Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 434

Novel magnetic therapy complements chemotherapy to enhance breast cancer treatment outcomes

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer-associated death for women worldwide. While chemotherapy is the mainstream treatment for breast cancer, more than 50% of women undergoing chemotherapy will experience at least one chemotherapy-related adverse side effect. Sometimes, the side effects could be so severe that patients need to terminate treatment early or doctors have to reduce the chemo dosage, and this could worsen their disease. Prolonged exposure to high doses of chemotherapeutic agents could also result in resistance to chemotherapy.

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) is pioneering a novel magnetic therapy — delivered using the OncoFTX System — that serves as an effective companion therapy to chemotherapy to enhance treatment outcome for breast cancer.

Our magnetic technology stimulates cellular oxygen respiration to produce energy. In certain cancers with elevated respiratory rates — such as breast tumors — the magnetic pulses cause the cancer cells to ‘hyperventilate’ and die. Fortunately, the healthy tissues near the cancer are able to tolerate the increased respiratory rate, without ill consequences. Therefore, the OncoFTX System is more selective for cancer than conventional chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Importantly, this therapy is localized, non-invasive and painless.

New medical procedure for treating irregular heart rhythm

The technology is designed to treat the condition atrial fibrillation, or irregular heart rhythm. This is in a way that carries a lower risk of complications and shorter anaesthesia time (when compared to traditional treatment).

The new technology took eighteen years to develop. In recent months, pulsed field ablation has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the acceptance marks a milestone in heart treatment.

The process involves the use of microsecond-scale, high-voltage electrical fields to cause irreversible electroporation and destabilization of cell membranes, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

Uncovering the effect of low-frequency static magnetic field on tendon-derived cells: from mechanosensing to tenogenesis

Magnetotherapy has been receiving increased attention as an attractive strategy for modulating cell physiology directly at the site of injury, thereby providing the medical community with a safe and non-invasive therapy.

Pesqueira, T., Costa-Almeida, R. & Gomes, M.E. Sci Rep 7, 10,948 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11253-6

Download citation.

Did egg or chicken come first? A protist suggests it was the egg!

The world is full of unusual unicellular organisms and microbes, many of which have not been discovered yet. In 2017, scientists identified a single-celled marine organism called Chromosphaera perkinsii in sediments collected from Hawaii. This species is estimated to be over a billion years old, making it older than the world’s most ancient animals. Researchers determined that this species has significant similarities to some animal embryos, though it is typically unicellular. The findings, which have been reported in Nature, suggested that some of the genetic mechanisms underlying complex life are present in C. perkinsii, or that it has evolved those characteristics independently.

The investigators noted that this study seems to answer the question of whether the chicken came before the egg; it was apparently the egg, since the genetic tools for making eggs existed prior to the emergence of chickens.

Real-Life Star Wars Tech: MIT Researchers Have Created a Miniature “Tractor Beam” To Capture Cells

MIT researchers have developed a miniature, chip-based “tractor beam,” like the one that captures the Millennium Falcon in the film “Star Wars,” that could someday help biologists and clinicians study DNA, classify cells, and investigate the mechanisms of disease.

Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, the device uses a beam of light emitted by a silicon-photonics chip to manipulate particles millimeters away from the chip surface. The light can penetrate the glass cover slips that protect samples used in biological experiments, enabling cells to remain in a sterile environment.

Traditional optical tweezers, which trap and manipulate particles using light, usually require bulky microscope setups, but chip-based optical tweezers could offer a more compact, mass-manufacturable, broadly accessible, and high-throughput solution for optical manipulation in biological experiments.

International Conference on Holodecks: Five Key Takeaways

Shaking hands with a character from the Fortnite video game. Visualizing a patient’s heart in 3D—and “feeling” it beat. Touching the walls of the Roman Coliseum—from your sofa in Los Angeles. What if we could touch and interact with things that aren’t physically in front of us? This reality might be closer than we think, thanks to an emerging technology: the holodeck.

The name might sound familiar. In Star Trek’s Next Generation, a holodeck was an advanced 3D virtual reality world that created the illusion of solid objects. Now, immersive technology researchers at USC and beyond are taking us one step closer to making this science fiction concept a science fact.

On Dec. 15, USC hosted the first International Conference on Holodecks. Organized by Shahram Ghandeharizadeh, a USC associate professor of computer science, the conference featured keynotes, papers and presentations from researchers at USC, Brown University, UCLA, University of Colorado, Stanford University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, UC-Riverside, and haptic technology company UltraLeap.

Move Over Plastics: Revolutionary Soft, Sustainable Material Set To Transform Medical Devices and Wearable Tech

Step aside, hard and rigid materials — a new soft, sustainable electroactive material is here, ready to unlock new possibilities for medical devices, wearable technology, and human-computer interfaces.

Using peptides and a snippet of the large molecules in plastics, Northwestern University materials scientists have developed materials made of tiny, flexible nano-sized ribbons that can be charged just like a battery to store energy or record digital information. Highly energy efficient, biocompatible, and made from sustainable materials, the systems could give rise to new types of ultralight electronic devices while reducing the environmental impact of electronic manufacturing and disposal.

The study was recently published in the journal Nature.

Anastasis: cell recovery mechanisms and potential role in cancer

Balanced cell death and survival are among the most important cell development and homeostasis pathways that can play a critical role in the onset or progress of malignancy steps. Anastasis is a natural cell recovery pathway that rescues cells after removing the apoptosis-inducing agent or brink of death. The cells recuperate and recover to an active and stable state. So far, minimal knowledge is available about the molecular mechanisms of anastasis. Still, several involved pathways have been explained: recovery through mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization, caspase cascade arrest, repairing DNA damage, apoptotic bodies formation, and phosphatidylserine. Anastasis can facilitate the survival of damaged or tumor cells, promote malignancy, and increase drug resistance and metastasis.

Anastasis induced by bee venom in normal cells compared to persistent cell death in breast cancer cells

Anastasis is a phenomenon that has been recently defined as a return from induced apoptosis. Its mechanism has not been clearly elucidated. Anastasis is thought to be involved in the development of drug resistance in cancer cells, however the distinct regulation of anastasis in normal and cancerous cells during anti-cancer therapy has not been discovered. One of the most privileged therapy strategies focuses on the drugs that are selectively cytotoxic in cancer cells but not negatively affect normal cell proliferation. This study for the first time comparatively evaluated the anastatic effect of a common synthetic cytotoxic agent, cisplatin and a natural cytotoxic agent, bee venom. The study showed that bee venom induced anastasis in normal cells (MCF10A, NIH3T3 and ARPE19) but cancer cells (MDA-MB-231 and MCF7) were irreversibly in cell death process.