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For more than 30 years stem cells have promoted as being a potential cure for many ills. Sadly the results have fallen miles behind the hype. This recent breakthrough uses stem cells to produce insulin and has kept an insulin dependent diabetic off insulin for 12 months.
newatlas.com

"Functional cure" for diabetes restores insulin production with stem cells

A patient with type 1 diabetes has been functionally cured of the disease, requiring no insulin doses for over a year. The treatment involves growing and transplanting new insulin-producing cells from the patient’s own stem cells.
newatlas.com newatlas.com
There is a down side, life long immunosuppression is required.
 
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun the guys who discovered microRNA while studying worm growth have won the 2024 Nobel Prize for medicine. A very well deserved award because the discovery of microRNA changed everything and has led to a much better understanding of how genes are controlled and cells divide, grow and specialise. Many of the treatments for cancer we sill see through this century will be based on this knowledge.
theconversation.com

Nobel prize in medicine awarded for discovery of microRNAs, the molecules that control our genes

US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun changed our understanding of how the body works and opened up a new area of science.
theconversation.com theconversation.com
 
Membrane-less organelles didn't exist when I did biology as a youngster, the cells organelles were all wrapped up snug as a bug in a rug in a hearty membrane. This ain't so, in the early 2000's it was recognised 'biomolecular condensates' were actually functional elements. It’s has been difficult to figure out what biomolecular condensates do, although a few have clear roles. However, many others don’t have clear functions. The discovery may alter significantly our understanding of the phase of chemical evolution that went on to form 'life'. It's always been assumed cell membranes were essential in the early RNA world but this may not be so. The medical implications are unknown but could be enormous, there are papers suggesting biological condensates are important in neurodegenerative disease - this paper discusses it, though it's one for the scholars. The topic is covered very well in this article from The Conversation written by a scientist involved in the research.
theconversation.com

Cells have more mini ‘organs’ than researchers thought − unbound by membranes, these rogue organelles challenge biology’s fundamentals

Membraneless organelles, also called biomolecular condensates, are changing how scientists think about protein chemistry, various diseases and even the origin of life.
theconversation.com theconversation.com
 
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Melbourne Uni, along with other folks mostly centred around Parkville, have developed a liquid 3D bioprinting method that means they no longer need a base to print on. If you've ever done any 3D printing with the cheap additive printer will know how many issues crop up with the base, it's even worse with bioprinting.

3D bioprinting is pushing the boundaries of human tissue engineering

A new way to 3D print human tissue is revolutionising how we create and test medical treatments, a University of Melbourne expert says
pursuit.unimelb.edu.au pursuit.unimelb.edu.au
 
This is really interesting. These scientists developed an experimental model of concussion using neurons grown from stem cells, which were then subject to physical trauma. This is a great thing in itself to develop a good model, we don't really have any good concussion models. Even more extraordinary were their findings. After subjecting the tissue to controlled trauma, they observed that in cells containing inactivated Herpes Simplex virus (HSV-1), the virus reactivated. Even worse, following this reactivation, the tissue began to exhibit key markers of Alzheimer’s disease: amyloid plaques, tau protein tangles, inflammation, neuronal death, and a surge in gliosis. Repeated trauma intensified these effects. In contrast, cells without HSV-1 showed only minor gliosis and no other Alzheimer’s indicators. They point out there may be a therapeutic options with antivirals.
www.earth.com

Human brains hold dormant viruses that come to life if you hit your head

The study reveals a potential link between concussions and the activation of dormant viruses, which may lead to neurodegenerative diseases.
www.earth.com www.earth.com

For the scholars, the original paper. Yet to read it, but I will.
 
