Inside the Fantasy Genre Writer’s Head December 23, 2022
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Books, Brilliant words, Geek Stuff, Uncategorizable.add a comment
…or, maybe not.
Base Editing Cures T-cell Leukemia December 17, 2022
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Recently base editing technology allowed researchers to add several novel modifications to T-cells from a healthy donor. The base edits altered several key markers that identify the immune cells as T-cells. This meant the edited cells were essentially invisible to other T-cells (and themselves, so they wouldn’t kill each other).
Other base edits to the T-cells removed markers that were unique to the donor, turning the cells into a “universal” treatment. Now this treatment can become an off-the-shelf drug given to many patients, in contrast to the slow and expensive personalized nature of current T-cell therapies.
These are enormous changes. The first patient to receive this treatment is completely cured instead of being dead, which was the next stage of her leukemia.
Homework: The Nature article describing the technique. There’s no paper with just this story.
Nanobots Cure Pneumonia in Mice December 13, 2022
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Mutants, Science, Star Trek Technology.add a comment
Well, that’s an exciting title, but a trifle misleading. Yes, the mice were fully cured of pneumonia but not by nanobots. It was algal cells whose surfaces are speckled with nanoparticles containing antibiotics. A bit of a cheat I admit, but I would never have thought of it. The algal cells migrate through the lungs delivering antibiotics (actually the cell membranes of neutrophiles, which I also would not have thought to do). Looks like this:
Pretty slick, right? The big green bit is the algal cell itself and the crumbly crust is the added cell membranes. The researchers (Wang and Zhang) treated the infected mice directly through their windpipes. Some were treated with this nanobots and got well in a week. The untreated mice died in three days.
I’ve had pneumonia twice; I know how they feel.
Homework: “Nanoparticle-modified microrobots for in vivo antibiotic delivery to treat acute bacterial pneumonia” by Fangyu Zhang, Jia Zhuang, Zhengxing Li, Hua Gong, Berta Esteban-Fernández de Ávila, Yaou Duan, Qiangzhe Zhang, Jiarong Zhou, Lu Yin, Emil Karshalev, Weiwei Gao, Victor Nizet, Ronnie H. Fang, Liangfang Zhang and Joseph Wang, 22 September 2022, Nature Materials.
DOI: 10.1038/s41563-022-01360-9
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