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Category: health – Page 2

Studying 2 distinct human cohorts with recent exposure to TB

https://doi.org/10.1172/jci.insight.202134 Paul Ogongo & team find different individual Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigens induce distinct T cell responses, with important implications for TB vaccine development.

5Center for Global Health Research, Kenya Medical Research Institute, Kisumu, Kenya.

6Center for Vaccine Innovation, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, La Jolla, California, USA.

7Department of Infectious Disease and Immunology, Center for Vaccine Research, Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Graphene ‘leaf tattoo’ sensor tracks plant hydration in real time

Is your houseplant thirsty? Are crops getting enough water? Is a forest at high risk of wildfire? Leaf health can answer all these questions, and researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed new technology to measure hydration levels with greater accuracy and without hurting the plant. The researchers developed an electronic tattoo for leaves that uses the hyperflexible and sustainable material graphene to track hydration levels. It sticks on the leaves without harming them, a major improvement over current methods that work only with dead or dried-out leaves or provide indirect measurements.

“Being able to directly measure and monitor the live leaf over time, at the point of photosynthesis, gives us more information to understand the health of our plant ecosystems, whether that’s an individual plant or an entire forest,” said Jean Anne Incorvia, associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the leaders on the new research published recently in Nano Letters.

Mutation map reveals how amylin mutations influence type 2 diabetes

Researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) have produced a mutational map showing how mutations in amylin—a hormone that plays a key role in glucose regulation—affect its tendency to form toxic amyloid aggregates in the pancreas. This process is linked to the development of type 2 diabetes. While it was already known that certain mutations could alter this aggregation capacity, understanding of this process was fragmented and based on isolated studies. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

“For the first time, we can systematically map how thousands of mutations modulate amylin aggregation, bringing human genetics closer to molecular mechanisms,” says Benedetta Bolognesi, the principal investigator of the Protein Phase Transitions in Health and Disease group at IBEC, who is also the lead author of the study.

“We have created a map that allows us to anticipate the potential impact of these mutations in the population,” adds Marta Badia, a researcher in the same group and first author of the study. “We are not assessing toxicity, but rather the protein’s intrinsic propensity to form fibers. This is a first step, but an extremely necessary one.”

Signal, Speculation, and Standards of Proof in Iatrogenic AD

💬 Editorial: Current evidence supports iatrogenic transmission of cerebral amyloid angiopathy but not AlzheimerDisease; a definitive causal link between contaminated growth hormone exposure and AD remains speculative.

Neurodegenerative diseases caused by protein misfolding (eg, Alzheimer disease [AD], frontotemporal lobar degeneration, Parkinson disease) share many similarities with prion diseases. All demonstrate template-directed protein misfolding and propagation in vivo. However, with 1 exception, they have not exhibited interindividual or zoonotic transmission as observed in iatrogenic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, respectively. An important unresolved question is whether other proteinopathies are transmissible between individuals, and if so, their potential impact on public health. To address these concerns, several prion centers have re-assessed cases of iatrogenic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease due to cadaver-derived human growth hormone (c-hGH) and dura mater grafts. Although amyloid β (Aβ) plaques and cerebral amyloid angiopathy were commonly seen, tau pathology necessary for a diagnosis of AD was not.1,2 Thus, while there is adequate evidence that cerebral amyloid angiopathy may be acquired through iatrogenic mechanisms, iatrogenic transmission of AD pathology remained speculative.3

In 2024, Banerjee et al published an article entitled, “Iatrogenic Alzheimer’s Disease in Recipients of Cadaveric Pituitary-Derived Growth Hormone.”4 This assertion of iatrogenic AD (iAD) was largely predicated on the detection of Aβ seeds contaminating the c-hGH used in 8 recipients who later presented with concerns of cognitive impairment. The recipients had a variety of premorbid neurologic conditions that led to the need for hGH, many of which are themselves associated with later-life neuropathology, perhaps most notably radiotherapy and epilepsy. This report was met with some skepticism, given how the cases were diagnosed and the lack of biological evidence to confirm AD pathology in most participants.5,6

In this issue of JAMA Neurol ogy, the same group presents a report of an autopsy-confirmed case of AD in a c-hGH recipient and describes the clinical phenotype of 3 other c-hGH recipients.7 In their autopsy case, they describe cerebral amyloid angiopathy and high-level AD neuropathologic change (A3B3C3), providing the strongest confirmation of an AD diagnosis in their cohort. Additionally, this individual had limited premorbid medical conditions (complex partial seizures) and required hGH due to idiopathic growth hormone deficiency. They describe the clinical presentation as a mixed primary progressive aphasia phenotype and remark that 3 other c-hGH recipients presented similar primary progressive aphasia phenotypes. One of these was diagnosed with atypical AD due to unspecified single-photon emission computed tomography imaging findings and the other through a reduced Aβ42/40-cerebrospinal fluid ratio.

