Category Biology/Biotechnology

After a day hiking in the forest, the last thing a person wants to discover is a tick burrowing into their skin. Days after plucking off the bloodsucking insect, the hiker might develop a rash resembling a bull’s-eye, a tell-tale sign of Lyme disease. Yet not everybody who contracts Lyme disease gets the rash. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have devised a blood test that quickly and sensitively diagnoses the disease at early stages.

About 300,000 cases of Lyme disease, which is caused by the tick-borne bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, are diagnosed in the U.S. each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP) in Japan has successfully found features in pathology images from human cancer patients, without annotation, that could be understood by human doctors...

Neuroscientists at Lund University in Sweden have developed a new technology that engineers the shell of a virus to deliver gene therapy to the exact cell type in the body that needs to be treated. The researchers believe that the new technology can be likened to dramatically accelerating evolution from millions of years to weeks.

Several of the new revolutionary treatments that have been used clinically in recent years to treat complex diseases – such as spinal muscular atrophy and enzyme deficiency – are based on gene therapy.

With gene therapy, the genetic material is controlled or altered using biological drugs...

Scientists model how synthetic gels can tune body’s inflammatory response. Hydrogels for healing, synthesized from the molecules up by Rice University bioengineers, are a few steps closer to the clinic.

Rice researchers and collaborators at Texas Heart Institute (THI) have established a baseline set of injectable hydrogels that promise to help heal wounds, deliver drugs and treat cancer...