Lifeboat Foundation

Autophagy biology has emerged as a ray of hope in addressing age-related diseases such as neurodegenerative disorders. Substantial effort in academia has been directed at advancing our understanding of the field and paving the way for ground-breaking therapies. But with genuine challenges in harnessing the power of autophagy and in developing effective therapies in this disease area, how close are we to really finding the first autophagy boosting drugs…?

The devastating impact of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of Motor Neurone Disease (MND), cannot be overstated. According to the WHO, neurological diseases affect over a billion people globally and are the leading cause of disability and the second leading cause of death worldwide [1, 2]. Incidence is increasing too, predominantly driven by population growth and aging. And, with no prospect of a cure, people who develop these conditions face a bleak future.

Justifiably, this disease area has been the subject of intensive research for many years and there have been some breakthroughs along the way, possibly offering hope for the development of new therapies. However, translating scientific breakthroughs into viable drugs for patients has been enormously challenging.

Acute respiratory infection is caused by a wide range of pathogens, and an etiologic diagnosis is established in only about one third of cases. As a result, broad-spectrum antibiotics are often unnecessarily prescribed and continued. The BioFire FilmArray^® Pneumonia Panel (BioFire PN) is a commercial multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay directed against 33 targets, including viruses, bacteria, and antibiotic resistance genes. In critically ill patients, BioFire PN results have shown a high level of agreement with culture results when tracheal aspirates (TA) or bronchoalveolar lavage fluid were sampled.

Now, in a comparative study, 298 samples (286 expectorated sputum and 12 from TA) deemed of good or moderate quality were obtained from hospitalized adult patients with acute respiratory or cardiopulmonary illness. BioFire PN detected a total of 1.23 bacterial pathogens per sample. Hemophilus influenzae was detected most often (33.0%), followed by Streptococcus pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus (20.5% for both), gram-negative bacilli (18.5%), and Moraxella catarrhalis (12.4%). Standard bacterial culture detected only 0.48 organisms per sample (compared with BioFire PN; P90%. Viral pathogens were detected in 51% of samples. Based on adjudication, the specificity of BioFire PN was only 45.0%. This was attributed to the greater number of potential pathogens identified compared with standard culture.

The North Carolina plant produces drugs that are injected or go through an IV.

The plant makes drugs for anesthesia, medicines that treat infections, and drugs needed for surgeries. The latter are used in surgeries or intensive care units for patients who are placed on ventilators, said Mike Ganio, who studies drug shortages at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

The Pfizer site does not make or store the company’s COVID-19 vaccine or treatments Comirnaty and Paxlovid.

Summary: Researchers reveal how a fertilized egg cell, or zygote, initiates its own genetic program, a process known as zygote genome activation.

The research identifies the OBOX gene family as master-regulators, crucial for this activation. These genes instruct the enzyme RNA polymerase II to transcribe the right genes at the right time, beginning the embryo’s development.

The team suggests that the genes’ functions are redundant to ensure this critical transition occurs successfully.

In a new study published in Nature Methods, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, describe improvements in the methods with which mutations can be introduced in human and other genomes—making these methods much more efficient and less error prone.

In the field of genome editing, scientists often need to change one letter—corresponding to one of the DNA bases Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine or Thymine—to another letter at one specific position in the genome. To do this, they use reagents that cut both strands of the DNA close to the position they want to change.

They then provide the cell with DNA molecules that contain the desired new letter in the hope that the cell’s repair systems will use these molecules to introduce the desired mutation when the DNA break is repaired. Since different repair systems in the cells compete with each other and only one of these systems is able to introduce the desired new mutation, applications of genome editing of single letters have so far been limited by low efficiency and unintended byproducts.

Neurologists at a memory clinic in China diagnosed a 19-year-old with what they believe to be Alzheimer’s disease, making him the youngest person to be diagnosed with the condition in the world.

The male teenager began experiencing memory decline around age 17, and the cognitive losses only worsened over the years.

Continue reading “Scientists Diagnose The Youngest Case of Alzheimer’s Ever Reported” »

Superconductors—found in MRI machines, nuclear fusion reactors and magnetic-levitation trains—work by conducting electricity with no resistance at temperatures near absolute zero, or −459.67°F.

The search for a conventional superconductor that can function at room temperature has been ongoing for roughly a century, but research has sped up dramatically in the last decade because of new advances in machine learning (ML) using supercomputers such as Expanse at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego.

Most recently, Huan Tran, a senior research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) School of Materials Science and Engineering, has worked on Expanse with Professor Tuoc Vu from Hanoi University of Science and Technology (Vietnam) to create an artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) approach to help identify new candidates for potential superconductors in a much faster and reliable way.

Using cannabis may cause changes in the human body’s epigenome, a study of over 1,000 adults suggests. The epigenome functions like a set of switches, activating or deactivating genes to change how our bodies function.

“We observed associations between cumulative marijuana use and multiple epigenetic markers across time,” says Lifang Hou, a preventative medical doctor and epidemiologist from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Cannabis is a commonly used substance in the United States, with 49 percent of people trying it at least once, Hou and a team of US researchers report in their published paper. Some US states and other countries have made it legal, but we still don’t fully understand its effects on our health.

A protein fragment from the brain could be used to track progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The tell-tale fragment of tau protein was detectable in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of patients with the disease, and researchers now hope to develop a blood test using it.

Alzheimer’s is a disease of errant protein aggregates that include amyloid plaques and then later tau tangles. ‘Amyloid plaques begin to form about 10 to 20 years before the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s,’ says Randall Bateman, a neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine who helped lead the study. ‘Whereas tau tangles begin once the symptoms begin.’

Studies in two patient groups, each with hundreds of people, revealed that levels of the fragment in the CSF were indicative of tau clumps in the brain seen on imaging and were linked to symptoms of cognitive decline.