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Category: biotech/medical – Page 15

Peripheral neuropathy protection by mitochondrial transfer from glia to neurons

For millions living with nerve pain, even a light touch can feel unbearable. Scientists have long suspected that damaged nerve cells falter because their energy factories known as mitochondria don’t function properly.

Now research published in Nature suggests a way forward: supplying healthy mitochondria to struggling nerve cells.

Using human tissue and mouse models, researchers found that replenishing mitochondria significantly reduced pain tied to diabetic neuropathy and chemotherapy-induced nerve damage. In some cases, the relief lasted up to 48 hours.

Instead of masking symptoms, the approach could fix what the team sees as the root problem — restoring the energy flow that keeps nerve cells healthy and resilient.

“By giving damaged nerves fresh mitochondria — or helping them make more of their own — we can reduce inflammation and support healing,” said the study’s senior author. “This approach has the potential to ease pain in a completely new way.

The work highlights a previously undocumented role for satellite glial cells, which appear to deliver mitochondria to sensory neurons through tiny channels called tunnelling nanotubes.

When this mitochondrial handoff is disrupted, nerve fibers begin to degenerate — triggering pain, tingling and numbness, often in the hands and feet, the distal ends of the nerve fibers.

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Plant Discovery Could Transform How Medicines Are Made

Plants produce protective chemicals called alkaloids as part of their natural defenses. People have used these compounds for a long time, including in pain relief medicines, treatments for various diseases, and familiar household products such as caffeine and nicotine.

Scientists want to learn exactly how plants build alkaloids. With that knowledge, they hope to create new and improved medicine-related chemicals faster, at lower cost, and with less harm to the environment.

In a study at the University of York, researchers examined a plant called Flueggea suffruticosa, which makes an especially strong alkaloid known as securinine. As they traced how securinine is produced, the team found a surprise: a key step depends on a gene that resembles bacterial genes more than typical plant genes.

Enormous freshwater reservoir discovered off the East Coast may be 20,000 years old and big enough to supply NYC for 800 years

“The important part was we collected all the samples we need to address our primary questions,” Dugan said. “When we’re done drilling and we pull our equipment out, the holes collapse back in and seal themselves up.”

Now, scientists are studying the reservoir in finer detail, including any microbes, rare earth elements, pore space — which can help researchers better estimate the reservoir’s size — and the age of the sediments, which will help narrow down when it formed. More definitive results about how and when the reservoir formed are expected in about one month’s time, Dugan said.

“Our goal is to provide an understanding of the system so if and when somebody needs to use it, they have information to start from, rather than recreating information or making an ill-informed choice,” he said.

Scientists identify promising new target for Alzheimer’s-linked brain inflammation

A multidisciplinary team has developed a selective compound that inhibits an enzyme tied to inflammation in people at genetic risk for Alzheimer’s, while preserving normal brain function and crossing the blood-brain barrier.

The findings are published in the journal npj Drug Discovery.

The driver is an enzyme called calcium-dependent phospholipase A2 (cPLA2). The team discovered its role in brain inflammation by studying people who carry the APOE4 gene —the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. While many people who have the APOE4 gene don’t develop the disease, those with elevated levels of cPLA2 generally do.

Video: Why ‘basic science’ is the foundation of innovation

At first glance, some scientific research can seem, well, impractical. When physicists began exploring the strange, subatomic world of quantum mechanics a century ago, they weren’t trying to build better medical tools or high-speed internet. They were simply curious about how the universe worked at its most fundamental level.

Yet without that “curiosity-driven” research—often called basic science—the modern world would look unrecognizable.

“Basic science drives the really big discoveries,” says Steve Kahn, UC Berkeley’s dean of mathematical and physical sciences. “Those paradigm changes are what really drive innovation.”

How beige fat keeps blood pressure in check

In this report, researchers link thermogenic adipose tissue (brown/beige fat), best known for heat production, to blood-pressure control via direct fat–blood vessel communication. Using mouse models engineered to lose beige fat identity (via adipocyte-specific disruption of PRDM16), they observed elevated arterial pressure alongside perivascular remodeling, including fibrotic tissue accumulation and marked vascular hypersensitivity to the vasoconstrictor hormone angiotensin II. Mechanistically, loss of beige fat identity increased secretion of QSOX1 (quiescin sulfhydryl oxidase 1), which activated pro-fibrotic gene programs in vascular cells and promoted vessel stiffening; blocking this pathway (including genetic removal of QSOX1 in the model) restored healthier vascular signaling and function. The authors characterize this as a previously underappreciated, obesity-independent axis by which the “quality” (thermogenic vs white-like) of perivascular fat influences vascular stiffness and responsiveness to pressor signals, suggesting QSOX1 and related adipose-derived signals as potential precision targets for future antihypertensive therapies.

