This Microfluidic Chip Can Remove Risky Cells.

 

Advances in medical science are happening so quickly that it is almost impossible to keep up with the latest developments. Some new treatments are helping patients with spinal cord injuries. Now a small plastic device may be added to a variety of treatments.

A tiny device built by scientists at MIT and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology might be used to improve therapy treatments for patients suffering from spinal cord injuries.

In cell therapy, clinicians create induced pluripotent stem cells by reprogramming some skin or blood cells taken from a patient. To treat a spinal cord injury, these pluripotent stem cells can become progenitor cells, which differentiate into spinal cord cells. These progenitors are then transplanted back into the patient.

These new cells can regenerate part of the injured spinal cord. However, pluripotent stem cells that don’t fully change into progenitors can form tumors. These are the risky cells that need to be removed.

This research team developed a microfluidic cell sorter that can remove about half of the cells that can potentially become tumors without causing any damage to the fully formed progenitor cells.

Read more here.

Medical Breakthroughs in 2023

 

Medical science is currently being transformed by scientific discoveries that will dramatically advance the way we diagnose and treat diseases and genetic disorders.

Alzheimers

The Alzheimer’s drug lecanemab (Leqembi) won FDA approval in July. Lecanemab removes the beta amyloid plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. Beta amyloids are the hallmark of Alzheimer’s. These proteins clump together to form plaques that destroy neurons, which are the cells that form the brain’s communication system. 

The drug does not stop the disease, but in a clinical trial, lecanemab slowed cognitive decline by about 30 percent over 18 months compared with a placebo. 

Medicare will provide coverage under certain conditions.

Muscular Dystrophy

In June 2023, the FDA approved the first gene therapy for children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. People with this muscle-wasting disease don’t make the protein dystrophin, which helps keep muscle cells intact. The therapy helps the body produce a version of the missing protein.

The disease is progressive and most affected individuals require a wheelchair by the teenage years. Serious life-threatening complications may ultimately develop including disease of the heart muscle (cardiomyopathy) and respiratory difficulties.

Postpartum Depression (PPD)

Until August, the only medication in the United States specifically targeting postpartum depression required a 60-hour intravenous infusion in a hospital. With FDA approval of zuranolone (Zurzuvae), women suffering postpartum depression can take an oral medication at home and experience improvement in as little as three days. Zurzuvae is a medication belonging to the neuroactive steroid class. It acts on GABA receptors, providing rapid relief for postpartum depression.

Zurzuvae may cause side effects such as dizziness, drowsiness, and nausea. It may also cause headaches or sleep disturbances.

Sickle Cell Disease

On December 8, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Casgevy, the world’s first CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing therapy. The treatment helps patients produce healthy hemoglobin. In people with the disease, hemoglobin is abnormal, causing red blood cells to become hard and crescent shaped, which can block blood flow. By March 2024, the FDA will decide whether the same therapy can be used to treat beta-thalassemia, a disorder that reduces hemoglobin production.

Read more here.

Potential AI Breakthrough on Neurodegenerative Disease

 

Jeremy Linsley: Scientific Program Leader at Gladstone Institutes, University of California, San Francisco. 

A new artificial intelligence technology his research team developed can identify dead cells with both superhuman accuracy and speed. This advance could potentially turbocharge all kinds of biomedical research, especially on neurodegenerative disease.

Jeremy explains:

Understanding when and why a cell dies is fundamental to the study of human development, disease and aging. For neurodegenerative diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, identifying dead and dying neurons is critical to developing and testing new treatments. But identifying dead cells can be tricky and has been a constant problem throughout my career as a neuroscientist.

Until now, scientists have had to manually mark which cells look alive and which look dead under the microscope. Dead cells have a characteristic balled-up appearance that is relatively easy to recognize once you know what to look for. My research team and I have employed a veritable army of undergraduate interns paid by the hour to scan through thousands of images and keep a tally of when each neuron in a sample appears to have died. Unfortunately, doing this by hand is a slow, expensive and sometimes error-prone process.

Making matters even more difficult, scientists recently began using automated microscopes to continually capture images of cells as they change over time. While automated microscopes make it easier to take photos, they also create a massive amount of images to manually sort through. It became clear to us that manual curation was neither accurate nor efficient. Furthermore, most imaging techniques can detect only the late stages of cell death, sometimes days after a cell has already begun to decompose. This makes it difficult to distinguish between what actually contributed to the cell’s death from factors just involved in its decay.

My colleagues and I have been trying for some time to automate the curation process. Our initial attempts could not handle the wide range of cell and microscope types we use in our research, nor rival the accuracy of our interns. But a new artificial intelligence technology my research team developed can identify dead cells with both superhuman accuracy and speed. This advance could potentially turbocharge all kinds of biomedical research, especially on neurodegenerative disease.

Source: The Conversation: New AI technique identifies dead cells under the microscope 100 times faster than people can

Jeremy Linsley is a neuroscientist with a demonstrated and diverse skillset within academic biomedical research. Skilled in calcium imaging, cell culture, high-throughput microscopy, 4D microscopy, behavioral analysis, molecular biology, disease genetics, zebrafish, drosophila, hIPSC, primary tissue, organotypic slice culture, deep learning and artificial intelligence. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Cellular and Molecular Biology with John Kuwada at the University of Michigan, and postdoctoral fellowship at Gladstone Institutes with Steve Finkbeiner.

Yarn Grown From Human Skin Cells

You have heard of smart textiles. Now we can talk about human textiles woven of yarn grown from human skin cells. These implantable “human textiles” can be used for tissue grafts and/or organ repair.

Synthetic materials used for stitches and scaffolds for growing tissue grafts can trigger an immune response, causing inflammation, but the use of human textiles promises to reduce that risk.

“We can sew pouches, create tubes, valves and perforated membranes,” says Nicholas L’Heureux, who led the work at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux. “With the yarn, any textile approach is feasible: knitting, braiding, weaving, even crocheting.”

Read more here and here.