Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists at the Morgridge Institute for Research have isolated a natural chemical that acts as a potent kryptonite against schistosomes, the parasitic worms that burrow through human skin and cause devastating health problems.

A research team led by Morgridge investigator Phillip Newmark reported in today’s (Oct. 17, 2019) issue of PLOS Biology the successful characterization of this chemical, which could lead to new ways to fight the neglected tropical disease schistosomiasis. This disease, caused by schistosome infection, affects more than 240 million people in Africa, Asia and parts of South America.

In this work the Newmark team focused on a phase of the schistosome life cycle that’s an intriguing target for preventing infection. Schistosomes seek out freshwater snails as hosts in order to produce millions of tiny fork-tailed creatures called cercaria, which are unleashed in the water and seek out mammals to infect. Their frenzied swimming allows them to penetrate human skin in minutes.

Scientists who are trying to save species at the brink of extinction are finding help in an unexpected place.

Heather Farrington, curator of zoology for the Cincinnati Museum Center, is using DNA from specimens collected more than 100 years ago to help understand the evolution and stresses faced by today’s animals.

Farrington runs the museum’s new state-of-the-art genetics laboratory, which helps researchers study populations of animals over time.

Light is the fastest way to distinguish right- and left-handed chiral molecules, which has important applications in chemistry and biology. However, ordinary light only weakly senses molecular handedness. Researchers from the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI), the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) and Technische Universitaet Berlin (TU Berlin) now report a method to generate and characterize synthetic chiral light, which identifies molecules’ handedness exceptionally distinctly. The results of their joint work have just appeared in Nature Photonics.

Like left and right hands, some molecules in nature have mirror twins. However, while these twin molecules may look similar, some of their properties can be very different. For instance, the handedness—or chirality—of molecules plays an essential role in chemistry, biology, and drug development. While one type of a molecule can cure a disease, its mirror twin—or enantiomer—may be toxic or even lethal.

It is extremely hard to tell opposite chiral molecules apart because they look identical and behave identically unless they interact with another chiral object. Light has long been used to detect chirality—oscillations of the electromagnetic field draw a chiral helix in space along the light propagation direction. Depending on whether the helix twirls clockwise or counterclockwise, the light wave is either right- or left-handed. However, the helix pitch, set by the light wavelength, is about 1000 times bigger than the size of a molecule. So the light helix is a gigantic circle compared to the tiny molecules, which hardly react to its chirality.

The healthcare industry stores some of the sensitive personal information there can be about people: hackers know this and are looking to exploit what they view as an easy target.

Doctors have reported on the first attempts in the United States to use gene editing to help patients fight cancer.

The doctors say one form of gene editing appeared to be safe when tested in three patients. But it is not yet known what long-term effects the method will have on cancer treatment or patient survival rates.

A gene editing tool called CRISPR/Cas9 was used in the tests, which were recently reported in a medical study. The method was discovered in recent years as a way to change the genetic material that make up a person’s DNA.

Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that specifically destroy bacteria. In the early 20th century, researchers experimented with phages as a potential method for treating bacterial infections. But then antibiotics emerged and phages fell out of favor. With the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections, however, researchers have renewed their interest in phage therapy. In limited cases, patients with life-threatening multidrug-resistant bacterial infections have been successfully treated with experimental phage therapy after all other alternatives were exhausted.

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and their collaborators have now for the first time successfully applied phage therapy in mice for a condition that’s not considered a classic bacterial infection: alcoholic liver disease.

The study publishes November 13, 2019 in Nature.

After more than two decades of research, the world finally has an approved Ebola vaccine.

The European Commission granted marketing authorization to Merck’s vaccine, known as Ervebo, on Monday, less than a month after the European Medicines Agency recommended it be licensed. It is currently being used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo under a “compassionate use” or research protocol similar to a clinical trial.

“The European Commission’s marketing authorization of Ervebo is the result of an unprecedented collaboration for which the entire world should be proud,” Ken Frazier, Merck’s chairman and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

We may have made a small dent in the number of annual cases, but there are still hordes of microbes out there.

To successfully engineer cell or tissue implants, bioengineers must facilitate their metabolic requirements through vascular regeneration. However, it is challenging to develop a broad strategy for stable and functional vascularization. In a recent report on Nature Communications, Wei Song and colleagues in the interdisciplinary departments of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Medicine, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Clinical Sciences and Bioengineering in the U.S. described highly organized, biomimetic and resilient microvascular meshes. The team engineered them using controllable, anchored self-assembly methods to form microvascular meshes that are almost defect-free and transferrable to diverse substrates, for transplantation.

The scientists promoted the formation of functional blood vessels with a density as high as ~200 vessels per mm^-2 within the subcutaneous space of SCID-Beige mice. They demonstrated the possibility of engineering microvascular meshes using human induced pluripotent stem-cell (iPSCs) derived endothelial cells (ECs). The technique opens a way to engineer patient-specific type 1 diabetes treatment by combining microvascular meshes for subcutaneous transplantation of rat islets in SCID-beige mice to achieve correction of chemically induced diabetes for 3 months.

Vasculature is an essential component of any organ or tissue, and vascular regeneration is critical to successfully bioengineer implants. For instance, during cell replacement therapy for type 1 diabetes (T1D), transplanted insulin producing cells rely on the vasculature to function and survive. Bioengineers often use vascular endothelial cells such as human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) to spontaneously assemble into tubular structures within the extracellular matrix (ECM). But the resulting structures can be random, uncontrollable and less efficient for microvascular regeneration. Scientists have recently developed three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques to engineer controlled cellular constructs with embedded vessels. However, it remains challenging to 3D print resilient and transferrable, high-resolution, microvasculature.