Eyal Aharoni — Breaking the Moral Turing Test

Dr. discusses one of the most provocative frontiers in technology: the automation of moral judgement — in his talk focusses on outcomes of a comparative moral Turing test (AI outperforms humans across a range of metrics), as well as AI assisted medical triage!

Link in reply🔗

Eyal Aharoni

Dr. Eyal Aharoni (Georgia State University) to the Future Day 2026 stage to discuss one of the most provocative frontiers in technology: the automation of moral judgement.

Breaking the Moral Turing Test: Studies of human attribution and deference to AI moral judgment and decision-making.

Continue reading “Eyal Aharoni — Breaking the Moral Turing Test” | >

Scientists uncovered the nutrients bees were missing — Colonies surged 15-fold

Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in pollen. In controlled trials, colonies fed this specially designed diet produced up to 15 times more young, showing a dramatic boost in reproduction and overall health. As climate change and modern agriculture reduce the availability of natural pollen, this innovation could offer a practical way to support struggling bee populations.

Microwave carrots, air-fry tomatoes: Researchers identify sustainable cooking methods for better nutrition

Researchers at the University of Seville’s Food Color and Quality Laboratory have studied the effects of different cooking methods used for tomatoes and carrots (in the oven, microwave or air fryer, among others) on the amount of carotenoids that are potentially available for absorption by the body following the digestion of these foods. According to the study, the bioavailability index varies significantly depending on how these foods are cooked. Carotenoids are compounds of great importance due to their positive health effects.

In the case of carrots, the bioavailability of total carotenoids increased ninefold when cooked in the oven. For tomatoes, the highest bioavailability values were obtained by cooking them in either an air fryer (190 °C for 10 minutes) or a conventional oven (180 °C for 20 minutes). There were no significant differences between the two methods. Although the increase in bioavailability was more modest (a 1.5-fold increase), it was also significant compared to raw tomatoes.

The researchers also highlight that the increases in the bioavailability of the vitamin A precursor carotenoids in tomatoes (α-carotene and β-carotene) ranged from 26 to 38 times and 46 to 71 times, respectively, compared with those in raw carrots. Cooking is, therefore, a sometimes-overlooked strategy for combating vitamin A deficiency, one of the world’s most serious nutritional problems.

Triple pre-surgery therapy may boost immunity against soft tissue sarcoma

Early results from preclinical studies and a clinical trial led by researchers at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and Stanford Medicine suggest that combining targeted radiation therapy with an experimental immune-boosting drug called BO-112 and anti-PD-1 therapy before surgery may help the immune system fight aggressive soft tissue sarcomas.

The findings, published in Cancer Discovery, show that the approach can reshape the tumor microenvironment to activate the body’s immune cells against cancer.

Soft tissue sarcomas are a rare and often hard-to-treat group of cancers that typically require a combination of surgery, radiation therapy and other systemic treatments. However, these tumors may still be resistant to standard therapies, highlighting the need for new treatment strategies.

DNA shape explains crucial gene-therapy challenges

CRISPR is a powerful DNA-editing tool that has underpinned huge advancements in human health care in the last decade. It is a precision tool, but is not perfect, and misplaced DNA edits can compromise safety and efficacy, costing billions each year. Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS), Imperial College London and the University of Sheffield have published research in Nature showing that the physical twisting of DNA plays an important role in these mistakes. Using a newly developed platform of tiny (nanometer-sized) DNA circles, called DNA minicircles, the team captured never-before-seen interactions between CRISPR and DNA, providing insights that could help eradicate errors altogether.

CRISPR-Cas9 has transformed biology by giving scientists a programmable way to cut and edit DNA. Its ever-growing impact includes groundbreaking therapies for genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia and an increasing role in personalized cancer treatment and rapid diagnostics. But even carefully designed CRISPR systems can sometimes cut DNA sequences that were not the intended targets.

“It’s a tool that is not perfect and can introduce errors and make edits where it shouldn’t make them,” says Professor David Rueda, head of the Single Molecule Imaging group at the LMS and Chair in Molecular and Cellular Biophysics at Imperial College London. “And it’s an important problem for the industry. It’s been estimated to be $0.3 to $0.9 billions per year in industry costs, in profiling off-targets, redesigning guides and delays.”

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