Biology & Medicine News and Discussions

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Next generation of hearing aids could read lips through masks
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-aid ... masks.html
by University of Glasgow
A new system capable of reading lips with remarkable accuracy even when speakers are wearing face masks could help create a new generation of hearing aids.

An international team of engineers and computing scientists developed the technology, which pairs radio-frequency sensing with Artificial intelligence for the first time to identify lip movements.

The system, when integrated with conventional hearing aid technology, could help tackle the "cocktail party effect," a common shortcoming of traditional hearing aids.

Currently, hearing aids assist hearing-impaired people by amplifying all ambient sounds around them, which can be helpful in many aspects of everyday life.

However, in noisy situations such as cocktail parties, hearing aids' broad spectrum of amplification can make it difficult for users to focus on specific sounds, like conversation with a particular person.

One potential solution to the cocktail party effect is to make "smart" hearing aids, which combine conventional audio amplification with a second device to collect additional data for improved performance.
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New Malaria vaccine could reduce deaths by 70% in 'breakthrough moment', experts say
Source: ITV

A team at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University have done it though, creating the world’s most effective malaria vaccine ever.

New results from their Phase II trial in west Africa show, a booster jab after three doses of vaccine, has an efficacy of 80%.

It is so high it smashes the World Health Organization’s efficacy goal of 75%, as well as GlaxoSmithKline’s offering which only prevents about 30% of severe malaria cases.
...
They’ve teamed up with the Serum Institute in India and hope to manufacture 150 million doses by early next year.
Read more: https://www.itv.com/news/2022-09-08/new ... xperts-say
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New technology to visualize axonal fiber bundles on the retina for early diagnosis of optic neuropathies
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... ndles.html
by The University of Hong Kong

A research team led by the Department of Ophthalmology, School of Clinical Medicine, LKS Faculty of Medicine of The University of Hong Kong (HKUMed), with collaborators from the Faculty of Medicine of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CU Medicine) and local and international partners, have developed a new technology ROTA (Retinal nerve fiber layer Optical Texture Analysis) to unveil the optical texture and trajectories of the axonal fiber bundles on the retina. ROTA outperforms the current clinical standards, attaining 15.0% to 28.4% higher in sensitivity in detecting early optic nerve damage in glaucoma—the leading cause of irreversible blindness. The research has been published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
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Study identifies key protein that drives rheumatoid arthritis damage
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... ritis.html
by Judith Van Dongen, Washington State University

Scientists have identified a protein known as sulfatase-2 that plays a critical role in the damage caused by rheumatoid arthritis. A chronic disease in which the immune system attacks the body's own joint tissues, rheumatoid arthritis affects an estimated 1.5 million Americans.

Published in the journal Cellular & Molecular Immunology, the discovery sheds new light on the molecular processes that drive inflammation seen in rheumatoid arthritis. It could also someday lead to improved treatment of the disease, which currently has no cure.

"Tumor necrosis factor-alpha—or TNF-alpha for short—is one of the main inflammatory proteins that drive rheumatoid arthritis and is targeted by many currently available therapies," said senior author Salah-Uddin Ahmed, a professor in Washington State University's College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. "However, over time patients can develop a resistance to these drugs, meaning they no longer work for them. That is why we were looking for previously undiscovered drug targets in TNF-alpha signaling, so basically proteins that it interacts with that may play a role."
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Researchers identify a potential path against inherited neurological disease
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... sease.html
by The Mount Sinai Hospital

Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), and elsewhere have reversed the effects of several life-threatening inherited neurodegenerative diseases called lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs) in patient cells and mice.

The team, led by Mount Sinai's Yiannis Ioannou, Ph.D., and translational scientist Juan Marugan, Ph.D., at NCATS, part of the National Institutes of Health, restored the proper function of both the mitochondria and lysosomes by using novel compounds they identified that increased the activity of TRAP1. This protein helps the mitochondria, which produce energy within cells, function properly. The findings were reported recently in iScience.

Dr. Ioannou is a Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

LSDs are characterized by genetic defects that prevent the cell's lysosomes from breaking down and recycling fats, sugars, and proteins, leading to their accumulation in organs, including the liver and brain. This can cause a malfunction in the mitochondria, leading to further damage to these organs.
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Treg cell transplantation proves effective in treating brittle bone disease in mouse model
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... ittle.html
by Medical University of South Carolina

The building blocks of a structure consist of load-bearing elements that rarely change despite renovations or repairs. They remain intact and consistent over time, but in the human body, our building blocks do just the opposite.

