Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”), a clinical-stage generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, today announced that it has successfully discovered a potent, selective, and orally bioavailable small molecule inhibitor of CDK8 for the treatment of cancer using a structure-based generative chemistry approach enabled by the Chemistry42 multi-modal generative reinforcement learning platform. The research was published in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, a leading journal in medicinal chemistry. As members of the CDK family, CDK8 and its paralog protein CDK19 play critical roles in regulating transcription of ...

Have you ever wondered why some insects like cockroaches prefer to stay or decrease movement in darkness? Some may tell you it’s called photophobia, a habit deeply coded in their genes. A further question would be whether we can correct this habit of cockroaches, that is, moving in the darkness just as they move in bright backgrounds. Scientists from Osaka University may have answered this question with a positive answer. They solved this question by converting a cockroach into a cyborg. They published this research in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems.                  ...

SAN ANTONIO — April 12, 2023—Southwest Research Institute will contribute to a new NASA institute to improve understanding and enable rapid certification of metal parts created using advanced additive manufacturing (AM) techniques. The Institute for Model-based Qualification & Certification of Additive Manufacturing (IMQCAM) will work to improve computer models of additively manufactured metal parts and expand their utility in spaceflight applications. Additive manufacturing uses 3D printing or rapid prototyping to build ...

Physicians and scientists from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) will join oncology experts and members of the global cancer research community to present the latest advances in cancer during the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting on April 14-19 in Orlando, Florida. MSK experts will present significant research and will be available to comment on topics including cancer disparities, analytical tools for precision medicine, genomic biomarkers, tumor biology, immunology and more. Deb Schrag, MD, MPH, will offer insights ...

Roland Martin, MD, a world-class neurologist and investigator, is the winner of the 2023 John Dystel Prize for MS Research. He is being honored for advancing our understanding of immune mechanisms underlying multiple sclerosis and translating them to develop innovative strategies to treat the disease. Martin uncovered how key MS susceptibility genes are involved in launching immune attacks on the nervous system and identified specific components of nerve-insulating myelin that are targeted by those attacks. His team has developed an experimental therapy designed to make ...

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the fourth most common cancer and accounts for 11% of the cancer burden in Thailand in 2020, with over 21,000 new CRC cases annually, and stage III and IV CRC account for up to 70%–80% of overall CRC cases, according to the Society of Colorectal Surgeons of Thailand. This report indicates Thailand has a high percentage of respondents (62.1%) who feel they lack CRC information to assess their risk, far higher than global average of 51.5%. In addition, 48.2% of Thais say that cost concerns are holding them back from CRC screening, way higher than global average of ...

First study to do apples-to-apples comparison of residential treatment use among Medicaid enrollees across several states Nine states represent 14.9 million people (20% of all Medicaid enrollees) CHICAGO --- Approximately 7 million adults in the U.S. are living with opioid use disorder (OUD). Yet a new Northwestern Medicine study that measured residential treatment use among Medicaid enrollees across nine states found only 7% of enrollees with OUD received residential treatment, an integral part of the recovery process ...

Researchers from NC State University and Texas A&M University published a new Journal of Marketing article that examines membership fee shipping programs and the effect on consumers’ purchase behaviors and company net revenue. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “The Effectiveness of Membership-Based Free Shipping: An Empirical Investigation of Consumers’ Purchase Behaviors and Revenue Contribution” and is authored by Fangfei Guo and Yan Liu. What is the top reason 50% of customers abandon items in online shopping carts? Why do e-commerce brands incur an annual revenue loss of about ...

Whether wriggling your toes or lifting groceries, muscles in your body smoothly expand and contract. Some polymers can do the same thing — acting like artificial muscles — but only when stimulated by dangerously high voltages. Now, researchers in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces report a series of thin, elastic films that respond to substantially lower electrical charges. The materials represent a step toward artificial muscles that could someday operate safely in medical devices. Artificial muscles could become key components of movable soft robotic implants and functional artificial organs. Electroactive elastomers, such as bottlebrush polymers, are attractive ...

Developing and testing new treatments or vaccines for humans almost always requires animal trials, but these experiments can sometimes take years to complete and can raise ethical concerns about the animals’ treatment. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed a new testing platform that encapsulates B cells — some of the most important components of the immune system — into miniature “organoids” to make vaccine screening quicker and greatly reduce the number of animals needed. Vaccines ...

Single-use hard plastics are all around us: utensils, party decorations and food containers, to name a few examples. These items pile up in landfills, and many biodegradable versions stick around for months, requiring industrial composting systems to fully degrade. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering have created a sturdy, lightweight material that disintegrates on-demand — and they made it from sugar and wood-derived powders. Watch a video about the material here. Sturdy, degradable materials made from plants and other non-petroleum sources have come ...

Early diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease requires reliable and cost-effective screening methods. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now discovered that a type of sugar molecule in blood is associated with the level of tau, a protein that plays a critical role in the development of severe dementia. The study, which is published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, can pave the way for a simple screening procedure able to predict onset ten years in advance. “The role of glycans, ...

The ancestors of modern mammals managed to evolve into one of the most successful animal lineages – the key was to start out small and simple, a new study reveals. In many vertebrate groups, such as fishes and reptiles, the skull and lower jaw of animals with a backbone are composed of numerous bones. This was also the case in the earliest ancestors of modern mammals over 300 million years ago. However, during evolution the number of skull bones was successively reduced in early mammals around 150 to 100 million years ago.   Publishing their findings today ...