It was thought myopia (near sightedness) was mainly genetic, however after the outbreak in East Asian countries over the last few decades it appears that too much screen time is the cause and as little as 2 hours a day in the outdoors can reverse or prevent many cases. Amazing.
www.theguardian.com

Shortsighted Taiwan may have lessons for the world as an eye condition skyrockets

Up to 90% of young people in Taiwan have myopia but eye experts say the growing global trend can be reversed
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
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An Australian man is the first person to leave hospital with an artificial heart. The BiVACOR is a titanium heart with magnetically suspended parts invented by another Australian, Dr Daniel Timms, who as a child watched his father suffer from heart failure. It was first implanted in a patient in July 2024 at the Texas Heart Institute, but that patient and subsequent ones were not discharged from hospital, as donor hearts became available. The BiVACOR is really a temporary measure to tide people over with failing hearts until donor heart is available.

www.abc.net.au

Australian man successfully receives titanium heart after 6-hour operation

A New South Wales man with heart failure lived with the artificial heart for over 100 days while waiting to be matched with a heart donor.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
 
CD Xbow said:

An Australian man is the first person to leave hospital with an artificial heart. The BiVACOR is a titanium heart with magnetically suspended parts invented by another Australian, Dr Daniel Timms, who as a child watched his father suffer from heart failure. It was first implanted in a patient in July 2024 at the Texas Heart Institute, but that patient and subsequent ones were not discharged from hospital, as donor hearts became available. The BiVACOR is really a temporary measure to tide people over with failing hearts until donor heart is available.

www.abc.net.au

Australian man successfully receives titanium heart after 6-hour operation

A New South Wales man with heart failure lived with the artificial heart for over 100 days while waiting to be matched with a heart donor.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
Click to expand...
6 or 7 years - post number 8 in this thread

Snake_Baker said:
Some big noises are being made about this artificial heart.

http://www.afr.com/business/health/...rtificial-heart-maker-bivacor-20180516-h104fi
Click to expand...
 
This is a very interesting article about synthetic biology - 'Yeast 2.0', fully synthetic. It's a good read from SMH but it's so interesting us poor folks can read it here:


Basically 10 years ago one of the 16 chromosomes teams that had been set up folded and one of our clever scientists talked his way into setting up a team in Oz to build the 16th chromosome. They didn't have a clue how to do it, they new nothing, not a sausage, but they knew the tech was liable to be important so they did it. That story alone is interesting. Now there is this:

'As the chromosome took shape, Australia’s capabilities in synthetic biology grew around it; the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, which Paulsen leads, was established partly off the back of the project.
“Now we’ve spun out nine start-up companies that raised $200 million in venture capital. From $21 million investments from the government we’ve got a tenfold return,” Paulsen said.
While microorganisms and agriculture are the immediate focus for these researchers, the underlying science could – in future decades – allow for the complete redesign of plants and animals.
“You’ll get to a point where, literally, people sit at a computer, design an organism, order the DNA, put it in their organism of choice, and then they’ve got a new, designer organism,” Paulsen said.'
 
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Pretty good data suggests old folks who get the shingles vaccine have a 3.5% reduction in dementia risk.
Raises lots of questions about causes of dementia and the role shingles and possibly other viruses have in it. So other than offering protection against the very nasty shingles, you can reduce your dementia risk a bit. Vaccines are wonderful.
 

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Melioidosis has claimed another victim in QLD
www.abc.net.au

Melioidosis death toll hits 31 with latest fatality in Townsville

Another person has died from a rare tropical disease in North Queensland, bringing the state's death toll to 31, but doctors say the number of cases is slowing as the weather dries up.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au

Melioidosis is endemic in parts of southeast Asia (including Thailand, Laos, Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar and Vietnam), southern China, Taiwan, PNG and northern Australia. The recent increase in cases in QLD is probably related to the floods and perhaps works on the Bruce Highway. Queensland Health said it had received 221 melioidosis notifications this year.

It's a nasty gram negative bacillus that does it's mischief inside cells. Most people exposed don't get ill at all. People with depressed immunity, diabetes, renal disease and cancer make up most of those with significant disease. Mortality is 10% with modern medical treatment and about 40% without and is due mostly to septic shock.

