Future Timeline

Columbia Engineers develop the smallest single-chip system that is a complete functioning electronic circuit; implantable chips visible only in a microscope point the way to developing chips that can be injected into the body with a hypodermic needle to monitor medical conditions

Mitochondria—the 'batteries' that power our cells—play an unexpected role in common diseases such as type 2 diabetes and multiple sclerosis, concludes a study of over 350,000 people conducted by the University of Cambridge.

The study, published today in Nature Genetics, found that genetic variants in the DNA of mitochondria could increase the risk of developing these conditions, as well influencing characteristics such as height and lifespan.

There was also evidence that some changes in mitochondrial DNA were more common in people with Scottish, Welsh or Northumbrian genetic ancestry, implying that mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA (which accounts for 99.9% of our genetic make-up) interact with each other.

Almost all of the DNA that makes up the human genome—the body's 'blueprint' - is contained within the nuclei of our cells. Among other functions, nuclear DNA codes for the characteristics that make us individual as well as for the proteins that do most of the work in our bodies.

Inserm teams led by Laurent Reber (Infinity, Toulouse) and Pierre Bruhns (Humoral Immunity, Institut Pasteur, Paris) and French company NEOVACS have developed a vaccine that could induce long-term protection against allergic asthma, reducing the severity of its symptoms and thus significantly improving patient quality of life. Their research in animals has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Asthma is a chronic disease affecting around 4 million people in France and 340 million worldwide. Allergic asthma is characterized by inflammation of the bronchial tubes and respiratory discomfort caused by the inhalation of allergens, most often dust mites. This exposure to dust mites and other allergens leads to the production of antibodies called immunoglobulin E (IgE) and type 2 cytokines (such as interleukin-4 (IL-4) and IL-13) in the airways. This leads to a cascade of reactions resulting in hyperresponsiveness of the respiratory tract, overproduction of mucus, and eosinophilia (when there are too many eosinophils, a type of white blood cell, in the airways).

Yerkes National Primate Research Center researchers in collaboration with Institut Pasteur have determined a combination immunotherapy of Interleukin-21 (IL-21) and interferon alpha (IFNα) when added to antiviral therapy (ART) is effective in generating highly functional natural killer (NK) cells that can help control and reduce simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in animal models. This finding, published online today in Nature Communications, is key for developing additional treatment options to control HIV/AIDS, which impacts 38 million people worldwide.

ART is the current leading treatment for HIV/AIDS. It is capable of reducing the virus to undetectable levels, but is not a cure and is hampered by issues such as cost, adherence to medication treatment plan and social stigma.

One of cancer’s crafty tricks involves manipulating the host’s immune cells to protect the tumors instead of fighting them. But now, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have turned the tables around again, transforming these cells back into cancer killers.

In a fair fight between the immune system and cancer, the immune system would win most of the time. But cancer doesn’t fight fair – it uses a range of underhanded tricks to gain the upper hand. To promote its own growth, cancer creates its own microenvironment around it to sap nutrients and weaken the immune response in the area.

One of the most devious ways it does this is by hijacking the function of immune cells called regulatory T cells (Tregs). Normally these cells play an important role in keeping the immune system from attacking the body’s own cells, which would lead to autoimmune diseases. But some types of cancer will selectively let Tregs into their microenvironment, where they then fight off other immune cells that come to kill the tumor.

The research team led by Dr. Ermolaeva found that the very same metformin treatment that prolonged life when C. elegans worms were treated at young age, was highly toxic when animals of old age were treated

Using proteome and lipid metabolism analysis, the team showed that metformin treatment initiated at an advanced age induces a cascade of metabolic failures culminating in lethal mitochondrial decline, exhaustion of ATP and ultimately in cell death. Interestingly, the toxic effect of metformin in old animals was reduced by simultaneous administration of rapamycin, an immunosuppressive drug found by the authors to stabilize the ATP levels in metformin-treated cells—a possibility to alleviate metformin toxicity in older organisms and advance the idea of metformin as an anti-aging drug.

Scientists have created new artificial tissues that mimic some of the complex characteristics and abilities of living tissues, paving the way towards unprecedented advances in medicine, soft-robotics, and micro-engineering.

Above – Photograph of a floating mould containing a protocellular material in the shape of a triangle with 1.0 cm sides being lifted from a Petri dish. Credit: Dr Pierangelo Gobbo and Dr Agostino Galanti

They can produce centimetre-sized artificial tissues of any shape and with complex internal structures.

May 20, 2021 by University of Nottingham



Scientists have discovered that the way in which neurons are connected within regions of the brain, can be a better indicator of disease progression and treatment outcomes for people with brain disorders such as epilepsy.

Many brain diseases lead to cell death and the removal of connections within the brain. In a new study, published in Human Brain Mapping, a group of scientists, led by Dr. Marcus Kaiser from the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham, looked at epilepsy patients undergoing surgery.

They found that changes in the local network within brain regions can be a better predictor of disease progression, and also whether surgery will be successful or not.

The team found that looking at connectivity within regions of the brain, showed superior results to the current approach of only observing fiber tract connectivity between brain regions. Dividing the surface of the brain into 50,000 network nodes of comparable size, each brain region could be studied as a local network with 100-500 nodes. These local networks showed distinct changes compared to a control group not suffering from epileptic seizures.

