Biology & Medicine News and Discussions

weatheriscool
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Nanotech strategy shows promise for treating autoimmune disease
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-nanotech- ... sease.html
by The Scripps Research Institute
Scientists at Scripps Research have reported success in initial tests of a new, nanotech-based strategy against autoimmune diseases.

The scientists, who reported their results in ACS Nano, engineered cell-like "nanoparticles" that target only the immune cells driving an autoimmune reaction, leaving the rest of the immune system intact and healthy. The nanoparticles greatly delayed, and in some animals even prevented, severe disease in a mouse model of arthritis.

"The potential advantage of this approach is that it would enable safe, long-term treatment for autoimmune diseases where the immune system attacks its own tissues or organs—using a method that won't cause broad immune suppression, as current treatments do," says study senior author James Paulson, Ph.D., Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Chair of Chemistry in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research.
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New potential mechanism for vision loss discovered
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-12- ... -loss.html
by Dresden University of Technology

Visual cells in the human retina may not simply die in some diseases, but are mechanically transported out of the retina beforehand. Scientists from the Deutsches Zentrum für Neurodegenerative Erkrankungen (DZNE) and the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) at TU Dresden have now discovered this.

For their research, they used miniature human retinas produced in the laboratory, so-called organoids. In the new issue of the journal Nature Communications, they report on their discovery, which paves the way for completely new research approaches, especially in connection with age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

"This principle, known as cell extrusion, has not yet been studied in neurodegenerative diseases," says Prof. Mike Karl, who heads the research group. AMD is the main cause of blindness and severe visual impairment in Germany. It is estimated that a quarter of people over the age of 60 suffer from AMD. The macula is a special region within the human retina that is needed, among other things, for high resolution color vision. In AMD, thousands of light-sensitive visual cells, the so-called photoreceptor cells, are lost in the macula.

"This was the starting point for our research project: we observed that photoreceptors are lost, but we could not detect any cell death in the retina," explains Mike Karl, who conducts research at the Dresden site of the DZNE and the CRTD at TU Dresden. "Half of all photoreceptors disappeared from the retinal organoid within ten days, but obviously they did not die in the retina. That made us curious."
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'Virtual pillars' separate and sort blood-based nanoparticles
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-virtual-p ... icles.html
by Duke University
Engineers at Duke University have developed a device that uses sound waves to separate and sort the tiniest particles found in blood in a matter of minutes. The technology is based on a concept called "virtual pillars" and could be a boon to both scientific research and medical applications.

Tiny biological nanoparticles called "small extracellular vesicles" (sEVs) are released from every type of cell in the body and are believed to play a large role in cell-to-cell communication and disease transmission. The new technology, dubbed Acoustic Nanoscale Separation via Wave-pillar Excitation Resonance, or ANSWER for short, not only pulls these nanoparticles from biofluids in under 10 minutes, it also sorts them into size categories believed to have distinct biological roles.

The results appeared online November 23 in the journal Science Advances.
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Clinical trial shows promising results for inciting production of neutralizing antibodies in HIV vaccine
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-12- ... ction.html
by Bob Yirka , Medical Xpress
A large team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions across the U.S., working with two colleagues from Sweden, reports promising results in a phase I clinical trial aimed at testing the efficacy and safety of an HIV vaccine.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes using a germline-targeting priming immunogen approach in developing the vaccine and how well it performed during its initial clinical trial. Penny Moore, with the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, in South Africa, has published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining germline targeting in vaccines and the work done by the researchers on this new effort.
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New drug a hopeful advance for incurable neurodegenerative myelin diseases
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-12- ... yelin.html
by University of Montreal
There's new hope for the future treatment of some leukodystrophies, neurodegenerative diseases in young children that progressively affect their quality of life, often leading to death before adulthood.

The development stems from the work of Benoit Coulombe, director of the Translational Proteomics Laboratory at the Clinical Research Institute of Montreal (IRCM) and a professor of biochemistry and molecular medicine in the Faculty of Medicine of Université de Montréal.

Published in the journal Molecular Brain, the new research shows that the drug Riluzole, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat certain forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, can at least partially correct the molecular cause of some leukodystrophies.

"Indeed, we have shown that the causative mutations of some leukodystrophies affect the subunits of an important cellular enzyme, RNA polymerase III, preventing its normal assembly—it turned out that Riluzole can counteract this assembly defect," said Maxime Pinard, the researcher responsible for the project in Coulombe's lab.
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Researchers develop nano-based technology to fight osteoporosis
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-nano-base ... rosis.html
by University of Central Florida

University of Central Florida researchers have created unique technology for treating osteoporosis that uses nanobubbles to deliver treatment to targeted areas of a person's body.

The new technology was developed by Mehdi Razavi, an assistant professor in UCF's College of Medicine and a member of the Biionix Cluster at UCF, and UCF biomedical sciences student Angela Shar at the Biomaterials and Nanomedicine Lab, as part of the lab's focus on developing tools for diagnostics and therapeutics.

