was much colder than the environment that created our solar system.

The new finding is based on the observation that 3I/ATLAS is remarkably rich in a specific type of water that contains deuterium. The team’s study is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“Our new observations show that the conditions that led to the formation of our solar system are much different from how planetary systems evolved in different parts of our galaxy,” said Luis Salazar Manzano, lead author of the new study and a doctoral student in the U-M Department of Astronomy.

CERN’s Medipix3 technology on track to help more patients

Originally derived from a technology developed to explore the fundamental nature of the Universe, Medipix3 technology now powers a medical scanner that is on track to benefit an increased number of patients. MARS Bioimaging Ltd has received 510(k) clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its portable photon-counting CT scanner for upper-limb imaging, allowing the system to enter the US health sector and enable broader clinical adoption.

Medipix technology is based on hybrid pixel detectors, which were originally designed at CERN for particle detection in high-energy physics experiments. This technology was adapted to create the Medipix family of pixel detector readout chips, enabling a new approach to medical imaging.

Unlike conventional CT (computed tomography) systems – which combine X-ray measurements taken from different angles to produce a 3D image – photon-counting technology measures individual X-ray photons and their energy. This produces detailed, three-dimensional images that help clinicians to distinguish between different types of tissue and materials, better informing their decision making. As Dr John Carrino, a prominent musculoskeletal radiologist involved in clinical trials with MARS Bioimaging, notes: “Photon-counting CT is going to be the future of CT for medical imaging.”

Hydraulic brain: Body motion linked to fluid movement in the brain

The brain is more mechanically connected to the body than previously appreciated, scientists report in Nature Neuroscience. Through a study using mice and simulations, the team found a potential biological mechanism underlying why exercise is thought to benefit brain health: abdominal contractions compress blood vessels connected to the spinal cord and the brain, enabling the organ to gently move within the skull. This swaying facilitates the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid to flow over the brain, potentially washing away neural waste that could cause problems for brain function.

According to Patrick Drew, professor of engineering science and mechanics, of neurosurgery, of biology and of biomedical engineering at Penn State, the work builds on previous studies detailing how sleep and neuron loss can influence how and when cerebrospinal fluid flushes through the brain.

“Our research explains how just moving around might serve as an important physiological mechanism promoting brain health,” said Drew, corresponding author on the paper. “In this study, we found that when the abdominal muscles contract, they push blood from the abdomen into the spinal cord, just like in a hydraulic system, applying pressure to the brain and making it move.

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