Take care if you are in those regions affected.
 
This might be a pretty important finding in neuroscience. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found Noradrenaline (= norepinephrine) which increases alertness, attention and learning didn't act on neurons but through the astrocytes, another, slower-acting type of brain cell that usually considered a support cell, literally.

neurosciencenews.com

Astrocytes, Not Neurons, Drive Brain’s Attention and Alertness - Neuroscience News

For nearly a century, scientists believed that neuromodulators like norepinephrine adjusted brain communication by acting directly on neurons. A new study overturns this long-held view, revealing that astrocytes—support cells long considered secondary—are the key intermediaries.
neurosciencenews.com neurosciencenews.com

“Textbooks tell us that neuromodulators like norepinephrine fine-tune neurons directly — in fact, textbooks tell us that everything in the brain is about neurons,” said Thomas Papouin, PhD, assistant professor of neuroscience at WashU Medicine and the senior author of the study.

“It seems that a lot of brain wiring and activity is probably orchestrated by astrocytes, on slower timescales. This is the type of discovery that profoundly reshapes our understanding of how the brain works.”

Original paper here which unfortunately is closed access https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5480
Would like to read that one.
 
These Eight Psychiatric Disorders Have a Surprising Genetic Connection

I posted earlier about how many of the same genes are involved in a wide range of quite different psychiatric illness. It is currently being worked out and it's complexity is excruciating.

'In 2019 an international team of researchers first identified 109 genes that were linked in different combinations with eight psychiatric disorders, including autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, Tourette syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anorexia.

This may explain why these conditions often co-occur – for example up to 70 percent of individuals diagnosed with autism or ADHD have the other too – and why they frequently cluster in families.

Human precursor neurons with protein expression stained in different colors, indicating the type of neurons developing. (Won et al., Cell, 2025)
Each of these eight conditions also has gene differences that are unique to them individually, so Won and team compared the unique genes with those shared between the disorders.

They took almost 18,000 variations of the shared and unique genes involved and put them into the precursor cells that become our neurons to see how they could impact gene expression in these cells during human development.

This allowed the researchers to identify 683 genetic variants that impacted gene regulation and to further explore them in neurons from developing mice.

Genetic variants behind multiple seemingly unrelated traits, or in this case conditions, are called pleiotropic. The pleiotropic variants were involved in many more protein-to-protein interactions than the gene variants unique to specific psychological conditions, and they were active across more types of brain cells.
Pleiotropic variants were also involved in regulatory mechanisms that impact multiple stages of brain development. The ability of these genes to impact cascades and networks of processes, such as gene regulation, could explain why the same variants can contribute to different conditions'

The complexity increases because all of gene regulation is affected by development, whether it's in utero, early childhood or adolescence.

www.sciencealert.com

Several Psychiatric Disorders Share The Same Root Cause, Study Finds

Researchers recently discovered that eight different psychiatric conditions share a common genetic basis.
www.sciencealert.com www.sciencealert.com
 

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Sadly the 4th death from Australian Bat Lyssavirus.
www.theguardian.com

A man has died after contracting the first NSW case of Australian bat lyssavirus. Here’s everything you need to know about the deadly infection

The rabies-like virus is extremely rare with no effective treatment after symptoms begin
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
It causes an illness identical to rabies, and like rabies can be treated by vaccination before symptoms occur with (you guessed it) rabies vaccine. Do not handle bats is the take home message. If bitten or scratched by a bat you will need to be vaccinated with the rabies vaccine.

I have only dealt indirectly with one bat bite. I came on a morning shift and the registrar on overnight said they had a patient with a bite from a bat. After consultation with the health department they had was sent him off to get rabies vaccine and the health department would follow him up. The guy bitten had apparently bought the bat with him and they had put it in the fridge. I thought the bat might be of value to see if it it had Lyssavirus. The fridge they had put it in was in a resus so off I trundled to retrieve the dead bat. You will notice I have made an assumption, the bat would be dead, you would only put a dead bat in the fridge wouldn't you? Apparently not, because when I opened the fridge door the bat fell out then spent the next minute flopping around on the floor, then fortunately expiring. Hidden assumptions.
 
