Microbial Cocktails Are More Than a Gut Feeling
[ad_1] In 2023, our understanding of the microbes that live inside the human gut will lead to new ideas for medicine. Today, we know that gut microbes help develop and…
The US Just Greenlit High-Tech Alternatives to Animal Testing
[ad_1] The Covid-19 crisis highlighted certain economic and welfare issues associated with using animals for research. Pandemic-related closures meant that many labs had to halt experiments and euthanize animals. Then the…
A Drug to Treat Aging May Not Be a Pipe Dream
[ad_1] Life expectancy in the best-performing countries has been increasing by three months per year every year since the early 1800s. Throughout most of human history, you had a roughly…
The Magic of mRNA Will Push Medical Advances for Everyone
[ad_1] mRNA is one of the first molecules of life. While identified six decades ago as the carrier of the blueprint for proteins in living cells, its pharmaceutical potential was…
Here’s What’s Next for Pig Organ Transplants
[ad_1] Starting in the 1960s, doctors attempted transplants of kidneys, hearts, and livers from baboons and chimpanzees—humans’ closest genetic relatives—into people. But the organs failed within weeks, if not days,…
A More Elegant Form of Gene Editing Progresses to Human Testing
[ad_1] In April 2016, Waseem Qasim, a professor of cell and gene therapy, was captivated by a new scientific paper that described a revolutionary way to manipulate DNA: base editing. The…
The Crispr Baby Scientist Is Back. Here’s What He’s Doing Next
[ad_1] Some scientists and ethicists think He deserves a chance to prove that he’s capable of producing scientifically valid and ethically sound work. “His case is publicly known enough that…
Electronic Second Skins Are the Wearables of the Future
[ad_1] The skin is the largest organ in our body, and also the most complex. Peer at it under a microscope and you’ll see thousands of nerve endings that keep…
This Low-Cost Test for Hearing Loss Lives on a Smartphone
[ad_1] Inside the snug confines of the human ear lies a bony structure, curly and shaped like a seashell. This structure, called the cochlea, contains little hairy cells that vibrate…
The Era of One-Shot, Multimillion-Dollar Genetic Cures Is Here
[ad_1] The company said the price was determined with consideration of the “clinical, societal, economic, and innovative value represented by this novel gene therapy.” Earlier last month, the Institute for…
A Proactive Way to Detect Cancer at Its Earliest Stages
[ad_1] In November 2016, German-American entrepreneur Cyriac Roeding read a profile of Sam Gambhir, a physician and scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine, in a magazine. In the article,…
Turns Out Fighting Mosquitoes With Mosquitoes Actually Works
[ad_1] The Aedes aegypti mosquito is not just a nuisance—it’s a known carrier of dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, and Zika viruses. Distinguished by the black and white stripes on its legs, the…
This Personalized Crispr Therapy Is Designed to Attack Tumors
[ad_1] In a new step for Crispr, scientists have used the gene-editing tool to make personalized modifications to cancer patients’ immune cells to supercharge them against their tumors. In a…
This Gulp of Engineered Bacteria Is Meant to Treat Disease
[ad_1] In the muddy trenches of World War I, thousands of soldiers on both sides fell ill with dysentery, a diarrheal disease often spread by contaminated water. Curiously, one German…
The Sci-Fi Dream of a ‘Molecular Computer’ Is Getting More Real
[ad_1] The reason they could opt for a more information-dense bit is because of the physics of the reading head. When the head sticks to a -1, it contorts in…
How to Detect a Man-Made Biothreat
[ad_1] But even if the platforms’ accuracy improves, it’s hard to know whether they would be able to detect a completely new organism that scientists have never seen before. Richard…
The Quest to Treat Binge-Eating and Addiction—With Brain Zaps
[ad_1] “It may be that stimulation of the nucleus accumbens altered the reward circuitry in the brain such that it turned down the volume on the pleasurable craving that patients…
Lab-Grown Human Brain Tissue Works in Rats
[ad_1] The tiny blobs of lab-grown human brain tissue were just specks, each measuring a few millimeters in diameter. Researchers at Stanford University made them by cultivating human stem cells…
A Bold Effort to Cure HIV—Using Crispr
[ad_1] Dornbusch thinks this strategy will spare patients from serious side effects and “off-target” edits—unintentional cuts elsewhere in the genome that could cause problems such as cancer. The regions targeted…
The Era of Fast, Cheap Genome Sequencing Is Here
[ad_1] Comparing those genomes to those of people without schizophrenia has allowed investigators to uncover multiple genes that have a profound impact on a person’s risk of developing it. By…
There’s New Proof Crispr Can Edit Genes Inside Human Bodies
[ad_1] The Crispr components can’t naturally get into cells on their own, so Intellia uses a delivery system called lipid nanoparticles—essentially tiny fat bubbles—to ferry them to the liver. In…
To Understand Brain Disorders, Consider the Astrocyte
[ad_1] This was slow going. “We spent a lot of time, probably the first couple of years, really just working out the immunopanning and culturing the astrocytes,” recalls Caldwell. One…
How a ‘Living Drug’ Could Treat Autoimmune Disease
[ad_1] In lupus, a type of autoimmune disease, the body’s natural defense system can’t tell the difference between its own cells and foreign ones, so it mistakenly attacks its own…
A GMO Purple Tomato Is Coming to Grocery Aisles. Will the US Bite?
[ad_1] In December 2004, plant scientist Cathie Martin went to the greenhouse to check on her tomatoes. The tiny fruits, about the size of gumdrops, were still green. These miniature…
This Follicle-Hacking Drug Could One Day Treat Baldness
[ad_1] “I think it’s a realistic vision,” says Maria Kasper, associate professor of cell and molecular biology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. However, she emphasizes that it’s too early…