Category Biology/Biotechnology

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can damage the heart even without directly infecting the heart tissue, a study has found. The research, published in the journal Circulation, specifically looked at damage to the hearts of people with SARS-CoV-2-associated acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a serious lung condition that can be fatal. But researchers said the findings could have relevance to organs beyond the heart and also to viruses other than SARS-CoV-2.

Scientists have long known that COVID-19 increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, and Long COVID, and prior imaging research has shown that over 50% of people who get COVID-19 experience some inflammation or damage to the heart...

Scientists have developed an ingestible capsule dotted with sensors that can detect pressure in a patient’s guts and detect points of failure.

The ingestible system will give colorectal medical teams an unprecedented understanding of the movement of a patient’s digestive tract, or lack thereof. Instead of simply taking images of inside the guts, the system will sense whether it’s contracting, how much pressure is exerted and exactly where it might be inactive.

The system has been tested in a synthetic gut and animals. A patent for the technology is pending.

The team from Heriot-Watt University and the University of Birmingham, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, have reported the...

Two progressively degenerative diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD, recently in the news with the diagnoses of actor Bruce Willis and talk show host Wendy Williams), are linked by more than the fact that they both damage nerve cells critical to normal functioning—the former affecting nerves in the brain and spinal cord ...

Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) identified a key metabolite in cells that helps direct immune responses and explains at a single cell level why immune cells that most efficiently recognize pathogens, vaccines, or diseased cells grow and divide faster than other cells.

The findings also indicate that a better understanding of this metabolite and its role in immune response could improve the design of immunotherapies and create longer-lived responses against different types of cancer as well as enhance vaccine strategies. The findings were published online by the journal Science Immunology in a paper titled “Single-cell NAD(H) levels predict clonal lymphocyte expansion dynamics.”

Antigens are foreign substances that our ...