A universal flu vaccine that protects against all strains of the virus could be available in the next two years, according to a leading scientist. From a report: An experimental vaccine based on the same mRNA technology used in the highly successful Covid jabs was found to protect mice and ferrets against severe influenza, paving the way for clinical trials in humans. Prof John Oxford, a neurologist at Queen Mary University in London, who was not involved in the work, said the vaccine developed at the University of Pennsylvania could be ready for use the winter after next.

"I cannot emphasise enough what a breakthrough this paper is," Oxford told the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme. "The potential is huge, and I think sometimes we underestimate these big respiratory viruses." Researchers have been working on universal flu vaccines for more than a decade, but the latest breakthrough, published in Science, is seen as a major step towards a jab that could help protect humans from a potentially devastating flu pandemic. Seasonal flu vaccines, which protect against up to four strains of the virus, are updated every year to ensure they are a good match for flu viruses in circulation. The new vaccine is designed to prime the immune system against all 20 subtypes of influenza A and B, potentially arming the body to tackle any flu virus that arises.

U.S. health regulators this week approved the first gene therapy for hemophilia, a $3.5 million one-time treatment for the blood-clotting disorder. From a report: The Food and Drug Administration cleared Hemgenix, an IV treatment for adults with hemophilia B, the less common form of the genetic disorder which primarily affects men. Currently, patients receive frequent, expensive IVs of a protein that helps blood clot and prevent bleeding. Drugmaker CSL Behring, based in Pennsylvania, announced the $3.5 million price tag shortly after the FDA approval, saying its drug would ultimately reduce health care costs because patients would have fewer bleeding incidents and need fewer clotting treatments.

According to a study cited by the National Library of Medicine, the price makes Hemgenix the most expensive medicine in the world, easily topping Novartis' Zolgensma gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which costs right around $2 million per dose and is also a single-dose medicine. Like most medicines in the U.S., most of the cost of the new treatment will be paid by insurers, not patients, including private plans and government programs. After decades of research, gene therapies have begun reshaping the treatment of cancers and rare inheritable diseases with medicines that can modify or correct mutations embedded in people's genetic code. Hemgenix is the first such treatment for hemophilia and several other drugmakers are working on gene therapies for the more common form of the disorder, hemophilia A.

The BBC reports: Leprosy bacteria may hold the secret to safely repairing and regenerating the body, researchers at the University of Edinburgh say. Animal experiments have uncovered the bacteria's remarkable ability to almost double the size of livers by stimulating healthy growth.

It is a sneakily selfish act that gives the bacteria more tissue to infect. But working out how they do it could lead to new age-defying therapies, the scientists say....

The bacterium that causes [leprosy], Mycobacterium leprae, has other, unusual properties, including the ability to perform "biological alchemy", converting one type of bodily tissue into another, which are fascinating scientists. So the researchers turned to another animals that catches the disease — armadillos. The experiments, which were performed in the US, showed the infection heads to the armoured animals' livers, where it performed a controlled hijacking of the organ to reprogram it for its own purpose.... You might expect such growth to be defective or even cancerous — but detailed analysis showed it was both healthy and functional, complete with the usual array of blood vessels and bile ducts.

"It is kind of mind-blowing," Prof Rambukkana said. "How do they do that? There is no cell therapy that can do that."
The bacteria appears to be "rewinding the developmental clock" on the liver cells, the BBC writes, transforming them into a younger, faster-growing state. "The hope is the approach can be harnessed for repairing the livers of people waiting for a transplant — or even to reverse some of the damage caused by ageing elsewhere in the body."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for submitting the story!

"With new COVID variants and subvariants evolving faster and faster, each chipping away at the effectiveness of the leading vaccines, the hunt is on for a new kind of vaccine," reports the Daily Beast, "one that works equally well on current and future forms of the novel coronavirus.

"Now researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland think they've found a new approach to vaccine design that could lead them to a long-lasting jab. As a bonus, it also might work on other coronaviruses, not just the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19." The NIH team reported its findings in a peer-reviewed study that appeared in the journal Cell Host & Microbe earlier this month.