In 1918, the American chemist Irving Langmuir published a paper examining the behavior of gas molecules sticking to a solid surface. Guided by the results of careful experiments, as well as his theory that solids offer discrete sites for the gas molecules to fill, he worked out a series of equations that describe how much gas will stick, given the pressure. Now, about a hundred years later, an “AI scientist” developed by researchers at IBM Research, Samsung AI, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) has reproduced a key part of Langmuir’s Nobel Prize-winning work. The system—artificial intelligence ...

Researchers of the Genome Dynamics Project team at Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science ·revealed new mechanism controlling cellular proliferation in response to serum, which triggers growth of resting cells.   One of the key pathways for cellular growth is the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) –mTOR (mechanistic/mammalian target of rapamycin) pathway. mTOR regulates the cellular response to nutrient availability. Dysregulation of the mTOR signaling pathway is intimately involved in many human diseases, especially the multitude of different human cancers. This ...

Since the 1950s, humanity has produced an estimated 8.3bn tons of plastic, adding a further 380m tons to this amount each year. Only 9% of this gets recycled. The inevitable result is that plastic is everywhere, from the depths of the oceans to the summit of Everest – and notoriously, inside the tissues of humans and other organisms. The long-term effects of ingested plastic on people aren’t yet known. But in rodents, ingested microplastics can impair the function of the liver, intestines, and exocrine and reproductive organs. Especially ...

Reducing global greenhouse gas emissions is critical to avoiding a climate disaster, but current carbon removal methods are proving to be inadequate and costly. Now researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have proposed a scalable solution that uses simple, inexpensive technologies to remove carbon from our atmosphere and safely store it for thousands of years. As reported today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers propose growing biomass crops to capture carbon from the air, then burying the harvested vegetation in engineered dry biolandfills. This ...

A research team led by Seishiro Tada and Takanobu Tsuihiji of the University of Tokyo shows that the living warm-blooded descendants of theropod dinosaurs evolved a better nasal cooling system aided by larger nasal cavities than cold-blooded animals. The study provides clues to the evolution of nasal cooling in warm-blooded animals from their theropod dinosaur ancestors.  Endotherms, or warm-blooded animals, maintain their high body temperature through internal heat sources. Birds, humans, and other mammals are endotherms. But ectotherms, or cold-blooded animals such as reptiles, use external heat sources to keep ...

Researchers have designed a low-cost, energy-efficient robotic hand that can grasp a range of objects – and not drop them – using just the movement of its wrist and the feeling in its ‘skin’.   Grasping objects of different sizes, shapes and textures is a problem that is easy for a human, but challenging for a robot. Researchers from the University of Cambridge designed a soft, 3D printed robotic hand that cannot independently move its fingers but can still carry out a range of complex movements. The robot hand was trained to ...

An extreme closeup of feathers from a bird with an uncanny ability to hold water while it flies could inspire the next generation of absorbent materials. With high resolution microscopes and 3D technology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology captured an unprecedented view of feathers from the desert-dwelling sandgrouse, showcasing the singular architecture of their feathers and revealing for the first time how they can hold so much water. “It’s super fascinating to see how nature managed to create structures so perfectly efficient to take ...

Time-restricted fasting diets could cause fertility problems according to new research from the University of East Anglia. A new study published today shows that time-restricted fasting affects reproduction differently in male and female zebrafish. Importantly, some of the negative effects on eggs and sperm quality can be seen after the fish returned to their normal levels of food consumption. The research team say that while the study was conducted in fish, their findings highlight the importance of considering not just the effect of fasting on weight and health, but also on fertility. Prof Alexei Maklakov, from UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “Time-restricted ...

Many birds’ feathers are remarkably efficient at shedding water — so much so that “like water off a duck’s back” is a common expression. Much more unusual are the belly feathers of the sandgrouse, especially Namaqua sandgrouse, which absorb and retain water so efficiently the male birds can fly more than 20 kilometers from a distant watering hole back to the nest and still retain enough water in their feathers for the chicks to drink and sustain themselves in the searing deserts ...

A team from the Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan has uncovered new information about how microglia, the resident immune cells in the brain, colonize the brain during the embryonic stage of development. Although erythromyeloid progenitors (EMPs) were previously thought to divide into either microglia or macrophages, the group found that macrophages that enter the brain primordium —the brain in its earliest recognizable stage of development— can become microglia at later stages of development. These findings demonstrate the plasticity of these ...

High levels of the body’s own cannabinoid substances protect against developing addiction in individuals previously exposed to childhood maltreatment, according to a new study from Linköping University in Sweden. The brains of those who had not developed an addiction following childhood maltreatment seem to process emotion-related social signals better. Childhood maltreatment has long been suspected to increase the risk of developing a drug or alcohol addiction later in life. Researchers at Linköping University have previously shown that this risk is three times higher if you have been exposed to childhood maltreatment ...

New research from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) has found that pregnant women display a strong immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection, comparable to that of non-pregnant women.  Published in JCI Insight, the study looked at the immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 in unvaccinated pregnant and non-pregnant women and found similar levels of antibodies and T and B cell responses, responsible for long-term protection. Lead author of the paper, University of ...