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Category: biotech/medical – Page 888

Australian military is funding a computer chip merged with human brain cells

This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here.

The Australian military is funding a project to grow intelligent “mini-brains” in petri dishes. The goal is to use these “DishBrains” to design better AIs — and, eventually, even combine the two, creating AIs merged with processing features of human brain cells.

By creating just the right conditions, scientists can coax stem cells into growing into “organoids,” three-dimensional tissues that resemble the structure and function of different organs — even brains.

Nanopore technology achieves breakthrough in protein variant detection

A team of scientists led by the University of Oxford have achieved a significant breakthrough in detecting modifications on protein structures. The method, published in Nature Nanotechnology, employs innovative nanopore technology to identify structural variations at the single-molecule level, even deep within long protein chains.

Human cells contain approximately 20,000 -encoding genes. However, the actual number of proteins observed in cells is far greater, with over 1,000,000 different structures known. These variants are generated through a process known as post-translational modification (PTM), which occurs after a protein has been transcribed from DNA.

PTM introduces structural changes such as the addition of chemical groups or carbohydrate chains to the individual amino acids that make up proteins. This results in hundreds of possible variations for the same protein chain.

Mayo Clinic Q and A: What is cardiac arrest?

DEAR MAYO CLINIC: I’ve heard about several people who have experienced sudden cardiac arrest. What is cardiac arrest? And how is it different from a heart attack? What do you do for someone who has this condition?

ANSWER: Cardiac arrest, or sudden cardiac arrest as it is more formally known, is a medical emergency. Think of it as a problem with the heart’s electrical activity. This synchronized electrical activity allows the heart to fill and pump blood normally. Sudden cardiac arrest can happen unexpectedly and quickly, and the heart stops working. It’s not the same as a heart attack, but it is just as critical that treatment occurs rapidly.

Cardiac arrest is when the heart cannot fulfill its duties, such as pumping oxygenated blood around the body to reach critical areas such as the brain and the rest of the body. It is sometimes called “sudden” because it seems to happen without warning. A person suddenly loses all heart activity, stops breathing and becomes unconscious. Without immediate treatment, sudden cardiac arrest can lead to death.

New method to identify mutations in childhood brain tumors

Researchers at Uppsala university have developed a new method to find mutations in brain tumors in children. They also showed that the mutations change how cancer cells respond to a cancer drug. These findings could lead to better diagnostics and more individualized treatment of children with brain tumors. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in children. It usually develops in the cerebellum and although modern treatment has improved the prognosis so that more than 70% of patients now live more than five years, not all patients can be cured. The aggressive treatment also causes such as balance problems and impaired learning abilities in cancer survivors.

Numerous studies have explored the less than 2% of human DNA that gives rise to proteins, and much less is known about the rest of the . In a cancer, such as medulloblastoma, 98% of the mutations thus occur in the less studied part of the genome. There could be thousands of mutations, and it is difficult to separate the ones driving the cancer from those without importance.

New Role Uncovered for the Signaling Protein STING

STING (short for stimulator of interferon genes) is considered one of the major factors that triggers the immune response in the context of infection, autoimmunity, and cancer. The signaling protein turns on genes involved in cell defense. Now, a team of MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers has discovered that STING can also act as an ion channel that allows protons to leak out of an organelle known as the Golgi body. This makes it the first human immune sensor that can translate danger signals into ion flow.

The findings are published in the journal Science in an article titled, “Human STING is a proton channel.”

“Proton leakage from organelles is a common signal for noncanonical light chain 3B (LC3B) lipidation and inflammasome activation, processes induced upon stimulator of interferon genes (STING) activation,” wrote the researchers. “On the basis of structural analysis, we hypothesized that human STING is a proton channel. Indeed, we found that STING activation induced a pH increase in the Golgi and that STING reconstituted in liposomes enabled transmembrane proton transport.”

This drug might let us regrow lost teeth. It’s heading to human trials

A drug that causes animals to grow new teeth is heading to clinical trials. If it proves safe and effective in people, it could one day allow us to regenerate teeth lost to injury, disease, or old age.

The challenge: 17% of Americans will lose all of their teeth by the time they’re 65, and the vast majority of us will lose at least some teeth as we get older.

While dentures or implants can replace these lost teeth, one can feel less-than-natural, and the other requires surgery.

CAR T Cells Could Change the Face of Autoimmune Therapy

Cellular therapies like chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells could represent a promising new avenue by which to treat autoimmune diseases, according to a recent review article. The authors cautioned, however, that most of the research testing CAR-based therapies has been in very early-stage trials.

CAR T cells are human cells that have been genetically modified to express a synthetic receptor, The cells have been used successfully as a therapy in several types of cancer, such as large B-cell lymphoma and multiple myeloma.

Manipulating T cells to target cancer cells has worked to treat some cancers. Researchers are investigating whether the same approach might be used to curb the dysregulated immune response that underlies autoimmune disease.

Similarities in gene expression between post-mortem and living human brains

An important objective of medical research is to identify the underlying molecular mechanisms of human brain health and diseases.

This objective has been predominantly achieved through observational studies of gene expression in human brain tissues obtained from post-mortem brain donors for their analysis. Importantly, many of these studies are based on the assumption that gene expression in the post-mortem human brain is an exact representation of gene expression in the living human brain.

A recent study published on the medRxiv preprint server challenges this assumption by comparing human prefrontal cortex gene expression between living and post-mortem samples.