The key to the NIH's potential vaccine design is a part of the virus called the "spine helix." It's a coil-shaped structure inside the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect our cells. Lots of current vaccines target the spike protein. But none of them specifically target the spine helix. And yet, there are good reasons to focus on that part of the pathogen. Whereas many regions of the spike protein tend to change a lot as the virus mutates, the spine helix doesn't.

That gives scientists "hope that an antibody targeting this region will be more durable and broadly effective," Joshua Tan, the lead scientist on the NIH team, told The Daily Beast....

A vaccine that binds the spine helix in SARS-CoV-2 should hold up for a long time. And it should also work on all the other coronaviruses that also include the spine helix — and there are dozens of them, including several such as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS that have already made the leap from animal populations and caused outbreaks in people....

Maybe a spine-helix jab is in our future. Or maybe not. Either way, it's encouraging that scientists are making incremental progress toward a more universal coronavirus vaccine. One that could work for many years on a wide array of related viruses.

For the first time, America's Food and Drug Administration has "approved a treatment that can delay the onset of Type 1 diabetes," reports ABC News: Teplizumab, a monoclonal antibody that will be marketed under the brand name Tzield from pharmaceutical companies ProventionBio and Sanofi, is administered through intravenous infusion. The injection was shown in clinical trials to delay onset of insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes for patients with autoantibody markers of early risk by over two years, with hopes for some that it can delay onset even longer.... Tzield was approved to delay the onset of stage 3 Type 1 diabetes in adults and children ages 8 and up who currently have stage 2 Type 1 diabetes.

The medication is thought to slow down the body's attack on its own insulin-producing cells and thus give people more time before they become dependent on pharmaceutical insulin. Tzield is not suitable for people with insulin-dependent Type 1 diabetes, people who are pre-Type 2 diabetics or those with type 2 diabetes. "This approval is a watershed moment for the treatment and prevention of type 1 diabetes," said Dr. Mark S. Anderson, director of the University of California San Francisco Diabetes Center. "Until now, the only real therapy for patients has been a lifetime of insulin replacement. This new therapy targets and helps to halt the autoimmune process that leads to the loss of insulin...."

Studies have shown that 75% of people with these diagnostic markers usually become insulin-dependent within five years and nearly 100% at some point in their lifetime.
ABC News also shares this quote from Dr. John Sharretts, director of the Division of Diabetes, Lipid Disorders, and Obesity in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. "The drug's potential to delay clinical diagnosis of type 1 diabetes may provide patients with months to years without the burdens of disease."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Triple threat. Tripledemic. A viral perfect storm. These frightening phrases have dominated recent headlines as some health officials, clinicians, and scientists forecast that SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) could surge at the same time in Northern Hemisphere locales that have relaxed masking, social distancing, and other COVID-19 precautions. But a growing body of epidemiological and laboratory evidence offers some reassurance: SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses often "interfere" with each other. Although waves of each virus may stress emergency rooms and intensive care units, the small clique of researchers who study these viral collisions say there is little chance the trio will peak together and collectively crash hospital systems the way COVID-19 did at the pandemic's start.

"Flu and other respiratory viruses and SARS-CoV-2 just don't get along very well together," says virologist Richard Webby, an influenza researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. "It's unlikely that they will circulate widely at the same time." "One virus tends to bully the others," adds epidemiologist Ben Cowling at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. During the surge of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 in Hong Kong in March, Cowling found that other respiratory viruses "disappeared ... and they came back again in April." When a respiratory virus sweeps through a community, interferons can broadly raise the body's defenses and temporarily erect a populationwide immune barrier against subsequent viruses that target the respiratory system. "Basically, every virus triggers the interferon response to some extent, and every virus is susceptible to it," says immunologist Ellen Foxman at Yale University, who has been exploring interference between SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses in a laboratory model of the human airway. Rhinoviruses, which cause common colds, can trip up influenza A (the most prevalent flu virus). RSV can bump rhinoviruses and human metapneumoviruses. Influenza A can thwart its distant cousin influenza B. "There are a lot of major health implications from viral interference," says Guy Boivin, a virologist at Laval University who co-authored a review (PDF) on viral interference earlier this year.

