In a new review of the evidence, scientists propose two main types of Parkinson’s, depending on which part of the nervous system the disease originates in.
Historically, the pharmaceutical industry has relied on economies of scale, mixing hundreds of litres of reagents in massive reaction chambers to make millions of doses of a single drug. Bio-MOD and related systems, however, cycle small amounts of chemicals through a series of thumb-sized chambers that can produce hundreds or thousands of doses of multiple drugs, all in less than 24 hours. Several teams have won support for this vision from the US military: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has handed out more than US$15 million to support these do-it-yourself drug-makers.
Engineers are miniaturizing pharmaceutical production in the hope of making it portable and inexpensive.
The idea of growing babies outside the body has inspired novels and movies for decades.
Now, research groups around the world are exploring the possibility of artificial gestation. For instance, one group successfully grew a lamb in an artificial womb for four weeks. Australian researchers have also experimented with artificial gestation for lambs and sharks.
And in recent weeks, researchers in The Netherlands have received €2.9 million to develop a prototype for gestating premature babies.
Through early adulthood, exposure to new experiences—like learning to drive a car or memorizing information for an exam—triggers change in the human brain, re-wiring neural pathways to imprint memories and modify behavior. Similar to humans, the behavior of Florida carpenter ants is not set in stone—their roles, whether it is protecting the colony or foraging for food, are determined by signals from the physical and social environment early in their life. But questions remain about how long they are vulnerable to epigenetic changes and what pathways govern social behavior in ants.
Now, a team led by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania discovered that a protein called CoRest, a neural repressor that is also found in humans, plays a central role in determining the social behavior of ants. The results, published today in Molecular Cell, also revealed that worker ants called Majors, known as “brawny” soldiers that protect colonies, can be reprogrammed to perform the foraging role—generally reserved for their sisters, the Minor ants—up to five days after they emerge as an adult ant. However, the reprogramming is ineffective at the 10-day mark, revealing how narrow the window of epigenetic plasticity is in ants.
“How behavior becomes established in humans is deeply fascinating—we know it’s quite plastic especially during childhood and early adolescence—however, of course, we cannot study or manipulate this experimentally,” said the study’s senior author Shelley Berger, Ph.D., the Daniel S. Och University Professor in the departments of Cell and Developmental Biology and Biology, and director of the Penn Epigenetics Institute. “Ants, with their complex societies and behavior, and similar plasticity, provide a wonderful laboratory model to understand the underlying mechanisms and pathways.
The combination treatment reversed diabetes and obesity while improving heart and kidney function—even when those organs had already begun failing.
On this episode of Anti-Aging Hacks show, we get into the following topics:
1. What is Gene Therapy and how Practical is it?
Continue reading “How Gene Therapy can Help You Stop Aging, Build Muscles, and Fight Diseases” »
In a new study, scientists observed several simultaneous reactions in mice given a common chemotherapy drug: Their gut bacteria and tissue changed, their blood and brains showed signs of inflammation, and their behaviors suggested they were fatigued and cognitively impaired.
The research is the first to show these combined events in the context of chemotherapy, and opens the door to the possibility that regulating gut bacteria could not only calm chemo side effects like nausea and diarrhea, but also potentially lessen the memory and concentration problems many cancer survivors report.
More research is needed to further understand how the chemo-modified gut influences the brain in a way that can have an impact on behavior. The same lab at The Ohio State University is continuing mouse studies to test the relationship and running a parallel clinical trial in breast cancer patients.
A British engineer has found a way to filter unwanted cells from blood using magnets — and his tool could be used in clinical trials as soon as next year.
Thanks to existing research, biochemical scientist George Frodsham knew it was possible to force magnetic nanoparticles to bind to specific cells in the body. But while other researchers did so primarily to make those cells show up in images, he wondered whether the same technique might allow doctors to remove unwanted cells from the blood.
“When someone has a tumour you cut it out,” he told The Telegraph. “Blood cancer is a tumour in the blood, so why not just take it out in the same way?”
The program, called Somatic Cell Genome Editing, will be investing $190 million. (2018)
Last year, I wrote about a team of Chinese scientists having received ethical approval to perform a clinical trial of gene-editing. The goal was to test whether gene-editing may be a potential cure for cancer. The technology used for the trial is called CRISPR/Cas9, not exactly a household name. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Cas9 stands for CRISPR associated protein 9, an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme. If you read all these words a few times, it can make your head hurt. The topic is complex, but I hope in this post to make it more understandable.
Death means an end, but one recent research challenges the idea and fuels the possibility of reviving the brain. And it has plunged the scientific community into an ethical debate.
Physical movements, thoughts, and actions are traits that define how we know the difference between what’s alive and what’s lifeless i.e. death. But beyond that, we hardly understand what death means. We’ve known that death is an eventuality and irreversible. But recent research done back in April 2019 changed all that. Consequently, science is making us rethink the definition of death and the sheer fact that it is permanent.
Continue reading “Immortality Debate: Can Science Cheat Death?” »