Bones are dynamic: They constantly break down and rebuild to become the strongest versions of themselves.

A mutation in this bone regeneration process can lead to weak and fragile bones, and if the mutation is related to the generated amount of collagen—a protein found in bone, connective tissue, skin and cartilage—it leads to brittle bone disease.
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New technique improves proteoform imaging in human tissue
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-technique ... issue.html
by Melissa Rohman, Northwestern University
Investigators led by Neil Kelleher, Ph.D., professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, have developed a new imaging technique that increases the detection of intact proteoforms by fourfold when compared to current protein imaging methods.

The imaging technique, detailed in a recent paper published in Science Advances, provides high-resolution, high-throughput imaging of proteoforms, or all modified versions of proteins. Importantly, the technique is "label-free," does not require antibodies and can identify whole proteoforms directly from any unfixed tissue. The technique can currently detect roughly 1,000 proteoforms and localizes proteoforms with a spatial resolution of 40 to 70 microns.

Several techniques are commonly used to image proteins in human tissue, but very few are capable of imaging proteoforms. Those that can image entire proteoforms do so by separating the proteoform from tissue and ionizing them for mass spectrometry. However, these techniques offer low molecular specificity.

To address this issue, Kelleher's team developed proteoform imaging mass spectrometry (PiMS). The technique works by extracting proteoforms from the tissue with nanodroplets, "weighing" the extracted proteoforms to identify them and then using this data to construct proteoform images of the scanned tissue.
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Using artificial intelligence to improve tuberculosis treatments
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-artificia ... ments.html
by Tufts University

Imagine you have 20 new compounds that have shown some effectiveness in treating a disease like tuberculosis (TB), which affects 10 million people worldwide and kills 1.5 million each year. For effective treatment, patients will need to take a combination of three or four drugs for months or even years because the TB bacteria behave differently in different environments in cells—and in some cases evolve to become drug-resistant. Twenty compounds in three- and four-drug combinations offer nearly 6,000 possible combinations. How do you decide which drugs to test together?

In a recent study, published in the September issue of Cell Reports Medicine, researchers from Tufts University used data from large studies that contained laboratory measurements of two-drug combinations of 12 anti-tuberculosis drugs. Using mathematical models, the team discovered a set of rules that drug pairs need to satisfy to be potentially good treatments as part of three- and four-drug cocktails.

The use of drug pairs rather than three- and four- drug combination measurement cuts down significantly on the amount of testing that needs to be done before moving a drug combination into further study.

"Using the design rules we've established and tested, we can substitute one drug pair for another drug pair and know with a high degree of confidence that the drug pair should work in concert with the other drug pair to kill the TB bacteria in the rodent model," says Bree Aldridge, associate professor of molecular biology and microbiology at Tufts University School of Medicine and of biomedical engineering at the School of Engineering, and an immunology and molecular microbiology program faculty member at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. "The selection process we developed is both more streamlined and more accurate in predicting success than prior processes, which necessarily considered fewer combinations."
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Researchers discover new drug target for inflammatory bowel disease
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... sease.html
by UT Southwestern Medical Center
A set of interacting molecules in immune cells of the gut is responsible for preventing the inflammation seen in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), UT Southwestern researchers report in a new study. The findings, published in Cell Reports, suggest a new drug target for treating IBD and related conditions.

"We discovered a fundamental mechanism that inhibits inflammation in the gut," said Venuprasad Poojary, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and Immunology at UT Southwestern and a member of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. "Understanding these kinds of basic details about the immune system is essential for developing new strategies to treat inflammatory diseases."
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In small study, CAR-T therapy pushes lupus into remission
posting.php?mode=reply&f=17&t=11
by Denise Mann HealthDay Reporter
While there's no cure for lupus and treatments don't work for many of the 1.5 million people who live with the disease in the United States, a new study shows a cancer therapy may kick hard-to-treat lupus into remission.

Lupus is an autoimmune disease that occurs when the body's immune system engages in friendly fire against its own skin, joints, bones, kidneys and heart, triggering a host of symptoms.

Enter CAR-T therapy.

Used to treat certain types of cancer, the therapy takes your body's own T-cells, trains them in the lab to recognize very specific cells, and then infuses them back into the body to do their job. In lupus, the therapy targets CD19, a protein on B cells.

The small study included five people with severe lupus involving multiple organs—such as the kidneys, heart, lungs and joints—who hadn't responded to standard therapy.
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