Category Health/Medical

An estimated one in five Americans live with chronic pain and current treatment options leave much to be desired. Feixiong Cheng, Ph.D., Director of Cleveland Clinic’s Genome Center, and IBM are using artificial intelligence (AI) for drug discovery in advanced pain management. The team’s deep-learning framework identified multiple gut microbiome-derived metabolites and FDA-approved drugs that can be repurposed to select non-addictive, non-opioid options to treat chronic pain.

The findings, published in Cell Press, represent one of many ways the organizations’ Discovery Accelerator partnership is helping to advance research in healthcare and life sciences.

Treating chronic pain with opioids is still a challenge due to the risk of severe side eff...

A research team from the University of California, Irvine is the first to reveal that a molecule in the brain—ophthalmic acid—unexpectedly acts like a neurotransmitter similar to dopamine in regulating motor function, offering a new therapeutic target for Parkinson’s and other movement diseases.

In the study, published in the October issue of the journal Brain, researchers observed that ophthalmic acid binds to and activates calcium-sensing receptors in the brain, reversing the movement impairments of Parkinson’s mouse models for more than 20 hours.

The disabling neurogenerative disease affects millions of people worldwide over the age of 50...

Estrogen, the major female ovarian hormone, can trigger nerve impulses within milliseconds to regulate a variety of physiological processes. At Baylor College of Medicine, Louisiana State University and collaborating institutions, researchers discovered that estrogen’s fast actions are mediated by the coupling of the estrogen receptor-alpha (ER-alpha) with an ion channel protein called Clic1.

Clic1 controls the fast flux of electrically charged chloride ions through the cell membrane, which neurons use for receiving, conducting and transmitting signals. The researchers propose that interacting with the ER-alpha-Clic1 complex enables estrogen to trigger fast neuronal responses through Clic1 ion currents. The study appears in Science Advances.

“Estrogen can act in the brain to reg...

A new study by the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich shows for the first time that bitter tasting protein fragments (peptides) are produced in the stomach during the digestion of the natural sweetener thaumatin. In a cellular test system, the peptides are able to stimulate the acid secretion of human stomach cells and influence inflammatory reactions. “Our research helps to elucidate the health effects of the plant protein, which is widely used as a sweetener,” says Veronika Somoza, head of the study and director of the Leibniz Institute.

Veronika Somoza’s team is researching, among other things, how bitter-tasting food compounds influence the metabolism of s...