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Category: biotech/medical – Page 866

Dr. Joni L. Rutter, Ph.D. — Director, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences — NIH

Dr. Joni L. Rutter, Ph.D., (https://ncats.nih.gov/director/bio) is the Director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS — https://ncats.nih.gov/) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) where she oversees the planning and execution of the Center’s complex, multifaceted programs that aim to overcome scientific and operational barriers impeding the development and delivery of new treatments and other health solutions. Under her direction, NCATS supports innovative tools and strategies to make each step in the translational process more effective and efficient, thus speeding research across a range of diseases, with a particular focus on rare diseases.

By advancing the science of translation, NCATS helps turn promising research discoveries into real-world applications that improve people’s health. The NCATS Strategic Plan can be found at — https://ncats.nih.gov/strategicplan.

In her previous role as the NCATS deputy director, Dr. Rutter collaborated with colleagues from government, academia, industry and nonprofit patient organizations to establish robust interactions with NCATS programs.

Prior to joining NCATS, Dr. Rutter served as the director of scientific programs within the All of Us Research Program, where she led the scientific programmatic development and implementation efforts to build a national research cohort of at least 1 million U.S. participants to advance precision medicine. During her time at NIH, she also has led the Division of Neuroscience and Behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). In this role, she developed and coordinated research on basic and clinical neuroscience, brain and behavioral development, genetics, epigenetics, computational neuroscience, bioinformatics, and drug discovery. Dr. Rutter also coordinated the NIDA Genetics Consortium and biospecimen repository.

Throughout her career, Dr. Rutter has earned an international reputation for her diverse and unique expertise via her journal publications and speaking engagements, and she has received several scientific achievement awards, including the 2022 Rare Disease Legislative Advocates–RareVoice Award for Federal Advocacy and the 2022 FedHealthIT–Women in Leadership Impact Award.

Dr. Rutter received her Ph.D. from the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire, and completed a fellowship at NCI within the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics.

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Common thyroid cancer symptoms to look for

The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland in your lower neck. It produces hormones that help regulate your metabolism, temperature and energy levels.

Thyroid cancer develops when cells within the thyroid mutate and grow abnormally. Thyroid cancer symptoms can be subtle early on and sometimes are blamed on an infection or a seasonal allergy. Thyroid cancer is highly treatable using a variety of methods.

Brain implants and AI help voiceless patients to speak up

Scientists use AI-powered brain-computer interface (BCI) to decipher speech.

Brain chips, a current research focus, are used for recording brain activity and treating several neurodegenerative diseases. In May this year, a man who lost the ability to talk because of a motorcycle incident stood up after 12 years thanks to brain implants that provided a bridge for communication between his brain and spinal cord.

Another area in which brain implants have shown significant potential is deciphering speech. Decoding brain signals to speech.

Gremlin/iStock.

In May this year, a man who lost the ability to talk because of a motorcycle incident stood up after 12 years thanks to brain implants that provided a bridge for communication between his brain and spinal cord.

Genotyping of HIV-1 to Detect Drug Resistance

To address the HIV surveillance needs of the global community, the Applied Biosystems HIV-1 Genotyping Kit with Integrase offers broad genotyping coverage of HIV-1 Group M subtypes from extracted viral RNA from plasma and dried blood spot (DBS) samples to detect resistance to protease inhibitors, nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors, non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors, and integrase inhibitors.

This HIV-1 resistance kit harnesses gold-standard Sanger sequencing technology to amplify and reliably sequence the diverse and rapidly evolving HIV-1 virus.

This product employs assays for HIV-1 genotyping licensed from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Novel Therapeutic Model Created to Study Eye Diseases

“Microglia exhibit both maladaptive and adaptive roles in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases and have emerged as a therapeutic target for central nervous system (CNS) disorders, including those affecting the retina,” wrote the researchers. “Replacing maladaptive microglia, such as those impacted by aging or over-activation, with exogenous microglia that enable adaptive functions has been proposed as a potential therapeutic strategy for neurodegenerative diseases. To investigate the potential of microglial cell replacement as a strategy for retinal diseases, we first employed an efficient protocol to generate a significant quantity of human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC)-derived microglia.”

“Our understanding of microglia function comes predominantly from rodent studies due to the difficulty of sourcing human tissue and isolating the microglia from these tissues. But there are genetic and functional differences between microglia in mice and humans, so these studies may not accurately represent many human conditions,” explained lead author Wenxin Ma, a PhD, biologist at the Retinal Neurophysiology Section, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health.

“To address this concern, researchers have been growing human microglia from human stem cells. We wanted to take this a step further and see if we could transplant human microglia into the mouse retina, to serve as a platform for screening therapeutic drugs as well as explore the potential of microglia transplantation as a therapy itself,” added senior author Wai Wong, vice president of retinal disease, Janssen Research and Development.

New pocket-sized device for clinicians could spot infected wounds faster

It’s notoriously difficult for doctors to identify a wound that is becoming infected. Clinical signs and symptoms are imprecise and methods of identifying bacteria can be time-consuming and inaccessible, so a diagnosis can be subjective and dependent on clinician experience. But infection can stall healing or spread into the body if it isn’t treated quickly, putting a patient’s health in grave danger. An international team of scientists and clinicians thinks they have the solution: a device run from a smartphone or tablet app, which allows advanced imaging of a wound to identify infection.

“Wound care is one of today’s most expensive and overlooked threats to patients and our overall health care system,” said Robert Fraser of Western University and Swift Medical Inc., corresponding author of the study published in Frontiers in Medicine. “Clinicians need better tools and data to best serve their patients who are unnecessarily suffering.”

The scientists developed a device called the Swift Ray 1, which can be attached to a smartphone and connected to the Swift Skin and Wound software. This can take medical-grade photographs, infrared thermography images (which measure body heat), and bacterial fluorescence images (which reveal bacteria using violet light).

CU Boulder researchers develop arrays of tiny crystals that deliver efficient wireless energy

Imagine a person on the ground guiding an airborne drone that harnesses its energy from a laser beam, eliminating the need for carrying a bulky onboard battery.

That is the vision of a group of CU Boulder scientists from the Hayward Research Group. In a new study, the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering researchers have developed a novel and resilient photomechanical material that can transform light energy into mechanical work without heat or electricity, offering innovative possibilities for energy-efficient, wireless and remotely controlled systems. Its wide-ranging potential spans across diverse industries, including robotics, aerospace and biomedical devices.

In a new study published in Nature Materials, the Hayward Research Group has developed a novel and resilient photomechanical material that can transform light energy into mechanical work without heat or electricity. The photomechanical materials offer a promising alternative to electrically-wired actuators, with the potential to wirelessly control or power robots or vehicles, such as powering a drone with a laser beam instead of a bulky on-board battery.