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Category: biotech/medical

High-risk neuroblastoma is an aggressive childhood cancer with poor treatment outcomes. Despite intensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy, less than 50 percent of these children survive for five years. While the genetics of human neuroblastoma have been extensively studied, actionable therapeutics are limited.

Now researchers in the Feng lab at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), in collaboration with scientists in the Simon lab at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), have not only discovered why this cancer is so aggressive but also reveal a promising therapeutic approach to treat these patients. These findings appear online in the journal Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

“Our work pinpoints a targeted therapy for treating this group of at-risk patients, likely leading to improved survival,” said corresponding author Hui Feng, MD, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology and medicine at BUSM.

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To create high-resolution, 3D images of tissues such as the brain, researchers often use two-photon microscopy, which involves aiming a high-intensity laser at the specimen to induce fluorescence excitation. However, scanning deep within the brain can be difficult because light scatters off of tissues as it goes deeper, making images blurry.

Two-photon imaging is also time-consuming, as it usually requires scanning individual pixels one at a time. A team of MIT and Harvard University researchers has now developed a modified version of two-photon imaging that can image deeper within tissue and perform the imaging much more quickly than what was previously possible.

This kind of imaging could allow scientists to more rapidly obtain high-resolution of structures such as vessels and individual neurons within the brain, the researchers say.

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Novameat is eyeing the expansion of its plant-based 3D-printed steaks since launching its cutting-edge technology three years ago.

A Spanish start-up creating 3D-printed plant-based steaks is eyeing an expansion onto the mass market.

It follows a successful launch last year, and the company has plans to produce 500kg of the vegan meat products per hour.

Since developing the cutting-edge biotechnology in 2018, the company revealed scaling production goals. It hopes to soon offer products to restaurants across Spain.

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The researchers explain that the development involves a new and very strong biological material, similar to collagen, which is non-toxic and causes no harm to the body’s tissues. The researchers believe that this new nanotechnology has many potential applications in medicine, including harvesting clean energy to operate devices implanted in the body (such as pacemakers) through the body’s natural movements, eliminating the need for batteries.

The study was led by Prof. Ehud Gazit of the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at the Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Fleischman Faculty of Engineering and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, along with his lab team, Dr. Santu Bera and Dr. Wei Ji.

Also taking part in the study were researchers from the Weizmann Institute and a number of research institutes in Ireland, China and Australia. As a result of their findings, the researchers received two ERC-POC grants aimed at using the scientific research from the ERC grant that Gazit had previously won for applied technology. The research was published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

Prof. Gazit, who is also Founding Director of the Blavatnik Center for Drug Discovery, explains: Collagen is the most prevalent protein in the human body, constituting about 30% of all of the proteins in our body. It is a biological material with a helical structure and a variety of important physical properties, such as mechanical strength and flexibility, which are useful in many applications. However, because the collagen molecule itself is large and complex, researchers have long been looking for a minimalistic, short and simple molecule that is based on collagen and exhibits similar properties. About a year and a half ago, in the journal Nature Materials, our group published a study in which we used nanotechnological means to engineer a new biological material that meets these requirements.

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Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.

The need for social distancing led restaurants and grocery stores to seek technological help. That may improve productivity, but could also cost jobs.

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😀 This could to more complex organisms being resurrected.

Deep in the tissues of sea anemones, corals, and jellyfish are strange yellow cells which are genetically distinct from the marine animals.

More than a century after these cells were first assigned a now forgotten genus, a new paper has resurrected the name and described six new species from around the world.

“Because our team comprises scientists from seven countries, we were able to collect all of these samples, and some during the global pandemic,” said lead author of the study, biologist Todd LaJeunesse from Penn State University.

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😀

U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the organization that administers America’s Spec Ops forces, says it will soon start clinical trials of an “anti-aging pill” that could halt some naturally degenerative effects of aging.

“We have completed pre-clinical safety and dosing studies in anticipation of follow-on performance testing in fiscal year 2022,” Navy Commander Tim Hawkins, a SOCOM spokesperson, told Breaking Defense.

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Most biological traits are inherited via genes, but there are exceptions to this rule. Two teams from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have been investigating the location of centromeres—specific sites on chromosomes that are essential for cell division. They found that in the small worm Caenorhabiditis elegans, the transmission of the correct location of these sites to the offspring is not mediated by genes, but by an epigenetic memory mechanism. These results have been published in the journal PLOS Biology.

Living organisms, from humans to microscopic worms, inherit physical and sometimes behavioral traits from their parents. The transmission of biological traits is usually mediated by DNA which is replicated at each cell division and contains the genes. However, some characteristics can be transmitted from one generation to the next independently of genes: these are epigenetic phenomena.

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