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Category: bioengineering – Page 26

Borrowing nature’s blueprint: Scientists replicate bone marrow

Hidden within our bones, marrow sustains life by producing billions of blood cells daily, from oxygen-carrying red cells to immune-boosting white cells. This vital function is often disrupted in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiation, which can damage the marrow and lead to dangerously low white cell counts, leaving patients vulnerable to infection.

Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering), Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM) and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a platform that emulates human marrow’s native environment. This breakthrough addresses a critical need in medical science, as animal studies often fail to fully replicate the complexities of human marrow.

AI-driven multi-modal framework improves protein editing for science and medicine

Researchers from Zhejiang University and HKUST (Guangzhou) have developed a cutting-edge AI model, ProtET, that leverages multi-modal learning to enable controllable protein editing through text-based instructions. This innovative approach, published in Health Data Science, bridges the gap between biological language and protein sequence manipulation, enhancing functional protein design across domains like enzyme activity, stability, and antibody binding.

Proteins are the cornerstone of biological functions, and their precise modification holds immense potential for medical therapies, , and biotechnology. While traditional protein editing methods rely on labor-intensive laboratory experiments and single-task optimization models, ProtET introduces a transformer-structured encoder architecture and a hierarchical training paradigm. This model aligns protein sequences with natural language descriptions using contrastive learning, enabling intuitive, text-guided protein modifications.

The research team, led by Mingze Yin from Zhejiang University and Jintai Chen from HKUST (Guangzhou), trained ProtET on a dataset of over 67 million protein–biotext pairs, extracted from Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL databases. The model demonstrated exceptional performance across key benchmarks, improving protein stability by up to 16.9% and optimizing catalytic activities and antibody-specific binding.

Lab-Grown “Mini-Brain” Learns Pong — Is This Biological Neural Network “Sentient”?

A leading neuroscientist claims that a pong-playing clump of about a million neurons is “sentient”. What does that mean? Why did Cortical Labs teach a lab-grown brain to play pong? To study biological self-organization at the root of life, intelligence, and consciousness. And, according to their website, “to see what happens.” What’s next for biocomputing?

CORRECTIONS/Clarifications:
- The cells aren’t directly frozen in liquid nitrogen — they are put in vials and stored in liquid nitrogen (and you can’t buy them legally without credentials) https://www.atcc.org/products/pcs-201-010
- The sentience of some invertebrates, like octopuses, is generally agreed upon. Prominent scientists affirmed non-human consciousness in the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness: https://philiplow.foundation/consciousness/
- The “Neanderthal neurons” are human cells that are “Neanderthalized” using genetic engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FBxnkzI9HU

DISCLAIMER: The explanations in this video are those proposed by the researchers, or my opinion. We are far from understanding how brains, or even neurons, work. The free energy principle is one of many potential explanations.

Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/IhmCurious.

Footage from Cortical Labs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neV3aZtTgVM
NASJAQ’s interview with founder Hon Weng Chong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1R5k5QWPsY
Cortical Labs website: https://corticallabs.com.

Full paper on DishBrain: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6

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This Company Is Trying To Bring The Woolly Mammoth And The Dodo Back To Life—A Biologist Explains

It’s a mission that is less a nostalgic yearning for a prehistoric past than it is a solution to combat climate change, the company’s founders have said. By reintroducing mammoths to Arctic environments, they hope to rejuvenate grasslands and reduce permafrost thaw—a major source of methane emissions.

The potential ripple effects of such an ecological intervention have raised profound ethical and scientific questions but have nonetheless captivated researchers, investors and the public alike.

Colossal Bioscience’s approach to de-extinction is rooted in cutting-edge advances in genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

Synthetic Biology: Rewriting Life. Andrew Hessel at NextMed Health

Synthetic Biology is on the cusp of revolutionizing biomedicine.
at NextMed Health 2023 (http://NextMedHealth.com)

Andrew Hessel is chairman of Project-write, and Author of The Genesis Machine, Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology.

More about Andrew Hessel: https://www.nextmed.health/bio-andrewhessel.

NextMed Health is a unique platform and community focused on the conversations. Join us at http://NextMed.Health/join

Genetic Evolution: Shaping Our Future Through Engineering

Genetic engineering is a beacon of hope. It promises eternal life, curing diseases and feeding the growing world population. The possibilities are boundless. The invention is not that old. But their pace is rapid. Life without genetic engineering will no longer exist. We are at the beginning of a new evolution.

The Silent Front (Extra Long Documentary) — • The Silent Front: Spies and Secrets o…

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AI Accelerates Enzyme Engineering

Engineered enzymes are poised to have transformative impacts across applications in energy, materials, biotechnology, and medicine. Recently, machine learning has emerged as a useful tool for enzyme engineering. Now, a team of bioengineers and synthetic biologists says they have developed a machine-learning guided platform that can design thousands of new enzymes, predict how they will behave in the real world, and test their performance across multiple chemical reactions.

Their results are published in Nature Communications in an article titled, “Accelerated enzyme engineering by machine-learning guided cell-free expression,” and led by researchers at Stanford University and Northwestern University.

“Enzyme engineering is limited by the challenge of rapidly generating and using large datasets of sequence-function relationships for predictive design,” the researchers wrote. “To address this challenge, we develop a machine learning (ML)-guided platform that integrates cell-free DNA assembly, cell-free gene expression, and functional assays to rapidly map fitness landscapes across protein sequence space and optimize enzymes for multiple, distinct chemical reactions.”

20 Years in the Making: Scientists Unveil Breakthrough Anticancer Weapon

A new twist on a decades-old anticancer strategy has demonstrated significant potential against various cancer types in a preclinical study conducted by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) is a prestigious private Ivy League research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1740 by Benjamin Franklin, Penn is one of the oldest universities in the United States. It is renowned for its strong emphasis on interdisciplinary education and its professional schools, including the Wharton School, one of the leading business schools globally. The university offers a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs across various fields such as law, medicine, engineering, and arts and sciences. Penn is also known for its significant contributions to research, innovative teaching methods, and active campus life, making it a hub of academic and extracurricular activity.

Tiny magnetic discs offer remote brain stimulation without transgenes

Novel magnetic nanodiscs could provide a much less invasive way of stimulating parts of the brain, paving the way for stimulation therapies without implants or genetic modification, MIT researchers report.

The scientists envision that the tiny discs, which are about 250 nanometers across (about 1/500 the width of a human hair), would be injected directly into the desired location in the brain. From there, they could be activated at any time simply by applying a magnetic field outside the body. The new particles could quickly find applications in biomedical research, and eventually, after sufficient testing, might be applied to clinical uses.

The development of these nanoparticles is described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, in a paper by Polina Anikeeva, a professor in MIT’s departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, graduate student Ye Ji Kim, and 17 others at MIT and in Germany.

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