Irvine, CA – May xx, 2023 – In a University of California, Irvine-led study, researchers have discovered small-molecule drugs with potential clinical utility in the treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy (DR), and retinitis pigmentosa (RP). The study, titled, “Stress resilience-enhancing drugs preserve tissue structure and function in degenerating retina via phosphodiesterase inhibition,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “In this study, we introduce a new class of therapeutics called ‘Stress ...

ST. LOUIS, MO - May 8, 2023 – Graduate student Amie Fornah Sankoh recently stood in front of 150 colleagues family and friends at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to defend her thesis, Investigating the Effects of Salicylic acid on Intercellular Trafficking via Plasmodesmata in Nicotiana benthamiana. Upon her successful defense, Dr. Amie Sankoh became the first Deaf, Black woman to receive a PhD in any STEM discipline.  Completing a PhD is a challenging undertaking for anyone; to do so without easy access to the kinds of verbal communication that hearing people ...

CHICAGO, May 8, 2023 – Macrophages, a type of white blood cell, defend the body by engulfing and digesting foreign particles, such as bacteria, viruses, and dead cells. The immune cells also tend to accumulate in solid tumors, so tracking them could enable new ways to detect cancer and the earliest stages of metastasis. As part of the 184th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Ashley Alva of the Georgia Institute of Technology will describe how attaching microbubbles to macrophages can create high-resolution and sensitive tracking images useful for disease diagnosis. Her presentation, “Tracking macrophages ...

CHICAGO, May 8, 2023 – Imagine a cocktail party full of 3D-printed, humanoid robots listening and talking to each other. That seemingly sci-fi scene is the goal of the Augmented Listening Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Realistic talking (and listening) heads are crucial for investigating how humans receive sound and developing audio technology. The team will describe the talking human head simulators in their presentation, “3D-printed acoustic head simulators that talk and move,” on Monday, May 8, at 12:15 p.m. Eastern U.S. in the Northwestern/Ohio State room of the Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile Hotel. The talk comes as part of ...

The World Mitochondria Society is organizing its 14th world conference, Targeting Mitochondria 2023, on October 11-13 at the Steigenberger Hotel Am Kanzleramt, Berlin. Targeting Mitochondria 2023 will address the latest advances and perspectives in mitochondrial research and provide an outlook on future mitochondrial therapies. Volkmar Weissig, president of the World Mitochondria Society, and Marvin Edeas, president of the scientific committee, said, "This year  we will have specific sessions on innovations such as mitochondria in space, exosome-based mitochondrial ...

A limited menu of prey may weave a tangled food web by emboldening wolf spiders of multiple species to dine on each other and even cannibalize their own, says a study from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Ecologists have long known that predators with otherwise-similar diets can coexist by effectively divvying up the food sources of a community to ease competition and, ideally, leave enough prey for everyone. But analyses of wolf spider species in Nebraska suggest that when the diversity of their mutual prey is lacking, the eight-legged ...

Researchers at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at UCLA and the National Institutes of Health have developed a zebrafish model that provides new insight into how the brain acquires essential omega-3 fatty acids, including docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and linolenic acid (ALA). Their findings, published in Nature Communications, have the potential to improve understanding of lipid transport across the blood-brain barrier and of disruptions in this process that can lead to birth defects or neurological conditions. The model may also enable researchers to design drug molecules that are capable of directly ...

When you need a bit of motivation, it often has to come from within. New research suggests cancer-fighting immune cells have found a way to do just that. Scientists at University of California San Diego have discovered a property of T cells that could inspire new anti-tumor therapeutics. Through a previously undescribed form of cell auto-signaling, T cells were shown to activate themselves in peripheral tissues, fueling their ability to attack tumors. The study, published May 8, 2023 in Immunity, was led by study first author and postdoctoral fellow Yunlong Zhao, PhD, and co-senior authors Enfu Hui, PhD, professor in the School of Biological Sciences at UC ...

Woods Hole, Mass. (Monday, May 8, 2023) - A new study provides the first observational evidence of the stabilization of the anti-cyclonic Beaufort Gyre, which is the dominant circulation of the Canada Basin and the largest freshwater reservoir in the Arctic Ocean. The study uses a newly extended record of “dynamic ocean topography” satellite data from 2011-2019 provided by two of the co-authors, along with an extensive hydrographic dataset from 2003-2019, to quantify the changing sea surface height ...

CHICAGO, May 8, 2023 – For decades, hearing aids have been focused on improving communication by separating speech from background noise. While the technology has made strides in terms of speech, it is still subpar when it comes to music. In their talk, “Evaluating the efficacy of music programs in hearing aids,” Emily Sandgren and Joshua Alexander of Purdue University will describe experiments to determine the best hearing aids for listening to music. The presentation will take place Monday, May 8, at 11:45 a.m. Eastern U.S. in the Indiana/Iowa room, as part of the 184th Meeting ...

A new study has shown that women are underrepresented in late-breaking cardiovascular clinical trials (LBCT) presented at national meetings. The study is published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Women’s Health.  Click here to read the article now. LBCT can have an impact on novel drug and device approvals, intervention indications, and patient management, according to Martha Gulati, MD, MS, from Smidt Heart Institute, and coauthors of the current study. The study investigators assessed the inclusion of women participants in LBCT presented at recent American ...

Key takeaways Quality and safety: The quality and safety of care across surgical specialties at VA healthcare sites is as good as, or better than, non-VA health centers on several quality measures. Cost and efficiency: When looking at several studies that assessed differences in cost and efficiency, non-VA medical centers performed better than VA centers. CHICAGO: By most measures, surgical care provided to United States military veterans in Veterans Affairs (VA) centers across the country is as good as, or better than, the same care delivered at non-VA medical centers, according to a new ...