A mouse aorta with immunofluorescent tagging, emphasizing the close connection between vasculature and fat. (Credit: Cohen lab)

Obesity causes hypertension. Hypertension causes cardiovascular disease. And cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. While the link between fat and high blood pressure is clearly central to this deadly chain, its biological basis long remained unclear. What is it about fat that impacts vascular function and blood pressure control?

Now, a new study demonstrates how thermogenic beige fat—a type of adipose tissue, distinct from white fat, that helps the body burn energy—directly shapes blood pressure control. Building on clinical evidence that people with brown fat have lower odds of hypertension, the researchers created mouse models that cannot form beige fat (the thermogenic fat depot in mice that most closely resembles adult human brown fat) to watch what happens when this tissue is lost. They found that the loss of beige fat increases the sensitivity of blood vessels to one of the most important vasoconstricting hormones (angiotensin II)—and that blocking an enzyme involved in stiffening vessels and disrupting normal signaling can restore healthy vascular function in mice. These results, published in Science (opens in new window), reveal a previously unknown mechanism driving high blood pressure and point toward more precise therapies that target communication between fat and blood vessels.

Ben & Marc: Why Everything Is About to Get 10x Bigger

The media and tech landscape is undergoing a significant transformation driven by advancements in AI, technology, and new structures, enabling entrepreneurs and companies to achieve exponential growth and innovation ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.

Building Your Own Platform.

🚀 Q: How can writers escape traditional media constraints? A: Launch on decentralized platforms like Substack where you build your own brand and business as a “non-fungible writer”, potentially creating organizations 10x larger than traditional media companies you’d work for.

💰 Q: What makes writer-led platforms attractive investments? A: Platforms become cornerstone franchises when writers only succeed by making the platform successful, creating aligned incentives that generate significant returns while enabling top talent to build independent businesses.

📊 Q: What content opportunity exists in decentralized media? A: A barbell market is emerging with mainstream filler content on one end and massive untapped demand for high-quality niche content on the other, creating opportunities across various specialized domains.

Leveraging AI for Business.

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Beyond Opioids: The New Gene Therapy That Relieves Pain Without the Addiction

The new method is designed to focus specifically on pain-related signals, without interfering with normal activity in other parts of the brain. A new preclinical study has identified a gene therapy approach that focuses directly on pain-processing regions of the brain while avoiding the addiction

How light suppresses virulence in an antibiotic-resistant pathogen

Light is a universal stimulus that influences all living things. Cycles of light and dark help set the biological clocks for organisms ranging from single-celled bacteria to human beings. Some bacteria use photosynthesis to convert sunlight into energy just like plants, but other bacteria sense light for less well-known functions.

In 2019, Sampriti Mukherjee, Ph.D., and her team at the University of Chicago discovered that far-red light, part of the light spectrum near the infrared range, prevents the formation of biofilms by the human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Biofilms form when communities of bacteria cluster together and attach to surfaces like medical devices or tissues. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an antibiotic-resistant bacterium, normally found in the soil and water, that is known to cause difficult to treat infections in hospitalized patients, especially those with weakened immune systems, lung diseases, or large wounds like burns. Figuring out how to prevent this pathogen from forming biofilms could help treat these dangerous infections.

AI-driven ultrafast spectrometer-on-a-chip advances real-time sensing

For decades, the ability to visualize the chemical composition of materials, whether for diagnosing a disease, assessing food quality, or analyzing pollution, depended on large, expensive laboratory instruments called spectrometers. These devices work by taking light, spreading it out into a rainbow using a prism or grating, and measuring the intensity of each color. The problem is that spreading light requires a long physical path, making the device inherently bulky.

A recent study from the University of California Davis (UC Davis), reported in Advanced Photonics, tackles the challenge of miniaturization, aiming to shrink a lab-grade spectrometer down to the size of a grain of sand, a tiny spectrometer-on-a-chip that can be integrated into portable devices. The traditional approach of spatially spreading light is abandoned in favor of a reconstructive method.

Instead of physically separating each color, the new chip uses only 16 distinct silicon detectors, each engineered to respond slightly differently to incoming light. This is analogous to giving a handful of specialized sensors a mixed drink, with each sensor sampling a different aspect of the drink. The key to deciphering the original recipe is the second part of the invention: artificial intelligence (AI).

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