Category Biology/Biotechnology

Researchers Unveil Pioneering Approach to Combat Age-Related Vision Loss

Cirrus Therapeutics, the University of Bristol, and London’s Global University Institute of Ophthalmology have discovered a new treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of vision loss among older adults.

Featured on the cover of the journal Science Translational Medicine, this research reveals that boosting a specific protein, IRAK-M, in retinal cells could offer a new and highly effective therapy for AMD.

AMD can severely impact a person’s vision. Patients suffering from AMD often start with blurred vision or seeing a black dot in their central vision, which can ultimately expand to the point where there is no useful central vision...

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First Step in Allergic Reactions, Paving the way for New Preventative Strategies

Scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School have identified how the first domino falls after a person encounters an allergen, such as peanuts, shellfish, pollen or dustmites. Their discovery, published in the April issue of Nature Immunology, could herald the development of drugs to prevent these severe reactions.

It is well established that when mast cells, a type of immune cell, mistake a harmless substance, such as peanuts or dust mites, as a threat, they release an immediate first wave of bioactive chemicals against the perceived threat...

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Researchers discover ‘Trojan Horse’ Virus Hiding in Human Parasite

Apocryptovirus odysseus (Ao) genome. From (rnaspades 3.15.5) assembly of the Ngô RNA sequencing dataset (SRR1205923), we recovered a high-coverage (123× coverage) RdRp-encoding contig, and identified a second correlated contig of likely viral origin. Contig 2 (279× coverage) contains two putative ORFs: pORF1 and pORF2, but these ORFs do not have identifiable homologs via BLASTp in the non-redundant and transcriptome shotgun assembly databases (date accessed: June 2023), TBLASTN with the nucleotide database, or by InterProScan or HHpred (date accessed: June 2023). Inlay, unbranched assembly graphs (Bandage 0.8.1) of both contigs confirmed a linear genome structure.
Apocryptovirus odysseus (Ao) genome. From (RNASPADES 3.15.5) assembly of the Ngô RNA sequencing dataset (SRR1205923), we recovered a high-coverage (123× coverage) RdRp-encoding contig, and identified a second correlated contig of likely viral origin. Contig 2 (279× coverage) contains two putative ORFs: pORF1 and pORF2, but these ORFs do not have identifiable homologs via BLASTp in the non-redundant and transcriptome shotgun assembly databases (date accessed: June 2023), TBLASTN with the nucleotide database, or by InterProScan or HHpred (date accessed: June 2023). Inlay, unbranched assembly graphs (Bandage 0.8.1) of both contigs confirmed a linear genome structure.

An international team led by researchers at the University of Toronto has found a new RNA virus that they believe is h...

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Immunotherapy Significantly Increases the Number of Patients Free from Bowel Cancer: Clinical trial

chemotherapy
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

An immunotherapy drug given before surgery instead of chemotherapy meant that over ten times more patients with a certain genetic profile were cancer-free after surgery, according to clinical trial results presented by researchers at UCL and UCLH.

The findings, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting 2024, are interim results from the NEOPRISM-CRC phase II clinical trial assessing whether the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab can improve outcomes for patients with stage two or stage three MMR deficient/MSI-High bowel cancer. The trial was a collaboration among UCL, UCLH, the Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, St...

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