Lifeboat Foundation

The immune system is one of the most complex parts of our body. It keeps us healthy by getting rid of parasites, viruses or bacteria, and by destroying damaged or cancer cells. One of its most intriguing abilities is its memory: upon first contact with a foreign component (called antigens) our adaptive immune system takes around two weeks to respond, but responses afterwards are much faster, as if the cells remembered the antigen. But how is this memory attained?

In a recent publication, a team of researchers coordinated by Dr. Ralph Stadhouders, from Erasmus MC, and Dr. Gregoire Stik, Group Leader at the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute, provides new clues on immune memory using state-of-the-art methodologies.

In their research paper, published in the journal Science Immunology, the first-author Anne Onrust-van Schoonhoven and colleagues compared the response of immune cells that had never been in contact with an antigen (called naïve cells) with cells previously exposed to antigen (memory cells) and sort of knew it. They focused on the differences in the epigenetic control of the cellular machinery and the nuclear architecture of the cells, two mechanisms that could explain the quick activation pattern of memory cells.

Researchers at New York University (NYU), Columbia University, and the New York Genome Center have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that can predict on-and off-target activity of CRISPR tools that target RNA instead of DNA.

The team paired a deep learning model with CRISPR screens to control the expression of human genes in different ways, akin to either flicking a light switch to shut them off completely or by using a dimmer knob to partially turn down their activity. The resulting neural network, which they called targeted inhibition of gene expression via gRNA design— TIGER—was able to predict efficacy from guide sequence and context. The team suggests the new technology could pave the way to the development of precise gene controls for use in CRISPR-based therapies.

“Our deep learning model can tell us not only how to design a guide RNA that knocks down a transcript completely, but can also ‘tune’ it—for instance, having it produce only 70% of the transcript of a specific gene,” said Andrew Stirn, a PhD student at Columbia Engineering and the New York Genome Center. Stirn is co-first author of the researchers’ published paper in Nature Biotechnology, titled “Prediction of on-target and off-target activity of CRISPR-Cas13D guide RNAs using deep learning.” In their paper, the researchers concluded, “We believe that TIGER predictions will enable ranking and ultimately avoidance of undesired off-target binding sites and nuclease activation, and further spur the development of RNA-targeting therapeutics.”

Scientists consider the role of overweight and obesity in increasing the risk for gastrointestinal cancers to be well established, with colorectal cancers the most common of these malignancies in the United States. According to National Cancer Institute (NCI) data, an estimated 153,020 men and women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2023, and 52,550 are expected to die of this disease. In two recent studies, researchers addressed the impact of overweight, obesity, and body mass index (BMI) on colorectal and non-colorectal gastrointestinal (GI) cancers at different stages of adult life, as well as the association of BMI and different molecular subtypes in colorectal cancers.

Obesity, BMI, and Cancer Across the Lifespan

In a new retrospective cohort study, researchers found that being overweight or obese in early and middle adulthood increases the risk for developing colorectal and non-colorectal GI cancers throughout a person’s lifetime. Even when an individual starts out as underweight or falls within a normal BMI as a young adult, the risk rises if they later become overweight or obese, according to the research.

For decades, people have arranged to freeze their bodies after death, dreaming of resurrection by advanced future medicine.

The signal, produced by neurons, helps the barrier form and maintain its protective properties.

In the largest observational study to date on “SuperAgers” — people in their 80s who have brains as sharp as those 30 years younger — researchers in Spain found key differences in lifestyle that may contribute to these older adults’ razor-sharp minds.

SuperAgers in the study had more gray matter in parts of the brain related to movement, and they scored higher on agility, balance and mobility tests than typical older adults — even though the physical activity levels of the two groups were the same.

“Though superagers report similar activity levels to typical older people, it’s possible they do more physically demanding activities like gardening or stair climbing,” said senior author Bryan Strange, director of the Laboratory for Clinical Neuroscience at the Technical University of Madrid, in a statement.

Immunotherapy could be the “shot in the arm” you need to treat your allergies.

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. (August 7, 2019) – You may think you can’t tell the difference between the symptoms caused by spring, summer and fall allergies. They all usually involve sneezing, sniffling, itchy eyes and a runny nose. And while symptoms for each Allergies are inappropriate or exaggerated reactions of the immune system to substances that, in the majority of people, cause no symptoms. Symptoms of the allergic diseases may be caused by exposure of the skin to a chemical, of the respiratory system to particles of dust or pollen (or other substances), or of the stomach and intestines to a particular food. rel= tooltip allergy season may be similar, the treatment can look very different, particularly if Immunotherapy is a form of preventive and anti-inflammatory treatment of allergy to substances such as pollens, house dust mites, fungi, and stinging insect venom.

So why, almost 30 years on from Dolly, haven’t humans been cloned yet? Is it primarily for ethical reasons, are there technological barriers, or is it simply not worth doing?

Related: What are the alternatives to animal testing?

When Nicola Spaldin began studying natural sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1988, she planned on becoming a physicist, but then quickly reconsidered. “After about the second lecture I completely changed my mind,” she recalls. “I thought ‘I’m absolutely not clever enough to be a physicist.’ Everybody was very brilliant and I was not.”

Yet it seems Spaldin was vastly underestimating herself. Now a professor of materials science at ETH Zurich, she won two major awards for physics last year: the EPS Europhysics Prize and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. Both accolades cited Spaldin’s pioneering work on the theory of magnetoelectric multiferroics – materials that are both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric. These properties are rarely found together, making it very difficult to engineer substances with both, but they have many exciting potential applications, from microelectronics to medicine.

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