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Category: biotech/medical – Page 169

DNA signaling cascades offer a better way to monitor drug therapy at home

Chemists at Université de Montréal have developed “signaling cascades” made with DNA molecules to report and quantify the concentration of various molecules in a drop of blood, all within five minutes.

Their findings, validated by experiments on mice, are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and may aid efforts to build point-of-care devices for monitoring and optimizing the treatment of various diseases.

This result was achieved by a research group led by UdeM chemistry professor Alexis Vallée-Bélisle.

Generation of harmful slow electrons in water is a race between intermolecular energy decay and proton transfer

When high-energy radiation interacts with water in living organisms, it generates particles and slow-moving electrons that can subsequently damage critical molecules like DNA. Now, Professor Petr Slavíček and his bachelor’s student Jakub Dubský from UCT Prague (University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague) have described in detail one of the key mechanisms for the creation of these slow electrons in water, a process known as Intermolecular Coulombic Decay (ICD). Their powerful mathematical model successfully explains all the data from complex laser experiments conducted at ETH Zurich (Hans-Jakob Woerner team).

The work, which deepens the fundamental understanding of radiation chemistry, has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

A detailed knowledge of the processes in , combined with advances in research technologies using high-energy radiation, is transforming the field of radiation chemistry. In the future, these insights could lead to significant changes in various fields, including medicine, particularly in developing more sensitive and controllable applications for devices based on ionizing radiation.

Acoustically activatable liposomes as a translational nanotechnology for site-targeted drug delivery and noninvasive neuromodulation

Purohit et al. incorporate sucrose into drug-loaded lipid nanoparticle (LNP) formulations, which shifts the acoustic impedance in a way that triggers drug release upon exposure to focused ultrasound (FUS). By using FUS to both transiently open the blood-brain-barrier and to release drugs from their LNPs, various drugs were delivered into the brains of mice.

Acoustically activatable nanocarriers made by incorporating 5% sucrose into liposomes release drug with low-intensity ultrasound, providing a readily clinically translatable system for both central and peripheral noninvasive neuromodulation.

Bioreducible Gene Delivery Platform that Promotes Intracellular Payload Release and Widespread Brain DispersionClick to copy article linkArticle link copied!

We here introduce a novel bioreducible polymer-based gene delivery platform enabling widespread transgene expression in multiple brain regions with therapeutic relevance following intracranial convection-enhanced delivery. Our bioreducible nanoparticles provide markedly enhanced gene delivery efficacy in vitro and in vivo compared to nonbiodegradable nanoparticles primarily due to the ability to release gene payloads preferentially inside cells. Remarkably, our platform exhibits competitive gene delivery efficacy in a neuron-rich brain region compared to a viral vector under previous and current clinical investigations with demonstrated positive outcomes. Thus, our platform may serve as an attractive alternative for the intracranial gene therapy of neurological disorders.

Air pollution and Parkinson’s: What a 292,000-person study reveals about hidden risks

Researchers in Northern Ireland examined whether exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) increases the risk of Parkinson’s disease. While no overall link was found after adjusting for confounders, younger adults under 50 showed a modest association with PM2.5, raising questions about age-related susceptibility and diagnostic misclassification.

How do you trust a robot you’ve never met?

Many of the environments where human-facing universal robots can provide benefits — homes, hospitals, schools — are sensitive and personal. A tutoring robot helping your kids with math should have a track record of safe and productive sessions. An elder-care assistant needs a verifiable history of respectful, competent service. A delivery robot approaching your front door should be as predictable and trustworthy as your favorite mail carrier. Without trust, adoption will never take place, or quickly stall.

Trust is built gradually and also reflects common understanding. We design our systems to be explainable: multiple AI modules talk to each other in plain language, and we log their thinking so humans can audit decisions. If a robot makes a mistake — drops the tomato instead of placing it on the counter — you should be able to ask why and get an answer you can understand.

Over time, as more robots connect and share skills, trust will depend on the network too. We learn from peers, and machines will learn from us and from other machines. That’s powerful but just like parents are concerned about what their kids learn on the web, we need good ways to audit and align skill exchange for robots… Governance for human–machine societies isn’t optional; it’s fundamental infrastructure.

Why AI Companies Are Racing to Build a Virtual Human Cell

Virtual cells could make it faster and easier to discover new drugs. They could also give insight into how cancer cells evade the immune system, or how an individual patient might respond to a given therapy. They might even help basic scientists come up with hypotheses about how cells work that can steer them toward what experiments to do with real cells. “The overall goal here,” Quake says, “is to try to turn cell biology from a field that’s 90% experimental and 10% computational to the other way around.”

Some scientists question how useful predictions made by AI will be, if the AI can’t provide an explanation for them. “The AI models, normally, are a black box,” says Erick Armingol, a systems biologist and post-doctoral researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the U.K. In other words, they give you an answer, but they can’t tell you why they gave you that answer.

A New Way To Stop Cancer Growth: Groundbreaking Drug Enters Human Trials

Scientists have developed compounds that selectively block a crucial interaction between RAS and the enzyme PI3K, a driver of tumor growth. Scientists from the Francis Crick Institute and Vividion Therapeutics have discovered a group of chemical compounds capable of selectively stopping the inter

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