About The Study: Mirroring trends seen among adults, pediatric deaths from fentanyl began to increase substantially in 2013, resulting in a more than 30-fold increase in mortality between 2013 and 2021. A surge that began in 2018 has led to a nearly 3-fold increase in deaths among older adolescents and a nearly 6-fold increase among children younger than 5 years. Across age groups, annual deaths peaked in 2020 and 2021, suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this public health crisis.  Authors: Julie R. Gaither, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.N., of the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, ...

About The Study: This study found that hospitals adjacent to health care delivery organizations affected by ransomware attacks may see increases in patient census and may experience resource constraints affecting time-sensitive care for conditions such as acute stroke. These findings suggest that targeted hospital cyberattacks may be associated with disruptions of health care delivery at nontargeted hospitals within a community and should be considered a regional disaster.  Authors: Christian Dameff, M.D., M.S., of the University of California, San Diego, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link ...

These health impacts affected communities in states with high oil and gas production, as well as states with limited or no gas activity, underlining the need for comprehensive regulatory action to protect Americans from the pollutants generated by this sector. Despite global efforts to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, oil and gas (O&G) production is nearing record levels in the United States, posing concern among health experts about what this O&G growth means for air quality and human health. While ...

FINDINGS Due to a policy decision in 2010 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the price of a prescription for the therapeutic gout drug colchicine increased nearly 16-fold from $11.25 in 2009 to $190.49 in 2011. Out-of-pocket costs for patients who took the drug jumped more than four-fold from $7.37 to $39.49 over the same period. Use of colchicine dropped 17% during this time and 27% over the following decade. Patients turned to alternative medications for gout such as allopurinol and corticosteroids. However, disease ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Much of the human genome is made of regulatory regions that control which genes are expressed at a given time within a cell. Those regulatory elements can be located near a target gene or up to 2 million base pairs away from the target. To enable those interactions, the genome loops itself in a 3D structure that brings distant regions close together. Using a new technique, MIT researchers have shown that they can map these interactions with 100 times higher resolution than has previously been possible. “Using this method, we generate the highest-resolution maps of the 3D genome that have ever been generated, and what we see are a lot of interactions between ...

Going beyond pregnancy and COVID-19, the world could someday soon come to rely on at-home tests for many diseases thanks in part to AI-fueled improvements. University of Florida scientists have used artificial intelligence tools to simplify a test that works for both hepatitis C and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The simplified test happens in one small test tube in just a few minutes. With further refinement, it could come to doctor’s offices soon and, one day, even home tests that are as easy as a pregnancy test. “We are trying to build a home-based test that is as reliable as a lab-based test,” said Piyush ...

New York, NY—May 8, 2023—Researchers at Columbia Engineering have developed a new class of integrated photonic devices--“leaky-wave metasurfaces”--that can convert light initially confined in an optical waveguide to an arbitrary optical pattern in free space. These devices are the first to demonstrate simultaneous control of all four optical degrees of freedom, namely, amplitude, phase, polarization ellipticity, and polarization orientation--a world record. Because the devices are so thin, transparent, and compatible with photonic integrated circuits ...

An artificial intelligence tool has successfully identified people at the highest risk for pancreatic cancer up to three years before diagnosis using solely the patients’ medical records, according to new research led by investigators at Harvard Medical School and the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with VA Boston Healthcare System, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The findings, published May 8 in Nature Medicine, suggest that AI-based population screening could be valuable in finding those at elevated risk for the disease and could expedite the diagnosis of a condition ...

A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has engineered bacteria to produce new-to-nature carbon products that could provide a powerful route to sustainable biochemicals. The advance – which was recently announced in the journal Nature – uses bacteria to combine natural enzymatic reactions with a new-to-nature reaction called the “carbene transfer reaction.” This work could also one day help reduce industrial emissions because it offers sustainable ...

In a new study in Nature Machine Intelligence*, researchers Bojian Yin and Sander Bohté from the HBP partner Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) demonstrate a significant step towards artificial intelligence that can be used in local devices like smartphones and in VR-like applications, while protecting privacy. They show how brain-like neurons combined with novel learning methods enable training fast and energy-efficient spiking neural networks on a large scale. Potential applications range from wearable AI to speech recognition and Augmented Reality.  While modern artificial neural ...

What cell types are found in which human tissue, and where? Which genes are active in the individual cells, and which proteins are found there? Answers to these questions and more are to be provided by a specialised atlas – in particular how the different tissues form during embryonic development and what causes diseases. In creating this atlas, researchers aim to map not only tissue directly isolated from humans, but also structures called organoids. These are three-dimensional clumps of tissue that are cultivated in the laboratory and develop in a way similar ...

JMIR Bioinformatics and Biotechnology and JMIR Publications are thrilled to announce and welcome Dr Ece Uzun as Editor-in-Chief for JMIR Bioinformatics and Biotechnology.  Dr. Uzun is currently the Director of Clinical Bioinformatics and Associate Director of Clinical Cancer Informatics and Data Science (CCIDS) at Lifespan and an Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University Alpert Medical School.  She has a B.S in Chemical Engineering and M.Sc in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering. She completed her PhD in Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in 2010 and focused ...

Professor Nicolas Doucet and his team at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) made a major breakthrough earlier this year in the field of evolutionary conservation of molecular dynamics in enzymes. Their work, published in the journal Structure, points to potential applications in health, including the development of new drugs to treat serious diseases such as cancer or to counter antibiotic resistance.  As a researcher specializing in protein dynamics, Professor Doucet is captivated by things that are invisible to the naked eye, yet full of mysteries and essential to all forms of life. He studies proteins ...