Osteoporosis is a disease marked by an imbalance between the body's ability to form new bone tissue, or ossification, and break down, or remove, old bone, known as resorption.

According to the Bone Health & Osteoporosis Foundation (BHOF), studies suggest that one in two women and up to one in four men aged 50 and older will break a bone due to osteoporosis. Also, experts predict that by 2025, osteoporosis will be responsible for about 3 million fractures and $25.3 billion in costs annually.

Razavi says that a healthy body continually replaces old or damaged bone tissue at a steady rate to ensure good bone quality and mass.

"But when the rate of bone resorption becomes higher than bone formation, then it leads to osteoporosis, a systemic disease of the skeletal system," he says.
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A New Self-Powered Ingestible Sensor Opens New Avenues for Gut Research

November 30, 2022

Engineering researchers have developed a battery-free, pill-shaped ingestible biosensing system designed to provide continuous monitoring in the intestinal environment. It gives scientists the ability to monitor gut metabolites in real time, which wasn’t possible before. This feat of technological integration could unlock new understanding of intestinal metabolite composition, which significantly impacts human health overall.

The work, led by engineers at the University of California San Diego, appears in the December issue of the journal Nature Communications.

The ingestible, biofuel-driven sensor facilitates in-situ access to the small intestine, making glucose monitoring easier while generating continuous results. These measurements provide a critical component of tracking overall gastrointestinal health, a major factor in studying nutrition, diagnosing and treating various diseases, preventing obesity, and more.

“In our experiments, the battery-free biosensor technology continuously monitored glucose levels in the small intestines of pigs 14 hours after ingestion, yielding measurements every five seconds for two to five hours,” said Ernesto De La Paz Andres, a nanoengineering graduate student at UC San Diego and one of the co-first authors on the paper. “Our next step is to reduce the size of the pills from the current 2.6 cm in length so they will be easier for human subjects to swallow.”

Older methods for directly monitoring the inside of the small intestine can cause significant discomfort for patients while generating only single short data recordings of an environment that continuously changes. By contrast, this biosensor provides access to continuous data readings over time. The platform could also be used to develop new ways to study the microbiome of the small intestine. The “smart pill” approach could lead to simpler and cheaper ways to monitor the small intestine, which could lead to significant cost savings in the future. 

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/a-new-self ... t-research


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World-First Trial Transfusing Lab-Grown Red Blood Cells Begins
by Clare Watson
December 13, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) A trial testing how long a teaspoon-sized transfusion of lab-grown red blood cells lasts in the body could revolutionize clinical care for people with blood disorders who require regular blood top-ups.

The world-first trial, underway in the UK, is studying whether red blood cells made in the laboratory last longer than blood cells made in the body.
Although the trial is only small, it represents a "huge stepping stone for manufacturing blood from stem cells," says University of Bristol cell biologist Ashley Toye, one of the researchers working on the study.

To generate the transfusions, the team of researchers isolated stem cells from donated blood and coaxed them into making more red blood cells, a process that takes around three weeks.

In the past, researchers showed they could transfuse lab-grown blood cells back into the same donor they were derived from. This time, they have infused the manufactured cells into another compatible person – a process known as allogeneic transfusion.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/world-fir ... ls-begins

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weatheriscool
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Trial on safety and immunogenicity of Ebola vaccines yields promising results
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-12- ... cines.html
by Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale
Ebola epidemics occur periodically in various sub-Saharan African countries. While vaccines exist and have already received WHO Prequalification against the Zaire ebolavirus species, it is essential to pursue and intensify efforts to supplement the available data to develop a safe and effective Ebola vaccine strategies in adults and children alike.

The PREVAC international consortium, which includes scientists from Inserm and from institutions in Africa, U.S. and UK, has published the results of a large-scale randomized clinical trial in West Africa in the New England Journal of Medicine. These results confirm the safety of three different vaccine regimens, and suggest that an immune response is induced and maintained for up to 12 months.

In a context where many sub-Saharan African countries regularly face Ebola outbreaks, vaccines are seen as a central tool to fight the spread of the disease. Since 2019, two vaccines have obtained WHO Prequalification against the Zaire ebolavirus species: the vaccine rVSVΔG-ZEBOV-GP developed by Merck, Sharpe & Dohme, Corp., and the Ad26.ZEBOV and MVA-BN-Filo vaccine regimen from Johnson & Johnson.

Beyond these advances, research on Ebola vaccines must continue. Indeed, additional data is needed in order to establish the most appropriate recommendations regarding the use of these vaccines, in different categories of the population.
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I still don't trust Ebola vaccines since look at what research universities claim: "The researchers noted that they were unable to assess the actual level of protection against the disease from the vaccines as no participants contracted Ebola during the trial, which began enrolment in 2017. But they said the vaccines were found to be safe for children and adults."
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