Lifeboat Foundation

Medication delivered by a novel gel cured 100% of mice with an aggressive brain cancer, a striking result that offers new hope for patients diagnosed with glioblastoma, one of the deadliest and most common brain tumors in humans.

Cui’s team combined an anticancer drug and an antibody in a solution that self-assembles into a gel to fill the tiny grooves left after a brain tumor is surgically removed. The gel can reach areas that surgery might miss and current drugs struggle to reach to kill lingering cancer cells and suppress tumor growth. The results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Continue reading “This gel stops brain tumors in mice. Could it offer hope for humans?” »

Taking out the trash: Autophagy genes help extrude protein aggregates from neurons in the nematode C elegans.

In a recent study published in Molecular Psychiatry, researchers explored the effects of a small humanin-like peptide 2 (SHLP2) variant on mitochondrial function.

Mitochondria are implicated in Parkinson’s disease (PD) pathogenesis. Mitochondrial-derived peptides (MDPs) are microproteins encoded from small open reading frames (sORFs) in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). SHLP2 is an MDP with an essential role in multiple cellular processes, and it improves mitochondrial metabolism by increasing biogenesis and respiration and reducing oxidation.

Recent studies link mitochondrial single nucleotide polymorphisms (mtSNPs) within coding regions of MDPs to age-related deficits. For instance, m.2706 A G, an mtSNP in humanin, predicts reduced circulating levels of humanin and worse cognitive decline. Moreover, another mtSNP, m.2158 T C, is associated with reduced PD risk, albeit the underlying mechanisms are unknown.

A study of around 500,000 medical records suggested that severe viral infections like encephalitis and pneumonia increase the risk of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

How does the developing brain process surprising sounds and what changes as we grow up?

For children, the world is full of surprises. Adults, on the other hand, are much more difficult to surprise. And there are complex processes behind this apparently straightforward state of affairs. Researchers at the University of Basel have been using mice to decode how reactions to the unexpected develop in the growing brain.

Babies love playing peekaboo, continuing to react even on the tenth sudden appearance of their partner in the game. Recognizing the unexpected is an important cognitive ability. After all, new can also mean dangerous.

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The neural processes behind memory encoding in the brain have been revealed in this new research.

However, beneath this seemingly effortless experience, there exist intricate neural processess.

Dartmouth College researchers have identified the complicated neurological systems that regulate how the human brain stores memories.

Continue reading “From sight to storage: Scientists crack code for how we remember” »

Year 2021 face_with_colon_three

In our new paper, we’ve investigated how quantum particles could move in a complex structure like the brain, but in a lab setting. If our findings can one day be compared with activity measured in the brain, we may come one step closer to validating or dismissing Penrose and Hameroff’s controversial theory.

Continue reading “Can Consciousness Be Explained by Quantum Physics? New Research” »

Our memories are rich in detail: we can vividly recall the color of our home, the layout of our kitchen, or the front of our favorite café. How the brain encodes this information has long puzzled neuroscientists.

In a new Dartmouth-led study, researchers identified a neural coding mechanism that allows the transfer of information back and forth between perceptual regions to memory areas of the brain. The results are published in Nature Neuroscience.

Prior to this work, the classic understanding of brain organization was that perceptual regions of the brain represent the world “as it is,” with the brain’s visual cortex representing the external world based on how light falls on the retina, “retinotopically.” In contrast, it was thought that the brain’s memory areas represent information in an abstract format, stripped of details about its physical nature. However, according to the co-authors, this explanation fails to take into account that as information is encoded or recalled, these regions may in fact, share a common code in the brain.

Human brains and thinking machines.

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