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I came across this one about the death of Bruce Lee at 32 y.o. I think they make a good case why the cerebral oedema found on autopsy was not due to a drug reaction, hyperthermia or violence. They make a reasonable case that it was due to hyponatraemia (low sodium) causing cerebral oedema and fitting. It's a difficult thing to prove in retrospect, it doesn't sound like he had blood taken at the hospital.

Who killed Bruce Lee? The hyponatraemia hypothesis - PMC

Bruce Lee brought attention to martial arts in the Western world and popularized the quote ‘Be water, my friend’. Lee died at the age of 32 years in Hong Kong on 20 July 1973, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of death is unknown, although ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

'He experienced headache and dizziness around 7:30 pm, after drinking water. Ting Pei gave him an ‘Equagesic’ pill (a combination of meprobamate and aspirin which he had taken before) and Lee went to the bedroom to rest. Raymond Chow left at that time. At 9:30 pm, Ting Pei found Lee unconscious. She called Chow who went to the house and tried to wake Lee up without success. They called a doctor, who spent another 10 min unsuccessfully doing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Lee was sent to the nearest hospital, where he was pronounced dead.'

Clearly emergency services were not such a thing in 1973.
 
This is just at the theoretical stage, a potential way to make small imaging devices, a table top synchrotron. Just the stocking filler for Xmas. If you don't know about "surface plasmon polaritons" now's your chance to learn.
phys.org

Tabletop particle accelerator could transform medicine and materials science

A particle accelerator that produces intense X-rays could be squeezed into a device that fits on a table, my colleagues and I have found in a new research project.
phys.org phys.org

For the scholars: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/cnym-16hc
 
CD Xbow said:
This is just at the theoretical stage, a potential way to make small imaging devices, a table top synchrotron. Just the stocking filler for Xmas. If you don't know about "surface plasmon polaritons" now's your chance to learn.
phys.org

Tabletop particle accelerator could transform medicine and materials science

A particle accelerator that produces intense X-rays could be squeezed into a device that fits on a table, my colleagues and I have found in a new research project.
phys.org phys.org

For the scholars: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/cnym-16hc
Click to expand...
Heading closer and closer to a Fantastic Voyage scenario

I can see pin head cameras being inserted through pores or at least less invasive acupuncture holes

Many many applications to come
 
Cmarsh said:
www.psypost.org

Scientists find the biological footprint of social anxiety may reside partially in the gut

New research shows gut microbes from socially anxious teens induce anxiety-like behaviors and brain changes in rats.
www.psypost.org www.psypost.org
Click to expand...
The gut-brain link is not really well understood, I suspect there will be a lot more work in the area. There has been a lot of work showing associations between gut and the brain. Gut microbiota can influence the permeability of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), affecting brain function. There has been research linking gut microbiome health to autism spectrum disorders, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer's, and schizophrenia. Gut bacteria can produce neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin) that regulate mood and gut function, they can also produce short-chain fatty acids that influence brain health.

I saw this article in Medscape about coffee risks for heart attacks and arrythmias. In short, no evidence of significant risk, so drink that triple strength latte without fear. There is evidence some folks get extra beats when they drink coffee and while these can be disturbing they pose no risk. The article starts with a great story about a trial set up by King Gustav III, I'm not going to spoil it, you'll have to read it or watch the video if you prefer sound and vision.

www.medscape.com

How Many Cups of Coffee Does It Take to Cause a Heart Attack?

Is coffee a cardiac hazard? Dr Christopher Labos reviews the data to prove your morning cup isn’t the public health threat many fear.
www.medscape.com www.medscape.com
 

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