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Category: biotech/medical – Page 4

Gold-laced nanoparticles could eventually spot and treat endometriosis without surgery

Endometriosis is a painful, common condition affecting women worldwide, but treatment and diagnosis options are scarce. A new University of Mississippi-led study may have found an answer to both problems.

Early results from a study published in Communications Chemistry show that gold-laced nanoparticles can hitchhike on white blood cells. By using those cells as a delivery vehicle, the team hopes to identify and treat endometriosis without repeated surgeries.

“Lots of women go through their lives being in enormous amounts of pain and thinking that it’s normal, and it’s not normal,” said Eden Tanner, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, who authored the study with a team of Ole Miss researchers.

Fish-inspired sensor tracks how human heart tissue responds to disease and treatment

Engineers have developed a new way to monitor how tiny lab-grown human heart tissues beat—by effectively “listening” to the ripples they create. The team has created a wireless, noninvasive sensing platform that can biomechanically measure how strongly the miniature heart tissues, known as cardiac organoids, beat in real time. The research could help accelerate drug development, improve disease modeling and reduce reliance on animal testing, offering a more human-relevant way to study how the heart works.

Cardiac organoids are 3D clusters of human heart cells grown in a laboratory that are used to evaluate the safety and efficacy of new drugs prior to clinical trials, as well as study disease. While they don’t replicate the full structure of a human heart, they mimic key behaviors, especially how heart muscles contract when drugs are administered.

They are increasingly seen as a powerful alternative to animal models, which often fail to fully capture how human biology works.

Atherosclerosis Profiling Reveals BHLHE40 as a Candidate Modulator of VSMC

BACKGROUND: Vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) play a central role in atherosclerosis by undergoing phenotypic modulation from a quiescent, contractile state to a range of synthetic phenotypes, including fibroblast-like, macrophage-like, and lipid-laden foam cell–like states. However, a comprehensive multimodal characterization and understanding of the transcriptional programs driving these transitions remain incomplete. METHODS: To comprehensively define the phenotypic diversity of VSMCs during atherosclerosis progression, we performed in-depth profiling using cellular indexing of transcriptomes and epitopes by sequencing and bulk RNA sequencing in a VSMC-lineage–tracing atherosclerotic mouse model. Insights from these data sets guided the design of targeted in vitro experiments to investigate candidate regulatory mechanisms.

Rethinking mRNA vaccines: Liver targeting can suppress immunity, while muscle boosts it

A new study by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai overturns a longstanding assumption about how mRNA vaccines generate immunity, revealing that certain non-immune cells help determine vaccine effectiveness.

The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, also introduces a powerful and versatile technology to control the expression of mRNA drugs, which the researchers demonstrate can enhance the effectiveness of mRNA cancer vaccines in preclinical studies of lymphoma. The paper is titled “mRNA vaccine immunity is enhanced by hepatocyte detargeting and not dependent on dendritic cell expression.”

The findings provide a new framework for designing mRNA vaccines and mRNA therapeutics, with immediate implications for cancer immunotherapy, infectious disease vaccines, and gene-editing treatments.

Molecular mechanics behind heart cell restructuring revealed

Microtubules, part of heart muscle cells’ internal “skeleton,” help determine how the heart changes shape under stress, and a common signaling pathway called the ERK pathway acts as a key controller of where the building materials for these cells’ growth are delivered inside them, a pair of new studies show. These findings, from a team at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, point to possible new ways to address harmful heart remodeling that can be linked to heart failure.

“The molecular decision behind how a heart cell, and by extension the heart, changes in size and shape has been a mystery, even though we’ve known that heart cells do change in length and width over a person’s life in response to different conditions,” said the studies’ senior author Benjamin Prosser, Ph.D., a professor of Physiology.

“But now that we know what is doing the work and what guides it, that opens the door to targeting these mechanisms and correcting abnormal growth.”

One injection reversed osteoarthritis in weeks

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, CU Anschutz, and Colorado State University have developed a set of experimental treatments that may help aging and damaged joints repair themselves in a matter of weeks. The therapies have shown promising results in animal studies, where they reversed signs of osteoarthritis and restored joint health.

The new approaches include a regenerative injection designed to be administered directly into a joint, as well as a biomaterial-based repair system that encourages the body’s own cells to rebuild damaged cartilage.

The work recently received a major boost from the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which announced that the team will move forward to the next stage of a project worth up to $33.5 million. The research is part of the ARPA-H Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis (NITRO) program, led by ARPA-H Program Manager Dr. Ross Uhrich.

Scientists engineer personalized cartilage graft for infants with life-threatening airway narrowing

A study led by researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) demonstrates a new method of using decellularized cartilage with patient-specific cells to help enlarge pediatric airways narrowed as a result of severe subglottic stenosis. Researchers demonstrate that this new method is faster, more effective and able to overcome issues associated with the current standard grafts, such as donor site morbidity, insufficient tissue volume and a delayed timeline. The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

Severe subglottic stenosis is a narrowing of the airway below the vocal cords and above the trachea. An estimated 20,000 infants per year are affected by this condition. The most severe cases require laryngotracheal reconstruction (LTR), an open-airway surgery used to enlarge the airway by implanting cartilage taken from the rib cage.

While LTR is used to successfully treat thousands of children with subglottic stenosis, in many cases, young children lack enough costal cartilage—the cartilage connecting the ribs to the sternum—for these grafts. As a result, operations often need to be delayed, leaving the child attached to a tracheostomy tube until they are older, and there is a higher risk of needing follow-up surgery because the airway is at risk of narrowing again.

Brain–computer interface detects hidden awareness in unresponsive patients

A new approach for identifying signs of hidden awareness in people who cannot speak or move after severe brain injury has been demonstrated by researchers at the University of Bath in the U.K.

The system detects patterns of brain activity through a wearable headset using an advanced application of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology.

Across multiple experimental sessions, the researchers uncovered signs of consciousness that were previously undetected in unresponsive patients.

Therapeutic inhibition of telomeric DNA damage response rescues hematopoietic dysfunction driven by telomere shortening and aging

Oppezzo and colleagues report that therapeutically blocking telomeric DNA damage signaling reduces senescence and inflammation and restores hematopoietic function in telomerase-deficient and physiologically aged mice.

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