Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,144

Scientists Grow ‘Yarn’ Out of Human Skin Cells So They Can Literally Stitch People Up

A team of researchers at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux have grown yarn from human skin cells that they call a “human textile” — and they say it could be used by surgeons to close wounds or assemble implantable skin grafts.

“These human textiles offer a unique level of biocompatibility and represent a new generation of completely biological tissue-engineered products,” the researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia.

The key advantage of the gruesome yarn is that unlike conventional synthetic surgical materials, the material doesn’t trigger an immune response that can complicate the healing process, according to New Scientist.

Bloom Science Granted Exclusive Option to License ALS Microbiome-based Gut Therapies

Bloom Science and Duke University have entered into an exclusive licensing agreement that provides the biopharmaceutical company access to the intellectual property and technology related to unique strain isolates and genetic variants of Akkermansia genus bacteria.

This type of bacteria has been demonstrated to slow disease progression and prolong survival in animal models of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

AI Can Now Detect Cancer

AI cancer detection may be able to provide doctors the ability to recognize and treat the disease before it spreads.

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) has been rapidly developing over the past few years.

With Siri and Amazon Alexa, self-driving cars, targeted advertisements, chatbots, and automated customer service representatives, the infiltration of AI into our daily lives is anything but subtle.

Drugmaker Regeneron working with U.S. HHS to develop coronavirus treatment

(Reuters) — Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc ( REGN.O ) is working with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop a treatment for the coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 400 people in China, the HHS said on Tuesday.

The company will use the same technology that was used to develop an experimental drug to treat Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the agency said.

Identification of cancer driver genes based on nucleotide context

Cancer genomes contain large numbers of somatic mutations but few of these mutations drive tumor development. Current approaches either identify driver genes on the basis of mutational recurrence or approximate the functional consequences of nonsynonymous mutations by using bioinformatic scores. Passenger mutations are enriched in characteristic nucleotide contexts, whereas driver mutations occur in functional positions, which are not necessarily surrounded by a particular nucleotide context. We observed that mutations in contexts that deviate from the characteristic contexts around passenger mutations provide a signal in favor of driver genes. We therefore developed a method that combines this feature with the signals traditionally used for driver-gene identification. We applied our method to whole-exome sequencing data from 11,873 tumor–normal pairs and identified 460 driver genes that clustered into 21 cancer-related pathways. Our study provides a resource of driver genes across 28 tumor types with additional driver genes identified according to mutations in unusual nucleotide contexts.

Refining the Allotopic Expression of Mitochondrial Genes

Researchers from SENS Research Foundation, including Matthew O’Connor and Amutha Boominathan, have published a new study showing how codons play an important role in getting copies of mitochondrial genes placed in the cellular nucleus to express themselves correctly [1].

A possible solution to mitochondrial diseases

Mitochondrial disease is not a single disease; in fact, it is a group of rare and related conditions that are thought to affect perhaps 1 in 5000 people. These are caused due to mutations in the genes involved in the process of aerobic respiration, one of the main functions of our mitochondria.