Category Biology/Biotechnology

To better leverage cancer data for research, scientists are developing an artificial intelligence (AI)-based natural language processing tool to improve information extraction from textual pathology reports. In a first for cancer pathology reports, the team developed a multitask convolutional neural network (CNN) – a deep learning model that learns to perform tasks, such as identifying key words in a body of text, by processing language as a two-dimensional numerical dataset.

As the second-leading cause of death in the United States, cancer is a public health crisis that afflicts nearly one in two people during their lifetime...

Researchers have lifted fertility rates in older female mice with small doses of a metabolic compound that reverses the aging process in eggs, offering hope for some women struggling to conceive.

The University of Queensland study found a non-invasive treatment could maintain or restore the quality and number of eggs and alleviate the biggest barrier to pregnancy for older women.

A team led by UQ’s Professor Hayden Homer found the loss of egg quality through aging was due to lower levels of a particular molecule in cells critical for generating energy.
“Quality eggs are essential for pregnancy success because they provide virtually all the building blocks required by an embryo,” Professor Homer said.

“We investigated whether...

A therapeutic intervention for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, could be on the horizon thanks to unexpected findings by University of Arizona researchers.

ALS is the progressive degeneration of motor neurons that causes people to lose the ability to move and eventually speak, eat and breathe.

Within the neuronal cells of patients with ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases, two proteins – TDP-43 and FUS – a...

What if we could replace a patient’s damaged blood vessels with brand new ones produced in a laboratory? This is the challenge set by Inserm researcher Nicolas L’Heureux, who is working on the human extracellular matrix – the structural support of human tissues that is found around practically all of the body’s cells.

In a study published in Acta Biomaterialia, L’Heureux and his colleagues at the Tissue Bioengineering unit (Inserm/Université de Bordeaux) describe how they have cultivated human cells in the laboratory to obtain extracellular matrix deposits high in collagen – a structural protein that constitutes the mechanical scaffold...