New research shows that FOXO1 is required for memory in T cells and associated with more durable clinical responses to CAR T cell therapy.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 584
Breakthrough Parkinson’s Gene Discovery Sheds Light on Evolutionary Origin
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative movement disorder that progresses relentlessly. It gradually impairs a person’s ability to function until they ultimately become immobile and often develop dementia. In the U.S. alone, over a million people are afflicted with Parkinson’s, and new cases and overall numbers are steadily increasing.
There is currently no treatment to slow or halt Parkinson’s disease. Available drugs don’t slow disease progression and can treat only certain symptoms. Medications that work early in the disease, however, such as Levodopa, generally become ineffective over the years, necessitating increased doses that can lead to disabling side effects.
Without understanding the fundamental molecular cause of Parkinson’s, it’s improbable that researchers will be able to develop a medication to stop the disease from steadily worsening in patients.
Testing drugs on mini-cancers in the lab may reveal best treatment
The next innovation in cancer treatment could be to test all possible drugs on thousands of miniature versions of a person’s tumour, grown in the lab, to see which works the best. The technique, sometimes called drug sensitivity testing, may have already helped a few children with advanced cancer live for longer than the standard approach.
It could eventually become routinely used for everyone with cancer, says Diana Azzam at Florida International University in Miami. “I would say it will help guide treatments in any [cancer], whether it’s aggressive or not.”
AI Tool Helps Doctors Pick Optimum Cancer Treatment For Patients
An Israeli medtech company is using artificial intelligence to help oncologists decide the best and most effective course of treatment for their cancer patients.
OncoHost’s main focus is on treatments for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). According to the World Cancer Research Fund, lung cancer is the second most common cancer (after breast cancer) and responsible for 12.2 percent of new cases of the disease.
In fact, OncoHost CEO Ofer Sharon tells NoCamels, lung cancer “is the number one killer” among patients with this form of the disease.
New treatment approach shows promise in hard-to-treat pediatric cancers
Researchers have developed a functional precision medicine approach that targets cancer by combining genetic testing with a new way to test individual drugs on tumor samples. The results of the clinical study were published in Nature Medicine.
Arkansas man receives world’s first eye transplant
Surgeons at NYU Langone have performed the world’s first whole eye transplant. The recipient can’t see out of his new eye, but it’s still healthy more than five months after the operation — putting doctors a major step closer to restoring vision with donor eyes in the future.
The patient: Aaron James, a 46-year-old military vet living in Arkansas, was working as a high-voltage lineman in 2021 when he came in contact with a live wire. The accident caused severe burns that led to the loss of his left eye, his nose, his mouth, half of his face, and his left arm from just above the elbow.
Doctors at NYU Langone became aware of Aaron’s case two months later. The hospital’s face transplant program is one of the best in the world, and after talking to Aaron, his family, and his doctors, they determined that he would be a good candidate for a partial face transplant.
How a new drug prototype regenerates lung tissue
Pulmonary diseases are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. For many progressive lung diseases like idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a key issue is a low supply of new stem cells to repair and reverse damage. These cells are responsible for regenerating and increasing the growth of healthy tissue—without them, lung function decreases and a range of severe illnesses can take hold.
This fMRI technique promised to transform brain research — why can no one replicate it?
In conventional functional MRI (fMRI), researchers monitor changes in blood flow to different brain regions to estimate activity. But this response lags by at least one second behind the activity of neurons, which send messages in milliseconds.
Park and his co-authors said that DIANA could measure neuronal activity directly, which is an “extraordinary claim”, says Ben Inglis, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The DIANA technique works by applying minor electric shocks every 200 milliseconds to an anaesthetized animal. Between shocks, an MRI scanner collects data from one tiny piece of the brain every 5 milliseconds. After the next shock, another spot is scanned. The software stitches together data from all the spots, to visualize changes in an entire slice of brain over a 200-millisecond period. The process is similar to filming an action pixel by pixel, where the action would need to be repeated to record every pixel, and those recordings stitched together, to create a full video.
Researchers call for a revamped fungal priority list to combat regional disease burdens
🌍🔬🍄
Study critiques the World Health Organization’s fungal priority pathogens list for not fully reflecting the global burden of fungal diseases, advocating for a revised list that considers regional disparities and elevates the priority of pathogens like Mucorales and Histoplasma spp. to better align with their impact on public health.