How this sci-fi-sounding tech is already being tested on humans, and what it could mean for biohackers, color blindness, and the future of human vision.
Category: biotech/medical
High manufacturing costs are limiting patient access to CAR T cell therapies, according to new research, which indicates that decentralization, vector-free modification technologies, and AI would help make production cheaper.
Making CAR T therapies is an expensive business. A recent study suggested that producing a single batch can cost anywhere between $170,000 and $220,000, depending on the logistical, processing, and distribution steps involved.
The fundamental problem is that CAR T production is not a good fit for centralized manufacturing, according to Martin Bonamino, PhD, leader of the experimental cancer immunotherapy group at Brazil’s National Cancer Institute (INCA).
Manipulating senescent cells by eliminating them or by modifying their activity has attracted huge interest for its potential to delay or even treat many age-related diseases, and to improve healthy aging. Mitochondria, and in particular their calcium levels, have emerged as key regulators of cellular senescence, cell death and the balance between the two, and might constitute targets for novel strategies to stifle the viability or properties of senescent cells.
Emotional responses to sensory experience are central to the human condition in health and disease. We hypothesized that principles governing the emergence of emotion from sensation might be discoverable through their conservation across the mammalian lineage. We therefore designed a cross-species neural activity screen, applicable to humans and mice, combining precise affective behavioral measurements, clinical medication administration, and brain-wide intracranial electrophysiology. This screen revealed conserved biphasic dynamics in which emotionally salient sensory signals are swiftly broadcast throughout the brain and followed by a characteristic persistent activity pattern. Medication-based interventions that selectively blocked persistent dynamics while preserving fast broadcast selectively inhibited emotional responses in humans and mice.
In a discovery three decades in the making, scientists at Rutgers and Brookhaven National Laboratory have acquired detailed knowledge about the internal structures and mode of regulation for a specialized protein and are proceeding to develop tools that can capitalize on its ability to help plants combat a wide range of diseases.
The work, which exploits a natural process where plant cells die on purpose to help the host plant stay healthy, is expected to have wide applications in the agricultural sector, offering new ways to protect major food crops from a variety of devastating diseases, the scientists said.
In a study published in Nature Communications, a team led by Eric Lam at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Qun Liu at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York reported that advanced crystallography and computer modeling techniques have enabled them to obtain the best picture yet of a pivotal plant protease, a protein enzyme that cuts other proteins, known as metacaspase 9.
Chinese researchers have developed a technology that sheds light on how the three-dimensional (3D) organization of plant genomes influences gene expression—especially in photosynthesis.
The research, which was led by Prof. Xiao Jun at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with BGI Research, is published in Science Advances.
The innovative method not only provides a more precise tool for understanding the intricate 3D interactions between genes, but also highlights the critical role of long-range chromatin interactions in gene regulation.
Enantiomers, or molecule pairs that are mirror images of each other, make up more than half of FDA-approved drugs in use today, including those used in treatments for cancer, neurologic diseases and arthritis. Separating enantiomers is critical for drug manufacturing because the effect of each molecule in the pair can be very different—for example, one enantiomer might cure a headache while its mirror-image could cause a headache.
Faster and more accurate enantiomer separations would help with the overall drug discovery and screening process, but by their very nature, enantiomers—which have identical compositions and only differ by not being superimposable (think left hand and right hand)—are notoriously difficult to separate.
An effort by a group of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to find an efficient, sustainable way to perform these critical enantiomer separations is the focus of a new study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
A study of more than 100 genomes from people who lived in ancient China has unmasked a “ghost” in their midst.
A new study suggests that SSRIs, commonly prescribed antidepressants, may reduce biological markers of Alzheimer’s disease.