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.
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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
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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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Mucus-based lubricant proves highly effective against HIV and herpes
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... e-hiv.html
by KTH Royal Institute of Technologyquote]

Cow mucus provides the basis for a synthetic prophylactic gel developed at KTH Royal Institute of Technology to protect against HIV and herpes transmission. The lubricating gel proved 70% effective in lab tests against HIV, and 80% effective against herpes.

The viral prophylactic tests were conducted in a lab on several types of cells. The results were reported today in the Advanced Science.

Hongji Yan, a biomaterials researcher at KTH, says the promising results raise hope that when it becomes available as a product, the gel could help reverse troubling trends in the spread of sexually transmitted infections.

More than 1 million STIs are acquired every day worldwide and most of these are asymptomatic, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). AIDS, the disease caused by HIV, remains a significant global epidemic, and adolescent girls and young women are twice as likely as men to contract HIV as their male counterparts according to UNAIDS.

The lubricant is derived from mucin, a main component of mucus that is produced in the human body, though suppliers provide the bovine type in purified form for fabrication of hydrogels.[/quote]

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New drug therapy for young children with severe eczema
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... evere.html
by University of Manchester

A biologic therapy for very young children with a moderate to severe form of a common skin condition has been shown to be safe and effective in an international trial which involved University of Manchester clinical scientists working within the Clinical Trials Facility at Royal Manchester Children's Hospital.

Sponsored by the Biotech companies Regeneron and Sanofi, the study of dupilumab in poorly controlled eczema is the first large-scale randomized double-blind trial of a monoclonal antibody for any skin disease in patients aged six months to six years.

The study, published in The Lancet showed that the drug greatly improved the severity of the condition, reducing skin itch and pain within two weeks.

It also significantly improved patients' sleep, and the quality of life of patients and their parents.

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Experimental Treatment Puts 5 Cases of Lupus Into Remission
September 16, 2022

Introduction:

(IFL Science) In a result that some immunologists are calling “revolutionary,” five cases of the severe autoimmune disease lupus have been sent into remission – and it’s all thanks to an experimental therapy previously known as a cancer treatment.

“We are very excited about these results,” said Georg Schett, a professor of rheumatology at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg and lead researcher on the project.

“Several other autoimmune diseases which are dependent on B cells and show autoantibodies may respond to this treatment,” he told The Guardian. “These include rheumatoid arthritis, myositis and systemic sclerosis… also diseases like multiple sclerosis may be very responsive to CAR T-cell treatment.”

But what is CAR T-cell therapy? It’s a fairly new treatment, usually used in the treatment of leukemia or lymphoma, which is both incredibly specialized and complex to administer, and almost astonishingly simple in concept. It's based on the miniature arms race that occurs between invading cancer cells and our body's own immune response to them: the immune system creates and deploys T-cells, a type of white blood cell which can hunt down and kill cancer cells in the body, while the cancer cells in turn can disguise themselves and hide from the incoming defenses.

Against that background, CAR T-cell therapy is basically a way to give those T-cells a helping hand – setting up a Special Forces squad, if you like. “[It] uses a patient's own T-cells, which are genetically modified in a lab, expanded into large numbers, and then reinfused back into the patient,” explained Chris McNamara, Consultant Hematologist at HCA Healthcare UK, in an explainer article on the treatment. “These new T-cells have a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), which can identify protein on the surface of the cancer cells and destroy them.”

Read more of the IFL Science article here: https://www.iflscience.com/-it-s-kind- ... ion-65365

Here is the article presented by the HCA Healthcare UK that explains the treatment: https://www.hcahealthcare.co.uk/blogs/u ... ll-therapy

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Rheumatoid arthritis drug effective against myasthenia gravis
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... henia.html
by Karolinska Institutet

Early intervention with rituximab, a drug used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), can reduce the risk of deterioration in myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that causes loss of muscle control. This is according to a randomized clinical study led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and published in the journal JAMA Neurology.

"Patients with new onset myasthenia who received rituximab as a complement to standard of care showed greater improvement compared with patients who were given a placebo," says Fredrik Piehl, professor at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, and the study's principal investigator. "They also needed fewer adjuvant treatments and lower doses of cortisone than the placebo group. These are encouraging results that give hope for a more effective strategy for controlling new onset myasthenia more quickly, even if larger studies will be needed to assess the long-term effects of the treatment."

In myasthenia gravis, the immune system attacks the receptors between nerves and muscles, causing abnormal muscle weakness and fatigue. It often starts around the eye muscles but usually spread to other muscles in the body. The disease tends to progress in flare-ups and since there is no curative treatment, intervention is primarily aimed at dampening the immune system and treating the symptoms. Around 25 per 100,000 people live with the disease in Sweden, the majority of whom are women.

There is only one approved drug for myasthenia, Soliris, but the treatment is costly, which means that very few patients—none to date in Sweden—have benefited from it. Instead, many patients are treated with cortisone, which can cause side effects, and older tablet treatments that tend to lack scientific support.

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A smartphone's camera and flash could help people measure blood oxygen levels at home

by University of Washington

First, pause and take a deep breath.

When we breathe in, our lungs fill with oxygen, which is distributed to our red blood cells for transportation throughout our bodies. Our bodies need a lot of oxygen to function, and healthy people have at least 95% oxygen saturation all the time.

Conditions like asthma or COVID-19 make it harder for bodies to absorb oxygen from the lungs. This leads to oxygen saturation percentages that drop to 90% or below, an indication that medical attention is needed.

In a clinic, doctors monitor oxygen saturation using pulse oximeters—those clips you put over your fingertip or ear. But monitoring oxygen saturation at home multiple times a day could help patients keep an eye on COVID symptoms, for example.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... xygen.html

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Researchers advance efforts to tailor drug delivery to cells' mitochondria
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-advance-e ... ivery.html
by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

In a study using lab-grown cells, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers specializing in aging report they have successfully delivered a common blood pressure drug directly to the inner membrane of mitochondria.

