Category Biology/Biotechnology

Fighting colorectal cancer at UTHealth are Lenard Lichtenberger, Ph.D., (right) and Dexing Fang, Ph.D. Credit: Rob Cahill, UTHealth

When scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) applied a chemical found in soybeans to a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), they increased its anticancer properties and reduced its side effects. Findings of the preclinical study of phosphatidylcholine, also called lecithin, appear in the journal Oncology Letters. “The results support the potential use of NSAIDs associated with phosphatidylcholine for the prevention and treatment of colorectal cancer,” said Lenard Lichtenberger, Ph.D., the study’s lead investigator and a professor of integrative biology and pharmacology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth.

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A membrane (red outer boundary) encapsulates actin (white lines), the protein building blocks of the cytoskeleton and tissues. The actin was polymerized by coupling ATP synthesis with artificial organelles (green dots) inside the membrane. Credit: Image courtesy of the Disease Biophysics Group/Harvard University

Researchers engineered a cell-like structure that harnesses photosynthesis to perform designer reactions. In the quest to build an artificial cell, there are two approaches: The first, reengineers the genomic software of a living cell. The second, focuses on cellular hardware, building simple, cell-like structures from the ground up that mimic the function of living cells...

Professor Matthew Disney of The Scripps Research Institute led the new study. Credit: The Scripps Research Institute

A new tool opens the possibility of creating drugs that can be taken conveniently as pills to correct genetic diseases. As scientists gain insights into which genes drive diseases, they are pursuing the next logical question: Can gene editing technologies be developed to treat or even cure those diseases? Much of that effort has focused on developing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9, a protein-based system.

At The Scripps Research Institute campus in Florida, chemist Matthew D. Disney, PhD, has taken a different approach, developing a small-molecule-based tool that acts on RNA to selectively delete certain gene products...

Object manipulations performed by the biohybrid robots. Credit: Shoji Takeuchi, Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo

Researchers have developed a novel method of growing whole muscles from hydrogel sheets impregnated with myoblasts. They then incorporated these muscles as antagonistic pairs into a biohybrid robot, which successfully performed manipulations of objects. This approach overcame earlier limitations of a short functional life of the muscles and their ability to exert only a weak force, paving the way for more advanced biohybrid robots.

The new field of biohybrid robotics involves the use of living tissue within robots, rather than just metal and plastic...