“The eyes are the windows to the soul.” It’s an ancient saying, and it illustrates what we know intuitively to be true — you can understand so much about a person by looking them deep in the eye. But how? And can we use this fact to understand disease?
One company is making big strides in this direction. Israel’s NeuraLight, which just won the Health and Medtech Innovation award at SXSW, was founded to bring science and AI to understanding the brain through the eyes.
A focal disease for NeuraLight is ALS, which is currently diagnosed through a subjective survey of about a dozen questions, followed by tests such as an EEG and MRI.
The patient’s eyes follow dots on a screen, and the AI system measures 106 parameters such as dilation and blink rate in less than 10 minutes. In other words, this will be an AI-enabled digital biomarker.
Lifestyle behaviors such as eating well and exercising can be significant factors in one’s overall health. But the risk of developing cancer is predominantly at the whim of an individual’s genetics.
Our bodies are constantly making copies of our genes to produce new cells. However, there are occasional mistakes in those copies, a phenomenon geneticists call mutation. In some cases, these mistakes can alter proteins, fuse genes and change how much a gene gets copied, ultimately impacting a person’s risk of developing cancer. Scientists can better understand the impact of mutations by developing predictive models for tumor activity.
Christopher Plaisier, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, is developing a software tool called OncoMerge that uses genetic data to improve cancer modeling technology.
The molecules in our bodies are in constant communication. Some of these molecules provide a biochemical fingerprint that could indicate how a wound is healing, whether or not a cancer treatment is working or that a virus has invaded the body. If we could sense these signals in real time with high sensitivity, then we might be able to recognize health problems faster and even monitor disease as it progresses.
Now Northwestern University researchers have developed a new technology that makes it easier to eavesdrop on our body’s inner conversations.
While the body’s chemical signals are incredibly faint—making them difficult to detect and analyze—the researchers have developed a new method that boosts signals by more than 1,000 times. Transistors, the building block of electronics, can boost weak signals to provide an amplified output. The new approach makes signals easier to detect without complex and bulky electronics.
Researchers at Boston University, U.S. report that the flow of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain is linked to waking brain activity. Led by Stephanie Williams, and publishing in the open access journal PLOS Biology on March 30, the study demonstrates that manipulating blood flow in the brain with visual stimulation induces complementary fluid flow. The findings could impact treatment for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, which have been associated with declines in cerebrospinal fluid flow.
Just as our kidneys help remove toxic waste from our bodies, cerebrospinal fluid helps remove toxins from the brain, particularly while we sleep. Reduced flow of cerebrospinal fluid is known to be related to declines in brain health, such as occur in Alzheimer’s disease. Based on evidence from sleep studies, the researchers hypothesized that brain activity while awake could also affect the flow of cerebrospinal fluid. They tested this hypothesis by simultaneously recording human brain activity via fMRI and the speed of cerebrospinal fluid flow while people were shown a checkered pattern that turned on and off.
Researchers first confirmed that the checkered pattern induced brain activity; blood oxygenation recorded by fMRI increased when the pattern was visible and decreased when it was turned off. Next, they found that the flow of cerebrospinal fluid negatively mirrored the blood signal, increasing when the checkered pattern was off. Further tests showed that changing how long the pattern was visible affected blood and fluid in a predictable way, and that the blood-cerebrospinal fluid link could not be accounted for by only breathing or heart rate rhythms.
The expanded availability of opioid use disorder-related telehealth services and medications during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with a lowered likelihood of fatal drug overdose among Medicare beneficiaries, according to a new study.
“The results of this study add to the growing research documenting the benefits of expanding the use of telehealth services for people with opioid use disorder, as well as the need to improve retention and access to medication treatment for opioid use disorder,” said lead author Christopher M. Jones, PharmD, DrPH, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The findings from this collaborative study also highlight the importance of working across agencies to identify successful strategies to address and get ahead of the constantly evolving overdose crisis.”
Published today in JAMA Psychiatry, this study is a collaborative research effort led by researchers at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, a part of CDC; the Office of the Administrator and the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality, both part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS); and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a part of the National Institutes of Health.
A fungal superbug called Candida auris is spreading rapidly through hospitals and nursing homes in the US. The first case was identified in 2016. Since then, it has spread to half the country’s 50 states. And, according to a new report, infections tripled between 2019 and 2021.
This is hugely concerning because Candida auris is resistant to many drugs, making this fungal infection one of the hardest to treat.
Candida auris is a yeast-type fungus that is the first to have multiple international health alerts associated with it. It has been found in over 30 countries, including the UK, since it was first identified in Japan in 2009.
In a recent study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, researchers assessed the impact of consuming unprocessed, minimally processed (UMP), and ultra-processed foods (UPFs) on diet quality.
Improving the seasonal influenza vaccine and public health specialists’ ability to predict pandemic potential in new flu strains may be possible, due to new findings from scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The key is the stability of a viral protein that gains entry into human cells. The findings were published today in Science Advances.
“We found that the protein flu viruses use to enter cells, hemagglutinin, needs to be relatively stable and resistant to acid in an effective H3N2 flu vaccine,” said senior and co-corresponding author Charles Russell, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Infectious Diseases. “We found a mutation in hemagglutinin that makes the virus grow better in eggs also causes a mismatch in the vaccine. The mutation makes the virus unstable and makes it look less human-like.”
The H3N2 virus is a subtype of Influenza A and is one of the culprits behind the seasonal flu. Many flu vaccines are made by growing the virus in chicken eggs, but the virus can gain mutations during that process. Some of those changes, like the one uncovered by the St. Jude group, make the vaccine less effective in generating the ideal immune response. At the same time, other mutations have more beneficial impacts.
Here’s a list of 10 visionary synbio company founders – who happen to be women – harnessing the power of biology to transform everything from health to human and animal nutrition, agriculture, haircare, bioremediation, and mining.
Ambassador Dr. John-Arne Røttingen, MD, Ph.D. (https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/people/john-arne-rottingen) is Ambassador for Global Health, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway, and a Visiting Fellow of Practice, at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University.
Ambassador Dr. Røttingen has previously served as the Chief Executive of the Research Council of Norway; the founding Chief Executive Officer of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); Executive Director of Infection Control and Environmental Health at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health; founding Chief Executive of the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services; Professor of Health Policy at the Department of Health Management and Health Economics, Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo; and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
From 2020, Ambassador Dr. Røttingen also chaired the Executive Group and the International Steering Committee of the WHO Solidarity trial to compare four untested treatments for hospitalized people with severe COVID-19 illness. In early 2021, he was appointed by the G20 to the High Level Independent Panel (HLIP) on financing the global commons for pandemic preparedness and response. That same year, he was also appointed to the Pandemic Preparedness Partnership (PPP), an expert group chaired to advise the G7 presidency. From mid-2021, he was part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator’s Vaccine Manufacturing Working Group.
Ambassador Dr. Røttingen received his MD and Ph.D. from the University of Oslo, an MSc from Oxford University and an MPA from Harvard University.
