In a pioneering new clinical trial, researchers have succeeded in delivering a cell-restoring drug directly to the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,481
Longevity Industry Report – UK Edition
A consortium of groups has come together with the painstaking task of charting the longevity industry, such as its companies, journalists, thought leaders, investors, and recent developments. The Longevity Industry in UK Landscape Overview 2018 report covers a great amount of ground and is well worth a read for people who are interested in this rapidly evolving scientific field.
This particular edition, which spans an impressive 1000+ pages, is focused on the United Kingdom; there will be additional reports covering Switzerland, Japan, Hong Kong, and California, and there will also be a more general global industry report in its second edition.
Interest in longevity has been increasing for some years, and we are at last seeing a true industry starting to bloom as more and more companies, researchers, and investors step into the ring. Companies such as Unity Biotechnology taking senescent cell-clearing therapies to human trials, deep learning approaches being applied to aging by companies such as Insilco Medicine, and Ichor Therapeutics’ development of age-related macular degeneration therapies have served to ignite the fires of enthusiasm and have brought ever-increasing funding and interest into this field.
Abcam Moves to New Purpose-Built Global Headquarters
CAMBRIDGE, England—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Feb 27, 2019—Abcam, a global innovator in life science reagents and tools, is pleased to announce its move to new state-of-the-art global headquarters, Discovery Drive, on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC), UK, a leading hub of healthcare, science and medical research.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190227005291/en/
‘Baby Bio’ for brain cells trial halted despite Parkinson’s patients seeing ‘miracle’ results
Parkinson’s patients treated with a groundbreaking new therapy to regrow their brain cells have criticised a decision by regulators to stop trials as ‘sinful.’
In the biggest surgical trial ever for the disease, British patients had holes drilled into the heads and special ports implanted so that a naturally occurring protein could be infused directly into the brain over nine months.
Described as ‘Baby Bio’ for brain cells, the Glial Cell Line Derived Neurotrophic Factor (GDNF) encourages the growth of cells that produce dopamine, a crucial hormone needed for movement, which vanishes in Parkinson’s patients.
‘Immunizing’ quantum bits so that they can grow up
Long story short, qubits need a better immune system before they can grow up.
A new material, engineered by Purdue University researchers into a thin strip, is one step closer to “immunizing” qubits against noise, such as heat and other parts of a computer, that interferes with how well they hold information. The work appears in Physical Review Letters.
The thin strip, called a “nanoribbon,” is a version of a material that conducts electrical current on its surface but not on the inside — called a “topological insulator” — with two superconductor electrical leads to form a device called a “Josephson junction.”
The February journal club will focus on the recent paper “Genomics of 1 million parent lifespans implicates novel pathways and common diseases and distinguishes survival chances”
Hosted by Dr. Oliver Medvedik, we will be joined by study authors, Dr. Peter Joshi and Paul Timmers both from the University of Edinburgh, UK, who will guide us through this fascinating genomics study of human longevity.
The research paper can be found here.:
https://elifesciences.org/articles/39856
A Step Closer to Universal Stem Cells
Researchers at UC San Francisco have taken science a step closer to creating stem cells that are effectively “invisible” to the immune system. This may ultimately lead to the production of “off-the-shelf” stem cell therapies that do not need to be patient matched.
The immune system is a double-edged sword
One of the big challenges in creating effective stem cell therapies is how the immune system responds to cells from other donors and sources. This complex, multilayered system is designed to defend our bodies from the constant onslaught of invading pathogens that we encounter in our daily lives.
New microfluidics device can detect cancer cells in blood
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Queensland University of Technology of Australia, have developed a device that can isolate individual cancer cells from patient blood samples. The microfluidic device works by separating the various cell types found in blood by their size. The device may one day enable rapid, cheap liquid biopsies to help detect cancer and develop targeted treatment plans. The findings are reported in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.
“This new microfluidics chip lets us separate cancer cells from whole blood or minimally-diluted blood,” said Ian Papautsky, the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Bioengineering in the UIC College of Engineering and corresponding author on the paper. “While devices for detecting cancer cells circulating in the blood are becoming available, most are relatively expensive and are out of reach of many research labs or hospitals. Our device is cheap, and doesn’t require much specimen preparation or dilution, making it fast and easy to use.”
The ability to successfully isolate cancer cells is a crucial step in enabling liquid biopsy where cancer could be detected through a simple blood draw. This would eliminate the discomfort and cost of tissue biopsies which use needles or surgical procedures as part of cancer diagnosis. Liquid biopsy could also be useful in tracking the efficacy of chemotherapy over the course of time, and for detecting cancer in organs difficult to access through traditional biopsy techniques, including the brain and lungs.
Discovery of colon cancer pathway could lead to new targeted treatments
University of Massachusetts Amherst food science researchers have pinpointed a set of enzymes involved in tumor growth that could be targeted to prevent or treat colon cancer.
“We think this is a very interesting discovery,” says Guodong Zhang, assistant professor of food science, whose study was published in the journal Cancer Research. “Our research identifies a novel therapeutic target and could help to develop novel strategies to reduce the risks of colon cancer.”
Colon cancer is the third most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, claiming some 50,000 lives each year. Those statistics emphasize the need to discover new cellular targets that are crucial in the development of colon cancer, Zhang says.