Vaccines remain the gold standard of protection against dangerous pathogens, but take considerable time and vast resources to develop. Rapidly mutating viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 can blunt their effectiveness and even render them obsolete.
To address these gaps, a multi-university team led by New Jersey Institute of Technology's Vivek Kumar is developing a hydrogel therapy that acts as a first line of defense against viruses and other biological threats. The peptides that make up this gel prevent viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, from attaching to and entering cells. They do this by binding to a particular receptor on the invading pathogen while also aggregating into a multilayer "molecular mask" that muffles its action.
Moderna is expected to announce a partnership Wednesday with artificial-intelligence heavyweight OpenAI, a deal that aims to automate nearly every business process at the biotechnology company and boost the ChatGPT maker’s reach into the enterprise.
As part of the transaction, some 3,000 Moderna employees will have access to ChatGPT Enterprise, built on OpenAI’s most advanced language model, GPT-4, by the end of this week. Further integration of AI into more of its processes could help Moderna outpace its plan to roll out 15 new products within the next five years, the Cambridge, Mass., company said.
Diagnosing rare Mendelian disorders is a labor-intensive task, even for experienced geneticists. Investigators at Baylor College of Medicine are trying to make the process more efficient using artificial intelligence. The team developed a machine learning system called AI-MARRVEL (AIM) to help prioritize potentially causative variants for Mendelian disorders. The study is published in NEJM AI.
Researchers from the Baylor Genetics clinical diagnostic laboratory noted that AIM's module can contribute to predictions independent of clinical knowledge of the gene of interest, helping to advance the discovery of novel disease mechanisms.
"The diagnostic rate for rare genetic disorders is only about 30%, and on average, it is six years from the time of symptom onset to diagnosis. There is an urgent need for new approaches to enhance the speed and accuracy of diagnosis," said co-corresponding author Dr. Pengfei Liu, associate professor of molecular and human genetics and associate clinical director at Baylor Genetics.
AIM is trained using a public database of known variants and genetic analysis called Model organism Aggregated Resources for Rare Variant ExpLoration (MARRVEL) previously developed by the Baylor team. The MARRVEL database includes more than 3.5 million variants from thousands of diagnosed cases. Researchers provide AIM with patients' exome sequence data and symptoms, and AIM provides a ranking of the most likely gene candidates causing the rare disease.
Bacterial enzyme strips away blood types to create universal donor blood
By Paul McClure
April 29, 2024
Using enzymes produced by a bacteria that almost everyone has in their gut, researchers have removed the antigens from red blood cells that determine blood type, putting us within reach of producing universal donor blood.
There’s a global shortage of blood supplies needed for life-saving transfusions due to factors that include an aging population with a higher demand for it and a lack of volunteer donors. However, even if there was an ample blood supply, it’s not as simple as just giving blood when it’s needed.
Each blood group (A, B, or AB) or type is identified by the presence of A and B antigens attached to sugar (oligosaccharide) chains on the surface of red blood cells. Blood cells in group O carry no antigens. When a blood transfusion is given, the donor and recipient's blood groups need to match. Otherwise, the immune system will attack and destroy the donated blood cells, causing a potentially fatal reaction.
