Category Biology/Biotechnology

A pioneering study marks a major step toward eliminating the need for daily insulin injections for people with diabetes. The study was led by Assistant Professor Shady Farah of the Faculty of Chemical Engineering at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, in co-correspondence with MIT, and in collaboration with Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Massachusetts. The findings are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The research introduces a living, cell-based implant that can function as an autonomous artificial pancreas, essentially a living drug that is long-term, thanks to a novel crystalline shield-protecting technology...

The familiar labels “night owl” and “early bird,” long used in sleep research, don’t fully capture the diversity of human internal clocks, a new study has found. The McGill University-led study published in Nature Communications found the two sleep-wake patterns, called chronotypes, contain a total of five distinct biological subtypes, each associated with different patterns of behavior and health.

A chronotype is based on the parts of a 24-hour period when a person naturally feels most alert or ready to sleep. Previous research has linked late chronotypes to worse health outcomes, but results have often been inconsistent. The new findings help explain why, the authors said.

“Rather than asking whether night owls are more at risk, the better question may be...

Scientists at The Wistar Institute have identified a previously overlooked mediator in the body’s response to life-threatening infections: hippuric acid, a metabolite produced when gut bacteria break down polyphenols from berries, tea, and other plant-based foods. The research reveals that this molecule acts as an immune-system amplifier, boosting the body’s inflammatory defenses during early infection but elevating them to deadly levels when infections progress to sepsis.

Published in Cell Reports, the study demonstrates that elevated hippuric acid levels correlate with increased mortality in sepsis patients, while also uncovering the molecular mechanisms by which this metabolite modifies immune re...

A team led by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has succeeded in identifying biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease in its earliest stages, before extensive brain damage has occurred...