May 19, 2021

Open up Scott Roy's Twitter bio and you'll see a simple but revealing sentence: "The more I learn the more I'm confused." Now the rest of the scientific world can share in his confusion. The San Francisco State University associate professor of Biology's most recent research catalogues a strange and confounding system of genes in a tiny rodent that scientists have ignored for decades.

"This is basically the weirdest sex chromosome system known to science," Roy said. "Nobody ordered this." But he's serving it anyway.

The owner of those chromosomes is the creeping vole, a burrowing rodent native to the Pacific Northwest. Scientists have known since the '60s that the species had some odd genes: Their number of X and Y chromosomes (bundles of DNA that play a large role in determining sex) is off from what's expected in male and female mammals.

May 20, 2021

When scientists hunt for life, they often look for biosignatures, chemicals or phenomena that indicate the existence of present or past life. Yet it isn't necessarily the case that the signs of life on Earth are signs of life in other planetary environments. How do we find life in systems that do not resemble ours?

In groundbreaking new work, a team* led by Santa Fe Institute Professor Chris Kempes has developed a new ecological biosignature that could help scientists detect life in vastly different environments. Their work appears as part of a special issue of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology collected in honor of renowned mathematical biologist James D. Murray.

The new research takes its starting point from the idea that stoichiometry, or chemical ratios, can serve as biosignatures. Since "living systems display strikingly consistent ratios in their chemical make-up," Kempes explains, "we can use stoichiometry to help us detect life." Yet, as SFI Science Board member and contributor, Simon Levin, explains, "the particular elemental ratios we see on Earth are the result of the particular conditions here, and a particular set of macromolecules like proteins and ribosomes, which have their own stoichiometry." How can these elemental ratios be generalized beyond the life that we observe on our own planet?

Virus Like Particles are mimics of the Nudaurelia capensis omega virus a model used to provide dynamic details about the process of viral maturation. Credit: Roger Castells-Graells

A critical process in the infection cycle of viruses has been revealed for the first time in dynamic detail using pioneering plant-based technology.

Evidence about the process of virus maturation revealed in the research could help us develop new methods for treating viral infections.

Maturation plays a critical role for all animal and bacterial viruses and is required to produce infectious virions or particles. Though the outlines of the process have been determined for many groups of viruses, detailed mechanistic studies have not been reported.

To provide the first detailed mechanistic study of maturation, Roger Castells-Graells, a rotation Ph.D. student working in Professor. George Lomonossoff's laboratory at the John Innes Centre infiltrated genetic material of the insect virus Nudaurelia capensis omega virus (NV) into dwarf tobacco plants N. benthamiana.

Nearly as light as air, these all-natural cellulose aerogels can be made sustainably, cheaply and with all natural materials. They're biointeractive too, so they can be used for therapeutics. Credit: Andrew Marais

A new low-cost and sustainable technique would boost the possibilities for hospitals and clinics to deliver therapeutics with aerogels, a foam-like material now found in such high-tech applications as insulation for spacesuits and breathable plasters.

With the help of an ordinary kitchen freezer, this newest form of aerogel was made from all natural ingredients, including plant cellulose and algae, says Jowan Rostami, a researcher in fiber technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Rostami says that the aerogel's low density and favorable surface area make it ideal for a wide range of uses, including timed release of medication and wound dressing.

Months after recovering from mild cases of COVID-19, people still have immune cells in their body pumping out antibodies against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Such cells could persist for a lifetime, churning out antibodies all the while.

The findings, published May 24 in the journal Nature, suggest that mild cases of COVID-19 leave those infected with lasting antibody protection and that repeated bouts of illness are likely to be uncommon.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have developed an algorithm that combines data from a simple blood test and brief memory tests, to predict with great accuracy who will develop Alzheimer's disease in the future. The findings are published in Nature Medicine.

Approximately 20-30% of patients with Alzheimer's disease are wrongly diagnosed within specialist healthcare, and diagnostic work-up is even more difficult in primary care. Accuracy can be significantly improved by measuring the proteins tau and beta-amyloid via a spinal fluid sample, or PET scan. However, those methods are expensive and only available at a relatively few specialized memory clinics worldwide. Early and accurate diagnosis of AD is becoming even more important, as new drugs that slow down the progression of the disease will hopefully soon become available.

Moderna will take mRNA flu and HIV vaccines into Phase 1 trials this year, as well as beginning a pivotal Phase 3 study for its cytomegalovirus (CMV) vaccine candidate.

A trial found a vaccine helps preserve some insulin-producing cells in type 1 diabetics with a specific gene variant

Results from a Phase 2 trial testing a novel type 1 diabetes vaccine have found the treatment is effective in a patient subgroup with a specific genetic variant. If validated in larger trials the new treatment could be helpful in around 50 percent of patients with type 1 diabetes.

For several years, researchers have known that one of the key indicators of type 1 diabetes is the presence of autoantibodies targeting a pancreatic protein called GAD65. In these diabetic patients the presence of these autoantibodies is often an early sign of disease and researchers have long hypothesized the possibility of disrupting this autoimmune mechanism as a way of helping prevent the destruction of insulin-producing cells.