Now, viral interference researchers are closely watching the newest respiratory virus to circle the globe. "What interactions could SARS-CoV-2 have with other viruses?" Murcia asks. "To this day, there are no robust epidemiological data." For one thing, the widespread social distancing and mask wearing in many countries meant there was little chance to see interference in action. "There was almost no circulation of other respiratory viruses during the first 3 years of the pandemic," Boivin says. Also, SARS-CoV-2 has many defenses against interferons, including preventing their production, which might affect its interactions with other viruses. Still, Foxman has published evidence that, in her organoid model, rhinovirus can interfere with SARS-CoV-2. And Boivin's team has reported (PDF) that influenza A and SARS-CoV-2 each can block the other in cell studies.

The world's first vaccine to treat deadly cancerous brain tumors can potentially give patients years of extra life, a global clinical trial has concluded. The Guardian reports: A senior NHS doctor who was one of the trial's chief investigators said the evidence showed DCVax had resulted in "astonishing" enhanced survival for patients. One patient in the 331-person multicenter global study lived for more than eight years after receiving DCVax. In Britain, 53-year-old Nigel French is still alive seven years after having it. If approved by medical regulators, DCVax would be the first new treatment in 17 years for newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients and the first in 27 years for people in whom it had returned. "The total results are astonishing," said Prof Keyoumars Ashkan, a neurosurgeon at King's College hospital in London who was the European chief investigator of the trial. "The final results of this phase three trial... offer fresh hope to patients battling with glioblastoma."

Trial researchers found that newly diagnosed patients who had the vaccine survived for 19.3 months on average, compared with 16.5 months for those who received a placebo. Participants with recurrent glioblastoma who had had DCVax lived on average for 13.2 months after receiving it, compared with just 7.8 months for those who did not. Overall 13% of people who received it lived for at least five years after diagnosis, while just 5.7% of those in the control group did so, according to the results of the trial, which were published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology.

The vaccine is a form of immunotherapy, in which the body's immune system is programmed to track down and attack the tumor. It is the first developed to tackle brain tumors. "The vaccine works by stimulating the patient's own immune system to fight against the patient's tumor. It provides a personalized solution, working with a patient's immune system, which is the most intelligent system known to man," said Ashkan. "The vaccine is produced by combining proteins from a patient's own tumor with their white blood cells. This educates the white cells to recognize the tumor. "When the vaccine is administered, these educated white blood cells then help the rest of the patient's immune system recognize the tumor as something it needs to fight against and destroy. Almost like training a sniffer dog."

Researchers have developed a fentanyl vaccine that could eliminate the drug's "high" by blocking its ability to enter the brain -- which could be a major step forward in the ongoing opioid crisis. Yahoo News reports: The study, conducted by a research team led by the University of Houston and funded by the Department of Defense through the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Disorder Research Program, was published in the journal Pharmaceutics at the end of October. Colin Haile, a research associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study, said in a news release that the vaccine "is able to generate anti-fentanyl antibodies that bind to the consumed fentanyl and prevent it from entering the brain, allowing it to be eliminated out of the body via the kidneys. "Thus, the individual will not feel the euphoric effects and can "get back on the wagon' to sobriety."

Haile added that the anti-fentanyl antibodies didn't cross-react with other opioids, meaning a vaccinated person could still be treated for pain relief with other opioids. The vaccine did not cause any adverse side effects in rats involved in lab studies, and clinical trials in humans are planned "soon," with manufacturing of clinical-grade vaccine to begin in the coming months.

