Category Health/Medical

Knocking out a protein known to stifle T cell activation on CAR T cells using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology enhanced the engineered T cells’ ability to eliminate blood cancers, according to new preclinical data from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center.

The findings will be presented as an oral presentation at the 62nd American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting & Exposition on Dec. 7 (abstract 554).

The team knocked out the CD5 gene — which encodes for the CD5 protein on the surface of T cells and can inhibit their activation — on CAR T cells using CRISPR-Cas9 and infused them back into mice with T- and B-cell leukemia or lymphoma...

Medication used to treat a range of inflammatory diseases may be less safe than previously thought. Glucocorticoids are steroids widely prescribed to treat a range of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. While high doses of steroids are known to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, the impact of lower doses is unknown. A study published in PLOS Medcine by Mar Pujades-Rodriguez at Leeds University and colleagues suggests that even low doses of glucocorticoid may increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases.

To quantify glucocorticoid dose-dependent cardiovascular risk, researchers analyzed medical records of 87,794 patients diagnosed with 6 different immune-mediate inflammatory diseases receiving care from 389 United Kingdom primary care clinics in 1998-2017...

Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection with a new antiviral drug, MK-4482/EIDD-2801 or Molnupiravir, completely suppresses virus transmission within 24 hours, researchers at Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University have discovered.

The group led by Dr. Richard Plemper, Distinguished University Professor at Georgia State, originally discovered that the drug is potent against influenza viruses.
“This is the first demonstration of an orally available drug to rapidly block SARS-CoV-2 transmission,” said Plemper. “MK-4482/EIDD-2801 could be game-changing.”
Interrupting widespread community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 until mass vaccination is available is paramount to managing COVID-19 and mitigating the catastrophic consequences of the pandemic.
Because the drug can be take...

The microscope uses a combination of hardware and software-based adaptive optics to reconstruct object image – reflective matrix microscope.

Non-invasive microscopic techniques such as optical coherence microscopy and two-photon microscopy are commonly used for in vivo imaging of living tissues. When light passes through turbid materials such as biological tissues, two types of light are generated: ballistic photons and multiply scattered photons. The ballistic photons travel straight through the object without experiencing any deflection and hence is used to reconstruct the object image. On the other hand, the multiply scattered photons are generated via random deflections as the light passes through the material and show up as speckle noise in the reconstructed image...