Developing ways to directly target these energy-producing parts of the cell for delivery of drugs has long been a goal for researchers because mitochondria drive, control or play a role in almost every biological process, including natural cell death and aging. Alterations or declines in mitochondrial activity and pathways are closely aligned with decreased organ function and frailty. But because of the mitochondria's double-membrane structure, scientists have found it challenging to get drug molecules to penetrate the inner membrane and gain access to core functions of the organelles.

The new study, described in the Aug. 4 issue of PNAS Nexus, reports on a method that essentially hijacks a system already used by mitochondria to transport oxygen and other chemicals to the inner membrane.

"Our study shows that we can use the body's natural mitochondrial transport system to deliver drugs much more precisely," says Peter Abadir, M.D., associate professor of geriatric medicine and gerontology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

For the study, the researchers lab-synthesized three naturally occurring transport proteins that interact with mitochondria. They then fused a commonly prescribed blood pressure medication (losartan) to each of these three proteins to determine which had the highest success rate penetrating the inner membrane of the mitochondria. These fused proteins, dubbed mtLOS1, mtLOS2 and mtLOS3, when introduced to lab-grown cells in separate trials, were able to transport the drug directly to the mitochondria at a significantly higher concentration than was possible with free losartan not fused to the transport protein. This could be seen under a microscope using florescence.

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Gel treats gum disease by fighting inflammation
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... ation.html
by New York University

A topical gel that blocks the receptor for a metabolic byproduct called succinate treats gum disease by suppressing inflammation and changing the makeup of bacteria in the mouth, according to a new study led by researchers at NYU College of Dentistry and published in Cell Reports.

The research, conducted in mice and using human cells and plaque samples, lays the groundwork for a non-invasive treatment for gum disease that people could apply to the gums at home to prevent or treat gum disease.

Gum disease (also known as periodontitis or periodontal disease) is one of the most prevalent inflammatory diseases, affecting nearly half of adults 30 and older. It is marked by three components: inflammation, an imbalance of unhealthy and healthy bacteria in the mouth, and destruction of the bones and structures that support the teeth. Uncontrolled gum disease can lead to painful and bleeding gums, difficulty chewing, and tooth loss.

"No current treatment for gum disease simultaneously reduces inflammation, limits disruption to the oral microbiome, and prevents bone loss. There is an urgent public health need for more targeted and effective treatments for this common disease," said Yuqi Guo, an associate research scientist in the Department of Molecular Pathobiology at NYU Dentistry and the study's co-first author.

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Epigenetic treatment in mice improves spinal cord regeneration after injury
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... -cord.html
by Public Library of Science

Currently, spinal cord injury does not have any effective treatments; physical rehabilitation can help patients regain some mobility, but for severe cases the outcomes are extremely limited by the failure of spinal neurons to regenerate naturally after injury. However, in a study publishing September 20th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, researchers led by Simone Di Giovanni at Imperial College London in the U.K. show that weekly treatments with an epigenetic activator can aid the regrowth of sensory and motor neurons in the spinal cord when given to mice 12 weeks after severe injury.

Building on their past success, researchers used a small molecule called TTK21 to activate genetic programming that induces axon regeneration in neurons. TTK21 changes the epigenetic state of genes by activating the CBP/p300 family of co-activator proteins. They tested TTK21 treatment in a mouse model of severe spinal cord injury. The mice lived in an enriched environment that gave them opportunities to be physically active, as is encouraged in human patients.

Treatment began 12 weeks after severe spinal cord injury and lasted for 10 weeks. Researchers found several improvements after TTK21 treatment compared with control treatment. The most noticeable effect was more axon sprouting in the spinal cord. They also found that retraction of motor axons above the point of injury halted, and that sensory axon growth increased. These changes were likely due to the observed increase in gene expression related to regeneration. The next step will be to enhance these effects even more and to trigger the regenerating axons to reconnect to the rest of the nervous system so that animals can regain their ability to move with ease.

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First direct evidence that babies react to taste and smell in the womb
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... -womb.html
by Durham University

A study led by Durham University's Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, UK, took 4D ultrasound scans of 100 pregnant women to see how their unborn babies responded after being exposed to flavors from foods eaten by their mothers.

Researchers looked at how the fetuses reacted to either carrot or kale flavors just a short time after the flavors had been ingested by the mothers.

Fetuses exposed to carrot showed more "laughter-face" responses while those exposed to kale showed more "cry-face" responses.

Their findings could further our understanding of the development of human taste and smell receptors.

The researchers also believe that what pregnant women eat might influence babies' taste preferences after birth and potentially have implications for establishing healthy eating habits.

The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.

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Researchers reveal new strategy to prevent blood clots without increasing the risk of bleeding
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-reveal-st ... clots.html
by University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center

A nanoparticle therapy developed by investigators at University Hospitals (UH) and Case Western Reserve University targets overactive neutrophils, a specific kind of white blood cell, to prevent almost all types of blood clots while causing no increased risk for bleeding. The preclinical findings, published in Science Translational Medicine, may lead to safer ways to care for patients impacted by blood clots. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), roughly 900,000 people in the U.S. suffer from life-threatening blood clots each year.

"What we are showing for the first time is that neutrophils are key drivers of both arterial and venous thrombosis. And when you target a neutrophil, you do not increase bleeding risk, you only decrease clotting risk," said Lalitha Nayak, MD, study lead author, hematologist/oncologist at UH Seidman Cancer Center, member of the Developmental Therapeutics Program at Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, and associate professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine.