Lifeboat Foundation

A serious knock to the head may also deliver an insidious blow to the human immune system – a one-two punch that could reawaken dormant viruses in the body, potentially contributing to neurodegenerative disease.

A study using stem cell ‘mini brains’ has shown that a herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) infection already ‘arrested’ by the immune system can shake off its shackles when brain tissue is injured.

“We thought, what would happen if we subjected the brain tissue model to a physical disruption, something akin to a concussion?” says biomedical engineer Dana Cairns from Tufts University in the US.

Read the 2021 Review Article “Immune and Genome Engineering as the Future of Transplantable Tissue” by Jennifer Elisseeff, PhD, Stephen F. Badylak, MD, DVM, PhD, and Jef D. Boeke, PhD, DSc.

Can artificial intelligence decode the secrets of life itself? Scientists are working on creating virtual cells that behave like real ones, potentially transforming medical research. But is this groundbreaking vision closer to reality—or still a distant dream?

Immunotherapy, cancer treatments that alter the immune system, making it better apt to fight tumor cells, have provided novel and efficacious therapeutic options for patients with advanced, difficult-to-treat malignancies. Many immune-based therapies work to boost immune mediators within the tumor microenvironment, and others can prime immune cells circulating through the body.

A groundbreaking study published in Cancer Cell brings us closer to achieving the best of both worlds. The novel data describing this comprehensive study suggests that we can achieve better efficacy with an immunotherapy that optimizes the immune response both inside the tumor (intratumoral immunity) and throughout the rest of the body (systemic immunity).

The researchers identified an enzyme (P4HA1) that is pivotal in directing immunotherapy effectiveness. P4HA1 regulates the differentiation of CD8+ T cells, a vital immune cell subset needed for finding and killing cancer. The study found that P4HA1 significantly upregulated the tumor-draining lymph nodes (TDLN), the lymph nodes located directly downstream of a tumor where immune cells, and sometimes cancer cells, drain out of the tumor.

A team of chemical, industrial and biotechnical engineers affiliated with several institutions in China has developed a dual-reactor system that can be used to convert CO₂ to a consumable single-cell protein. In their paper published in the journal Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, the group describes how they designed, built and tested their dual reactor system and its possible uses.

Scientists note two major impediments to the continued practical existence of mankind: climate change and food production. In this new effort, the team in China developed a dual-reactor system that tackles both problems at once—it uses carbon dioxide in the air to produce a type of protein that can be consumed as food.

The new system has two stages. The first uses microbial electrosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide into acetate, which then serves as an intermediary. The second stage involves feeding the acetate produced in the first stage into a reactor, where it is mixed with aerobic bacteria, which uses the acetate to produce a single-cell protein.

When dealing with a human brain, preventing perception would require even more care. If a person’s brain inched toward consciousness under such an experiment, the consequences would be thorny, according to Hank Greely, a biomedical legal expert at Stanford University in California. “That’s very tricky ethically, legally and scientifically,” he told New Scientist.

Vrselja told the publication that he and his colleagues “have no intention of plugging anyone at the point of death into their BrainEx machine.” But what they’ve accomplished so far is a significant step toward proving that brain death may not be as final as we once thought, arousing fresh hope that patients who are hovering between life and death can still be saved.

In the meantime, the researchers have had some success in keeping brains “cellularly active for up to 24 hours” so they can test treatments for neurological conditions. They hope to help patients with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Columbia researchers created an AI model that predicts gene activity in any human cell, advancing disease research and treatment. It has already uncovered mechanisms behind pediatric leukemia and may reveal hidden genome functions.

Researchers at Columbia University.

Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City that was established in 1754. This makes it the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest in the United States. It is often just referred to as Columbia, but its official name is Columbia University in the City of New York.

Left and right circularly polarized light, where the electromagnetic waves spiral in a clockwise and counterclockwise manner as they travel, plays a crucial role in a wide range of applications, from enhancing medical imaging techniques to enabling advanced communication technologies. However, generating circularly polarized light often requires complex and bulky optical set-ups, which hinders its use in systems with space constraints.

To address this challenge, a team of researchers from Singapore led by Associate Professor Wu Lin of Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) has put forth a new type of metasurface—an ultra-thin material with properties not found in nature—that may be able to replace traditional complex and bulky optical set-ups.

They have published their research in the Physical Review Letters paper “Enabling all-to-circular polarization up-conversion by nonlinear chiral metasurfaces with rotational symmetry.”

Scientists from Delft, Vienna, and Lausanne discovered that the protein machines that shape our DNA can switch direction. Until now, researchers believed that these so-called SMC motors that make loops into DNA could move in one direction only. The discovery, which is published in Cell, is key to understanding how these motors shape our genome and regulate our genes.

“Sometimes, a cell needs to be quick in changing which genes should be expressed and which ones should be turned off, for example in response to food, alcohol or heat. To turn genes off and on, cells use Structural Maintenance of Chromosomes (SMC) motors that act like switches to connect different parts of DNA,” first author Roman Barth explains.

“However, SMC machines don’t naturally know which parts to connect. They simply load somewhere on the DNA and start shaping it into a loop until they reach a point where they are forced to stop. That’s why they rely heavily on the ability to explore both sides of the DNA to find the right stop signs.”