Amazon is starting a health referral service that seeks to link patients to virtual visits with providers who treat conditions like acne, hair loss and allergies. From a report: The initiative, called Amazon Clinic, is the Seattle company's latest effort to break into health care. It already operates an online pharmacy, and is in the process of buying 1Life Healthcare, which manages clinics under the One Medical brand, for $3.49 billion.

In a blog post announcing the service on Tuesday, Amazon called the new clinic a "virtual health storefront," connecting patients to "award-winning telehealth providers." The post didn't name those partners. The offering will be initially available in 32 US states and doesn't yet accept insurance, Amazon said. Patients select their condition, choose a provider from a list, and complete an intake questionnaire. From there, they connect directly to the provider through a "message-based portal."

"Around 20% of people who survive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after cardiac arrest may describe lucid experiences of death that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death," reports SciTechDaily.

"This is according to new research led by investigators at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and elsewhere." Long-time Slashdot reader InfiniteZero shared their report: Included in the study were 567 men and women whose hearts stopped beating while hospitalized and who received CPR between May 2017 and March 2020 in the United States and the United Kingdom.... Survivors reported having unique lucid experiences, including a perception of separation from the body and observing events without pain or distress. They also reported a meaningful evaluation of life, including of their actions, intentions, and thoughts toward others. The researchers found these experiences of death to be different from hallucinations, dreams, delusions, illusions, or CPR-induced consciousness.

Tests for hidden brain activity were also included in the research. A key finding was the discovery of spikes of brain activity, including so-called gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves up to an hour into CPR. Some of these brain waves normally occur when people are conscious and performing higher mental functions, including thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception. "These recalled experiences and brain wave changes may be the first signs of the so-called near-death experience, and we have captured them for the first time in a large study," says Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, the lead study investigator and an intensive care physician, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Health, as well as the organization's director of critical care and resuscitation research."Our results offer evidence that while on the brink of death and in a coma, people undergo a unique inner conscious experience, including awareness without distress...."

"These lucid experiences cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink of death," says Parnia. As the brain is shutting down, many of its natural braking systems are released. Known as disinhibition, this provides access to the depths of a person's consciousness, including stored memories, thoughts from early childhood to death, and other aspects of reality. While no one knows the evolutionary purpose of this phenomenon, it clearly reveals "intriguing questions about human consciousness, even at death," says Parnia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Draconian licensing rules and a lack of public funding are holding back the emerging field of psychedelic medicine in the UK, leading scientists have warned after the release of groundbreaking results on the use of psilocybin to treat depression. The latest clinical trial found that a single dose of the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, combined with psychotherapy, helped alleviate depression in nearly a third of patients with severe depression. The finding follows other promising results suggesting that psychedelic drugs could be used in treating conditions including anxiety, PTSD, addiction and anorexia.

However, Prof David Nutt, the former government drug adviser and director of the neuropsychopharmacology research unit at Imperial College London, said that unless regulations and attitudes changed, potential treatments would remain "in limbo" at an experimental stage and available only to those who could pay for them in private clinics. "Patients are being denied access because of the regulations," he said. "The research is really hampered by the legal status."

Despite what some are hailing as a "psychedelic renaissance," Nutt said there had been minimal public funding for research in this area, besides a grant he received from the Medical Research Council to study psilocybin and funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research for a trial published last week. "I don't think there's any other funding. It's all philanthropists and private sector funding," he said. "It reflects the fact that we still see illegal drugs as drugs to be banned." He said basic scientific research was vital for the development of new potential treatments. "This isn't just some public groundswell of hippy resurrection," he said. "The science has driven the clinical work."

The Washington Post reports: Psilocybin, the active hallucinogen found in psychedelic mushrooms — also known as "magic mushrooms" — can effectively alleviate a severe bout of depression when administered in a single dose and combined with talk therapy, a new clinical study found.

Adults with depression who were administered a single 25-miligram dose of psilocybin were more likely to experience significant improvements in their mental health — both immediately and for up to three months — than others who were randomly assigned smaller doses of the same drug, said the peer-reviewed study, which was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine....

