Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Researchers have developed a new family of nano-scale capsules capable of carrying CRISPR gene editing tools to different organs of the body before harmlessly dissolving. The capsules were able to enter the brains of mice and successfully edit a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gene therapies have the potential to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, but they face a common barrier — the blood-brain barrier.

Dual-action cell therapy engineered to eliminate established tumors and train the immune system to eradicate primary tumor and prevent cancer’s recurrence. Scientists are harnessing a new way to turn cancer cells into potent, anti-cancer agents. In the latest work from the lab of Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, investigators have developed a new cell therapy approach to eliminate established tumors and induce long-term immunity, training the immune system so that it can prevent cancer from recurring. The team tested their dual-action, cancer-killing vaccine in an advanced mouse model of the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma, with promising results. Findings are published in Science Translational Medicine.

For the first time since it was proposed more than 80 years ago, scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have demonstrated the phenomenon of “quantum recoil,” which describes how the particle nature of light has a major impact on electrons moving through materials. The research is published online today (January 19) in the journal Nature Photonics.

Making quantum recoil a practical reality should eventually allow businesses to more accurately produce X-rays of specific energy levels, leading to superior accuracy in healthcare and manufacturing applications such as medical imaging and flaw detection in semiconductor chips.

Quantum recoil was theorized by Russian physicist and Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg in 1940 to accurately account for radiation emitted when charged particles like electrons move through a medium, such as water, or materials with repeated patterns on the surface, including those on butterfly wings and graphite.

A ‘longevity protein’ discovered in the DNA of centenarians promises to rejuvenate the heart by at least 10 years. Hope comes from a preclinical study coordinated by Annibale Puca of the MultiMedica group in Milan and Paolo Madeddu of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, funded by the British Heart Foundation and the Italian Ministry of Health and published in ‘Cardiovascular Research’, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).

Altering a cellular process can lead stem cells—cells from which other cells in the body develop—to die or regenerate, according to a new study led by Cedars-Sinai and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

The findings, to be published today (January 13) in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Stem Cell, may assist in the development of new drugs that can manipulate this process to slow or stop cancer from growing and spreading, and enable regeneration in the context of other diseases.

Ophir Klein, MD, PhD, executive director of Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s and the senior author of the study, said the findings underscore the body’s need to produce just the right amount of new cells.

Many of us have seen microscopic images of neurons in the brain — each neuron appearing as a glowing cell in a vast sea of blackness. This image is misleading: Neurons don’t exist in isolation. In the human brain, some 86 billion neurons form 100 trillion connections to each other — numbers that, ironically, are far too large for the human brain to fathom.

Wei-Chung Allen Lee, Harvard Medical School associate professor of neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital, is working in a new field of neuroscience called connectomics, which aims to comprehensively map connections between neurons in the brain.

Last year, Verve Therapeutics started the first human trial of a CRISPR treatment that could benefit most people—a signal that gene editing may be ready to go mainstream.

The University of Singapore has invented a VR Glove that allows you to feel objects in the metaverse! The technology includes pressurized fingertips and restricted motion that mimics the real-life sensation of picking up objects. The goal is to assist medical professionals to practice in Virtual Reality (but we can see how these would make for some pretty incredible immersive gameplay). Production will begin over the next few years.

The VR glove is an important advancement in wearable tech, as it is a fully untethered haptic system. With this super fast feedback loop, the glove encounters the metaverse in what is essentially real-time. So, that means minimal to no lag for users. Additionally, the gloves are lighter and more affordable than the gloves that are currently on the market. This makes The National University of Singapore’s HaptGlove all the more impressive as a piece of wearable tech.

The glove was developed by The National University of Singapore for use with trainees at the National University Health System. Specifically, users will be able to use the technology to grasp surgical devices or check the pulse of a patient. Furthermore, the haptic system inside the glove should resemble the feeling of an object on your fingertips, providing real-time feedback. This is an important moment for the medical field that could have serious impact, as VR becomes a testing ground for future health tech. It’s interesting to note this development alongside other trends, like the push towards Web5.

Past neuroscience research consistently found a link between deviations from the “normal” iron metabolism, also known as iron dysregulation, and different neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Specifically, brain regions associated with these diseases have been found to be often populated by microglia (i.e., resident immune cells) packed with Iron.

While the association between iron dysregulation and neurodegenerative diseases is well documented, the ways in which iron accumulation affects the physiology of microglia and neurodegeneration are yet to be fully grasped. Researchers at global health care company Sanofi have recently carried out a study aimed at filling this gap in the literature, by better understanding how microglia respond to iron.

“For years it has been known that iron accumulates in affected brain regions in PD, MS and other neurodegenerative diseases,” Timothy Hammond, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told MedicalXpress. “This is something we can see in patients using MRI imaging, where it has been shown that iron levels increase over the course of the disease. We also had our own data from progressive MS patients showing iron dysregulation in brain microglia, the resident immune cells of the brain.”