Robert C Williams performed genetic analysis to understand how the HLA and SLC16A11 genes affect Type 2 diabetes in Indigenous Americans.
GC Therapeutics’ plug-and-play stem cell programming platform aims to reduce cell therapy development time by up to 100 times.
Cell therapies have revolutionized the treatment of certain disease areas; however, challenges in scaling these therapies…
Cell therapy startup GC Therapeutics (GCTx) has emerged from the lab of renowned geneticist George Church, securing a $65 million Series A funding round that brings the total raised by the company to a cool $75 million. The company is on a mission to enable the next generation of cell therapies through its proprietary TFome platform, which GCTx claims is the first plug-and-play induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) cellular programming platform.
Continue reading “George Church lab spawns $75m cell therapy startup” »
RNA interference (RNAi) technology has gradually become a cutting-edge technology for treating diseases such as genetic disorders and cancer due to its huge potential in gene expression regulation. However, the efficient delivery and safety of short interfering RNA (siRNA) remain key challenges for its clinical application.
Summary: The largest and most diverse study on recessive genetic changes in developmental disorders reveals that over 80% of cases caused by recessive variants are linked to known genes. Researchers analyzed data from nearly 30,000 families and found that a shift in focus from gene discovery to interpreting changes in known genes could double diagnosis rates.
The study highlights the importance of genetic background in diagnosis and suggests that some patients may have multiple contributing genetic factors. These findings could lead to more personalized and accurate diagnoses for families affected by developmental disorders.
Could slight wobbles in the orbit of Mars be caused by microscopic black holes that have existed since the Big Bang? This is what a recent study published in Physical Review D hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and UC Santa Cruz investigated how these miniscule black holes could be comprised of dark matter, which was first hypothesized in the 1970s, resulting in miniscule wobbles in the orbit of Mars. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the characteristics of dark matter, which remains one of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe.
“Given decades of precision telemetry, scientists know the distance between Earth and Mars to an accuracy of about 10 centimeters,” said Dr. David Kaiser, who is a professor of physics and the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at MIT, and a co-author on the study. “We’re taking advantage of this highly instrumented region of space to try and look for a small effect. If we see it, that would count as a real reason to keep pursuing this delightful idea that all of dark matter consists of black holes that were spawned in less than a second after the Big Bang and have been streaming around the universe for 14 billion years.”
For the study, the researchers began with handwritten calculations produced by Tung X. Tran, who eventually became the study’s lead author and is a graduate student at Stanford University, which calculated the results if a primordial black hole passed through a human body, which he calculated would push the person approximately 20 feet.
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common cause of illness-based death throughout the world. According to the World Health Organization, CAD causes 17.9 million deaths per year worldwide, nearly one-third of all illness-based deaths annually.
Coronary angiography is currently the best method of confirming a CAD diagnosis, but it is expensive and invasive, poses risks to patients, and is not suitable for early diagnosis and assessing disease risk.
Seeking a safer, lower-cost and more efficient diagnostic method, a research team from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine’s School of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine’s School of Life Science, and Hunan University of Chinese Medicine’s School of Traditional Chinese Medicine has used artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a diagnostic algorithm based on tongue imaging. Their work is published in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine.
Despite the ongoing threat posed by new viruses following the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which led to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, new antiviral drugs continue to be developed to effectively block viral entry into the human body.
Professor Kyungjae Myung and his research team in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, affiliated with the IBS Center for Genomic Integrity, has discovered UNI418, a compound that effectively prevents the penetration of the coronavirus. This compound works by regulating dielectric homeostasis, thereby inhibiting the virus’s entry into human cells.
In the present investigation, the SD rats were separated into two groups old control group and the treatment group (n = 8). The treatment group received four injections of E5 every alternate day for 8 days, and eight injections every alternate day for 16 days. Body weight, grip strength, cytokines, and biochemical markers were measured for more than 400 days of the study. Clinical observation, necropsy, and histology were performed. The E5 treatment exhibited great potential by showing significantly improved grip strength, remarkably decreased pro-inflammatory markers of chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, as well as biomarkers for vital organs (BUN, SGPT, SGOT, and triglycerides), and increased anti-oxidant levels. Clinical examinations, necropsies, and histopathology revealed that the animals treated with the E5 had normal cellular structure and architecture. In conclusion, this unique ‘plasma-derived exosome’ treatment (E5) alone is adequate to improve the health-span and extend the lifespan of the old SD rats significantly.
The Pennsylvania State University in May blocked a prominent professor at the school from doing research and making presentations on its behalf, Retraction Watch has learned.
The professor, Deborah Kelly, has faced mounting scrutiny over her work since a researcher in the United Kingdom noticed apparent data manipulation in a now-retracted article she published in 2017. Kelly earned her third retraction last week following a university probe that found “serious data integrity concerns” in another paper, as we reported at the time.
In comments she made via her legal counsel for that story, Kelly, a biomedical engineer and an expert in electron microscopy, told us:
