Category Biology/Biotechnology

Though protein clumps associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s were discovered more than a century ago, researchers remain largely unable to prevent them from forming or eliminate them from the brain. And though a variety of therapies have taken aim at tau tangles, beta-amyloid plaques and Lewy bodies, among other notorious aggregates, none have been very effective at stopping disease progression.

Rockefeller’s Hermann Steller and his team in the Strang Laboratory of Apoptosis and Cancer Biology have long been fo...

The first human clinical trial of a universal Sarbeco coronavirus vaccine, developed by the University of Cambridge and spin-out DIOSynVax (DVX) Ltd, has shown that the vaccine is safe and has no significant side effects.

The trial, involving 39 healthy volunteers, tested a vaccine designed to provide protection against multiple Sarbeco coronaviruses—the large group of viruses that occur in nature including SARS-CoV-2, which caused the COVID pandemic.

The vaccine triggered immune responses in the volunteers not only to SARS-CoV-2 and SARS, but to related bat viruses that could potentially jump from animals to humans and cause future pandemics.

This trial proves the safety of an entirely new way of designing vaccines...

Northwestern Medicine scientists have developed a novel synthetic biomolecular condensate that can degrade intracellular disease-causing proteins, providing a framework for new therapeutic approaches for a wide range of diseases, as detailed in a recent study published in Nature Communications.

Shana Kelley, Ph.D., the Neena B. Schwartz Professor of Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering, and Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago, was senior author of the study.

Targeted protein degradation is an emerging therapeutic strategy that harnesses cells’ own degradation machinery to clear disease-cau...

University of Florida researchers are exploring how lasers could help astronauts build structures on the moon using materials already available there, including lunar soil transformed into glass. The work, led by Victoria M. Miller, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and researcher with the UF Astraeus Space Institute, recently completed a research phase focused on laser forming, a manufacturing process that bends materials without physical contact.

The team’s latest paper, published in Lasers in Manufacturing and Materials Processing, examined how different atmospheric conditions affect laser bending, an important question for future manufacturing in the vacuum of space...