The trial's findings could be an encouraging sign for the 16 million Americans estimated each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have depression, many of whom struggle to find treatments that work for them. Its authors hope the study — which was relatively small, with just 79 participants receiving the 25 mg dose — will pave the way for eventual regulatory approval of psilocybin by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a drug against depression....

Notwithstanding the headaches, nausea and dizziness reported by many as adverse side effects, most of the adults enjoyed the experience.
The Post got an interesting reponse from James Rucker, a consultant psychiatrist at King's College London who worked on the trial. He said there's something about the psychedelic experience that leads to a rapid resolution of depression symptoms, adding "We don't really know what that is at the moment, but it's very different to standard antidepressants...."

"What people forget about psychedelics is that they were being used as medicines prior to 1971 when they essentially got caught up in the drugs war," Rucker added. "We're just picking up the baton of history."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Shmoodling for submitting the story.

Here's the Guardian's report on new cryptographic techniques where "you can share data while keeping that data private" — known by the umbrella term "privacy-enhancing technologies" (or "Pets). They offer opportunities for data holders to pool their data in new and useful ways. In the health sector, for example, strict rules prohibit hospitals from sharing patients' medical data. Yet if hospitals were able to combine their data into larger datasets, doctors would have more information, which would enable them to make better decisions on treatments. Indeed, a project in Switzerland using Pets has since June allowed medical researchers at four independent teaching hospitals to conduct analysis on their combined data of about 250,000 patients, with no loss of privacy between institutions. Juan Troncoso, co-founder and CEO of Tune Insight, which runs the project, says: "The dream of personalised medicine relies on larger and higher-quality datasets. Pets can make this dream come true while complying with regulations and protecting people's privacy rights. This technology will be transformative for precision medicine and beyond."

The past couple of years have seen the emergence of dozens of Pet startups in advertising, insurance, marketing, machine learning, cybersecurity, fintech and cryptocurrencies. According to research firm Everest Group, the market for Pets was $2bn last year and will grow to more than $50bn in 2026. Governments are also getting interested. Last year, the United Nations launched its "Pet Lab", which was nothing to do with the welfare of domestic animals, but instead a forum for national statistical offices to find ways to share their data across borders while protecting the privacy of their citizens.

Jack Fitzsimons, founder of the UN Pet Lab, says: "Pets are one of the most important technologies of our generation. They have fundamentally changed the game, because they offer the promise that private data is only used for its intended purposes...." The emergence of applications has driven the theory, which is now sufficiently well developed to be commercially viable. Microsoft, for example, uses fully homomorphic encryption when you register a new password: the password is encrypted and then sent to a server who checks whether or not that password is in a list of passwords that have been discovered in data breaches, without the server being able to identify your password. Meta, Google and Apple have also over the last year or so been introducing similar tools to some of their products.
The article offers quick explanations of zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, and fully homomorphic encryption (which allows the performance of analytics on data by a second party who never reads the data or learns the result).

And "In addition to new cryptographic techniques, Pets also include advances in computational statistics such as 'differential privacy', an idea from 2006 in which noise is added to results in order to preserve the privacy of individuals."

"Google is giving Apple a taste of its own medicine," reports Business Insider, arguing that the latest update to Android's messaging app "is going to make texting between iPhone and Androids even more annoying than it already is." [Alternate URL] The updates are great if you're an Android user. Google Messages' new features include the ability to reply to individual messages, star them, and set reminders on texts. But these features and some other updates to Messages are RCS-enabled, meaning they're not going to be very compatible with SMS, which is the texting standard that iMessage switches to when messaging someone without an iPhone. iPhones exchange messages using iMessage, Apple's proprietary messaging system, but revert to SMS when texting an Android.

One feature that's part of Google's payback to Apple is that now, when Messages users react to an SMS text with an emoji, iPhone users will get a text saying the other person reacted to their text with a description of whatever emoji the person used. It's similar to when iMessage users react to an SMS text, with the recipient getting a "so and so loved" message instead of seeing the heart emoji reaction.... In August, Android launched a page on its website calling Apple out for refusing "to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other." The page has buttons that take users to Twitter to tweet at Apple to "stop breaking my texting experience. #GetTheMessage" with a link to Android's page urging Apple to "fix texting."

