Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical

Researchers led by Jean-Paul Noel at the University of Minnesota, United States, have decoupled intentions, actions and their effects by manipulating the brain-machine interface that allows a person with otherwise paralyzed arms and legs to squeeze a ball when they want to.

Published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, the study reveals temporal binding between and actions, which makes actions seem to happen faster when they are intentional.

Separating intentions from actions was made possible because of a . The participant was paralyzed with damage to their C4/C5 vertebrae and had 96 electrodes implanted in the region of their motor cortex.

Read more | >

Researchers at the University of Oklahoma have made a discovery that could potentially revolutionize treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections, cancer and other challenging gram-negative pathogens without relying on precious metals.

Currently, precious metals like platinum and rhodium are used to create synthetic carbohydrates, which are vital components of many approved antibiotics used to combat , including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a notorious hospital-acquired infection responsible for the deaths of immunocompromised patients. However, these elements require harsh reaction conditions, are expensive to use and are harmful to the environment when mined.

In an innovative study published in the journal Nature Communications, an OU team led by Professor Indrajeet Sharma has replaced these with either blue light or iron, achieving similar results with significantly lower toxicity, reduced costs, and greater appeal for researchers and .

Read more | >

During viral infection, the innate immune system utilizes a variety of specific intracellular sensors to detect virus-derived nucleic acids and activate a series of cellular signaling cascades that produce type I IFNs and proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines. Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) is an oncogenic double-stranded DNA virus that has been associated with a variety of human malignancies, including Kaposi’s sarcoma, primary effusion lymphoma, and multicentric Castleman disease. Infection with KSHV activates various DNA sensors, including cGAS, STING, IFI16, and DExD/H-box helicases. Activation of these DNA sensors induces the innate immune response to antagonize the virus. To counteract this, KSHV has developed countless strategies to evade or inhibit DNA sensing and facilitate its own infection. This review summarizes the major DNA-triggered sensing signaling pathways and details the current knowledge of DNA-sensing mechanisms involved in KSHV infection, as well as how KSHV evades antiviral signaling pathways to successfully establish latent infection and undergo lytic reactivation.

Read more | >

A research team has unveiled a crucial mechanism that helps regulate DNA damage repair, with important implications for improving cancer treatment outcomes.

The result was published in Cell Death & Differentiation. The team was led by Professor Zhao Guoping at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The efficacy of radiotherapy is largely limited by the DNA damage repair capacity of tumor cells. When ionizing radiation induces DNA double-strand breaks—the primary lethal damage—tumor cells often exhibit abnormal overexpression of DNA repair proteins, establishing a robust damage response system that drives clinical radioresistance. To address this challenge, the team deciphered the regulatory network of epigenetic modifications in DNA damage repair.

Read more | >

But classic risk factors do not seem to fully explain the recent rise in early-onset cancers, says Dr. Cathy Eng, director of the Young Adult Cancers Program at Vanderbilt University’s Ingram Cancer Center in Tennessee. Some of the trends are baffling; young, nonsmoking women, for example, are being diagnosed with lung cancer in strangely high numbers. Many times, Eng’s patients were extremely healthy: vegetarians, marathon runners, avid swimmers. “That’s why I really believe there’s other risk factors to account for this,” she says.

There’s no shortage of theories about what those may be. Many scientists point to modern diets, which tend to be heavy on potentially carcinogenic products—including ultra-processed foods, red meat, and alcohol—and may also contribute to weight gain, another cancer risk factor. The foods we eat can also affect the gut microbiome, the colony of microbes that lives in the digestive system and appears linked to overall health. Alterations to the gut microbiome via diet, or perhaps exposure to drugs like antibiotics, have also been implicated.

Other researchers blame the microplastics littering our environment and leaching into our food and water supplies, some of which, according to a 2024 study, have even shown up in cancer patients’ tumors. Other environmental factors could also be to blame, given that everything from cosmetics to food packaging contains substances that many researchers aren’t convinced are safe. Even our near constant exposure to artificial light could be messing with normal biological rhythms in ways that have profound health consequences, some research suggests.

Read more | >

One of the challenges of fighting pancreatic cancer is finding ways to penetrate the organ’s dense tissue to define the margins between malignant and normal tissue. A new study uses DNA origami structures to selectively deliver fluorescent imaging agents to pancreatic cancer cells without affecting normal cells.

The study, led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign mechanical science and engineering professor Bumsoo Han and professor Jong Hyun Choi at Purdue University, found that specially engineered DNA origami structures carrying imaging dye packets can specifically target human KRAS mutant cancer cells, which are present in 95% of pancreatic cancer cases.

“This research highlights not only the potential for more accurate cancer imaging, but also selective chemotherapy delivery, a significant advancement over current pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma treatments,” said Han, who is also affiliated with the Cancer Center at Illinois. “The current process of cancerous tissue removal through can be improved greatly by more accurate imaging of tumor margins.”

Read more | >

Somewhere in the body of a patient, a small clump of cells, growing undetected, has begun to form a tumor. It has yet to cause pain or visible symptoms of illness. Several months from now, or perhaps years, those first signs will prompt a doctor’s inquiry, a referral to a specialist, and an eventual diagnosis. Treatment will depend on how long the cancer has gone unnoticed and how far it has spread.

There were early signs, though not ones the patient or doctor could have noticed. Small fragments of RNA, cast off from dying cells or spit out of the tumor’s twisted transcriptions, floating about in the bloodstream—early signals of a tissue in distress.

A new method developed by Stanford researchers aims to bring the moment of detection much closer to the beginning. They have developed a blood-based method called RARE-seq that detects tumor-derived cell-free RNA with around 50 times the sensitivity of standard sequencing techniques.

Read more | >

Breast cancer is becoming increasingly treatable, but in some cases the disease can resurface even decades after a patient has been declared cancer free. This is because of cells that detach from the original tumor and hide in a dormant state in the breast or other organs.

Little is known about the mechanisms responsible for dormancy in , and even less is known about what causes these cells to suddenly wake up. A new study from the laboratory of Israel Prize laureate Prof. Yosef Yarden at the Weizmann Institute of Science, published in Science Signaling, reveals the mechanism that puts to sleep, as well as the reason that they emerge from dormancy more aggressive than they were before they became dormant.

From the earliest stage of embryonic development, through sexual maturation to the production of breast milk during pregnancy and after childbirth, breast tissue changes throughout a woman’s life. These changes are made possible by the metamorphosis that breast tissue cells undergo, from the early developmental stage, known as mesenchymal, when the cells are round, highly mobile and dividing rapidly, to the more mature, epithelial stage, when they are somewhat cubical, less active and dividing slowly.

Read more | >