Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 73

Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered new details about how the human genome produces instructions for creating proteins and cells, the building blocks of life, according to a pioneering new study published in Science Advances.

While it’s understood that genes function as a set of instructions for creating RNA, and thus proteins and cells, the fundamental process by which this occurs has not been well-studied due to technological limitations, said Vadim Backman, Ph.D., the Sachs Family Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine, who was senior author of the study.

“It is still not fully understood how, despite having the same set of genes, cells turn into neurons, bones, skin, heart, or roughly 200 other kinds of cells, and then exhibit stable cellular behavior over a human lifespan which can last for more than a century—or why aging degrades this process,” said Backman, who directs the Center for Physical Genomics and Engineering at Northwestern. “This has been a long-standing open question in biology.”

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2-minute pitch for my startup Cathedral Therapeutics (co-founded with David Curiel)! If you’re interested, please feel free to reach out.

Cathedral’s novel technology protects adeno-associated virus (AAV) gene therapies from the immune system so that all patients can access the life-changing cures they need. We encapsulate AAVs inside of hollow organelles found in human cells called protein vaults to make vaultAAV complexes. This approach shields the encapsulated AAVs from antibodies so that they can enter cells and deliver beneficial DNA. https://www.cathedraltherapeutics.com/

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Engineers are renowned clock-problem solvers. They’re also notorious for treating every problem like a clock. Increasing specialization and cultural expectations play a role in this tendency. But so do engineers themselves, who are typically the ones who get to frame the problems they’re trying to solve in the first place.

In his latest book, Wicked Problems, Guru Madhavan argues that the growing number of cloudy problems in our world demands a broader, more civic-minded approach to engineering. “Wickedness” is Madhavan’s way of characterizing what he calls “the cloudiest of problems.” It’s a nod to a now-famous coinage by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who used the term “wicked” to describe complex social problems that resisted the rote scientific and engineering-based (i.e., clock-like) approaches that were invading their fields of design and urban planning back in the 1970s.

Madhavan, who’s the senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering, is no stranger to wicked problems himself. He’s tackled such daunting examples as trying to make prescription drugs more affordable in the US and prioritizing development of new vaccines. But the book isn’t about his own work. Instead, Wicked Problems weaves together the story of a largely forgotten aviation engineer and inventor, Edwin A. Link, with case studies of man-made and natural disasters that Madhavan uses to explain how wicked problems take shape in society and how they might be tamed.

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Researchers have created a new AI algorithm called Torque Clustering, which greatly enhances an AI system’s ability to learn and identify patterns in data on its own, without human input.

Researchers have developed a new AI algorithm, Torque Clustering, which more closely mimics natural intelligence than existing methods. This advanced approach enhances AI’s ability to learn and identify patterns in data independently, without human intervention.

Torque Clustering is designed to efficiently analyze large datasets across various fields, including biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, finance, and medicine. By uncovering hidden patterns, it can provide valuable insights, such as detecting disease trends, identifying fraudulent activities, and understanding human behavior.

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Researchers have developed a simple blood test to detect pancreatic cancer before it spreads to other sites in the body. The test could be used for routine screening to improve the disease’s low survival rate.

Fischer and his colleagues focused on detecting enzymes called proteases, which break down proteins and are active in tumours, even from the very early stages. They specifically looked at the activity of matrix metalloproteinases involved in chewing up collagen and the extracellular matrix, which helps tumours to invade the body.

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Despite today’s AI-driven tools for modeling a bioprocess and a host of sensors to track the progress of a bioprocess in action, an expert’s hand still plays a key role in making protein-based drugs. As Hiller put it: “The science (or art!) of preparing very concentrated feed mixtures often relies on the careful order of addition of chemicals, manipulation of pH (up and down) and temperature, and separate preparation of certain concentrated solutions before addition to the bulk feed mixture.”

Culturing cells always included some art, with a bit of superstition thrown in the mix. When I worked in a cell-culture lab in the early 1980s, there were rumors of cells dying when an incubator was moved from one side of a room to another. So people rarely moved anything. Plus, if the media included horse serum, scientists shuddered if a batch came from a different herd. Maybe some of the superstition disappeared over the decades, but some of the art remains, as Hiller confirmed.

Still, science underlies the ongoing attempt to replicate a cell’s natural environment during a bioprocess. Instead of just putting the cells in a vat filled with medium, which is the essence of batch processing, perfusion can add nutrients and remove waste. As Hiller noted, perfusion culture “is somewhat analogous to the processes that occur for cells within an organ in the body.”

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Mashour is one of a small set of clinicians and scientists trying to change that. They are increasingly bringing the tools of neuroscience into the operating room to track the brain activity of patients, and testing out anesthesia on healthy study participants. These pioneers aim to learn how to more safely anesthetize their patients, tailoring the dose to individual patients and adjusting during surgery. They also want to better understand what governs the transitions between states of consciousness and even hope to crack the code of coma.

Your brain on anesthesia

Today’s anesthetic arsenal eschews Morton’s original formula for newer, safer drugs. These include ether-based inhalants such as sevoflurane and isoflurane, and the widely used, intravenous anesthetic propofol, all of which wear off faster than early ether-based anesthetics, enabling quicker recovery. (They are also less likely to cause fires and explosions in the operating room, a regular occurrence through the first half of the 20th century.) Despite these improvements, the risks associated with excessive sedation remain high. Depending on the complexity and length of surgery, between 17 and 43 percent of patients may have cognitive problems, typically in memory and executive functions.1 These typically last only one to two weeks after surgery, but few rigorous studies have examined changes in cognitive function in the general population beyond six months after surgery.

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🛟🧬🧫🩹⚙️

Wound infections are common combat injuries and can take otherwise able-bodied personnel out of operations and/or result in severe medical complications. Current standard of care relies on complicated and often time-consuming tests to identify the specific infection-inducing pathogens that caused the wound infection. Therapeutic treatments rely on broad-spectrum and high-dose antibiotics alongside surgical excision – which are not pathogen specific, drive antibiotic resistance, can have toxic side effects, require advanced medical training, and can result in high treatment costs and burden on patients. A game-changing approach to managing infection of combat wounds, particularly one that can be applied autonomously, would benefit warfighter readiness and resilience.

The BioElectronics to Sense and Treat (BEST) program seeks to meet this need by developing wearable, automated technologies that can predict and prevent a wound infection before it can occur, and to eliminate an infection if it has already taken hold. To achieve this, DARPA is seeking researchers to develop novel bioelectronic smart bandages comprised of wound infection sensor and treatment modules. The sensors should be high-resolution and provide real-time, continual monitoring of wounds based on, for example, the person’s immune state and the collection of bacteria that live in and around a wound. Data from these sensors will be used to predict if a wound will fail to heal due to infection, diagnose the infection, and regulate administration of targeted treatments – using closed-loop control to prevent or resolve infection for improved wound healing.

“Given that infection initiates at the time of injury and can take hold before aid arrives, particularly in austere environments, the earlier we can deploy these technologies, the bigger impact they will have,” noted Dr. Leonard Tender, BEST program manager. “Even if medivac occurs immediately, without the ability to prevent infection, the downstream care required to treat the surge of wound infections resulting from a large-scale combat operation could easily overwhelm care capacity.”

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