"We would much prefer that everybody adopts RCS which has the capability to support proper reactions," Jan Jedrzejowicz, Google Messages product manager, said in a briefing before the Messages updates were announced. "But in the event that's not possible or hasn't happened yet, this feels like the next best thing." Recently, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he doesn't get a lot of feedback from iPhone users that Apple needs to fix messaging between iPhones and Androids. Apple doesn't have much incentive to do so, either. In legal documents from a 2021 lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple, an Apple executive said "Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us."

The deaths of nearly 100 children in Indonesia have prompted the country to suspend sales of all syrup and liquid medication. From a report: It comes just weeks after a cough syrup in The Gambia was linked to the deaths of nearly 70 children. Indonesia said some syrup medicine was found to contain ingredients linked to acute kidney injuries (AKI), which have killed 99 young children this year. It is not clear if the medicine were imported or locally produced. On Thursday, Indonesian health officials said they had reported around 200 cases of AKI in children, most of who were aged under five. Earlier this month, the The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a global alert over four cough syrups that were linked to the deaths of almost 70 children in The Gambia. The WHO found the syrups used there - made by an Indian pharmaceutical company - contained "unacceptable amounts" of diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol. The syrups have been "potentially linked with acute kidney injuries", said the organisation. Indonesia's Health Minister on Thursday said the same chemical compounds were also found in some medicines used locally.

At least five hours sleep a night may cut the over-50s' chances of multiple chronic health problems, researchers say. The BBC reports: The PLoS Medicine study tracked the health and sleep of UK civil servants. All of the about 8,000 participants were asked: How many hours of sleep do you have on an average weeknight?" Some also wore a wrist-watch sleep tracker. And they were checked for chronic conditions, including diabetes, cancer and heart disease, over two decades of follow-up:

- Those who slept five hours or less around the age of 50 had a 30% greater risk of multiple ailments than those who slept seven hours
- Shorter sleep at 50 was also associated with a higher risk of death during the study period, mainly linked to the increased risk of chronic disease

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: UNDARK has an interesting interview with NYU professor emeritus Gary Marcus (PhD in brain and cognitive sciences, MIT) about Why Mastering Language Is So Difficult for AI. Marcus, who has had a front-row seat for many of the developments in AI, says we need to take AI advances with a grain of salt.

Starting with GPT-3, Marcus begins, "I think it's an interesting experiment. But I think that people are led to believe that this system actually understands human language, which it certainly does not. What it really is, is an autocomplete system that predicts next words and sentences. Just like with your phone, where you type in something and it continues. It doesn't really understand the world around it.

"And a lot of people are confused by that. They're confused by that because what these systems are ultimately doing is mimicry. They're mimicking vast databases of text. And I think the average person doesn't understand the difference between mimicking 100 words, 1,000 words, a billion words, a trillion words — when you start approaching a trillion words, almost anything you can think of is already talked about there. And so when you're mimicking something, you can do that to a high degree, but it's still kind of like being a parrot, or a plagiarist, or something like that. A parrot's not a bad metaphor, because we don't think parrots actually understand what they're talking about. And GPT-3 certainly does not understand what it's talking about."

Marcus also has cautionary words about Google's LaMDA ("It's not sentient, it has no idea of the things that it is talking about."), driverless cars ("Merely memorizing a lot of traffic situations that you've seen doesn't convey what you really need to understand about the world in order to drive well"), OpenAI's DALL-E ("A lot of AI right now leverages the not-necessarily-intended contributions by human beings, who have maybe signed off on a 'terms of service' agreement, but don't recognize where this is all leading to"), and what's motivating the use of AI at corporations ("They want to solve advertisements. That's not the same as understanding natural language for the purpose of improving medicine. So there's an incentive issue.").

Still, Marcus says he's heartened by some recent AI developments: "People are finally daring to step out of the deep-learning orthodoxy, and finally willing to consider "hybrid" models that put deep learning together with more classical approaches to AI. The more the different sides start to throw down their rhetorical arms and start working together, the better."

Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr shares a report from the Boston Globe's health-news site STAT: The scientist flicked on a laser, filling the rat's brain with blue light. The rodent, true to its past two weeks of training, scampered across its glass box to a tiny spout, where it was duly rewarded with a drink of water. From the outside, this would appear to be a pretty run-of-the-mill neuroscience experiment, except for the fact that the neurons directing the rat to its thirst-quenching reward didn't contain any rat DNA. Instead, they came from a human "mini-brain" — a ball of human tissue called an organoid — that researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine had grown in a lab and implanted in the rodent's cortex months before.

The experiment — part of a study published Wednesday in Nature — is the first describing human neurons influencing another species' behavior. The study also showed that signals could go the other way; tendrils of human neurons mingled with the rodent brain cells and fired in response to air rustling the rats' whiskers.

The advance opens the door to using such human-rodent chimeras to better understand how the human brain develops and what goes wrong in neurological and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, autism, and epilepsy. When the Stanford scientists implanted organoids grown from the cells of patients with a severe genetic brain disorder, they could watch the neurons develop abnormally with unprecedented clarity.

"This paper really pushes the envelope," said neuroscientist Tomasz Nowakowski, of the University of California, San Francisco, who uses brain organoids in his research on neurodevelopmental disorders but was not involved in the new work. "The field is desperate for more experimental models. And what's really important about this study is it demonstrates that brain organoids can complete their maturation trajectory when transplanted. So it really expands our toolkit for asking more nuanced questions about how genetic mutations lead to behavioral disorders."
It's an example of how stem cells have revolutionized brain research. By "doing their experiments in very young rats whose cortexes are not yet saturated with synapses," the article points out, the researchers "found that the human neurons easily integrated into the animals' rapidly expanding circuitry, which provided them with the stimulation they needed to push past previous developmental barriers."

Angus Chen, reporting for StatNews: For a while, scientists thought the trillions of microbes on our bodies lived in landscapes connected to the outside world -- our skin, hair, and gut -- but research in the last few years has shown that's not so. When Ravid Straussman, a cancer biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, looked deeper, he and several other research groups around the world found bacteria in the milieu of tumors. Then, he and other scientists began wondering: if tumors are home to bacteria, then what about another major resident of our microbiome, fungi? Now, two new papers published in Cell, one from Straussman's lab and collaborators at the University of California San Diego and another from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Duke University, have found genetic footprints of fungi in tumors across the human body.

Together, the studies provide a "nice, rigorous association" between fungi and cancer, said Ami Bhatt, an associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University who did not work on either paper. "It provides pretty compelling evidence there may be rare fungi within tumors," she said. But the work raises far more questions than it answers. "Are they alive or not? And assuming they really are there, then why are they there? And how did they get there?"

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Paabo on Monday for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. From a report: It was the first of several prizes to be given over the next week. The Nobel Prizes, among the highest honors in science, recognize groundbreaking contributions in a variety of fields. "Through his pioneering research, Svante Paabo -- this year's Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine -- accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans," the Nobel committee said in a statement. "Paabo's discoveries have generated new understanding of our evolutionary history," the statement said, adding that this research had helped establish the burgeoning science of "paleogenomics," or the study of genetic material from ancient pathogens.

Nils-Goran Larsson, a professor in medical biochemistry for the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said that Dr. Paabo had used existing technology and his own methods to extract and analyze the ancient DNA. "It was certainly considered to be impossible to recover DNA from 40,000-year-old bones," Dr. Larsson said, adding later that the discoveries would "allow us to compare changes between contemporary Homo sapiens and ancient hominins. And this, over the years to come, will give us huge insights into human physiology."