Tag Archives: News

New therapies could regenerate the heart after heart failure

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Drug Discovery News

New progress presented at an annual conference of the American Heart Association signals renewed hope to repair the heart after injury.

When heart failure doesn’t kill immediately, it kills slowly. The heart is said to “remodel” after injury but often can’t come back stronger. Injured sections lose their vital nerves, or gain back too many. Fibroblast cells thicken the pump’s walls with collagen. The adult heart scars, and this weakens its output.

The problem is that adult hearts aren’t programmed to bounce back to their prior abilities. Yet “everything you need to regenerate a heart should exist in the mammalian genome,” said Ahmed Mahmoud, who studies regenerative biology at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute. “We know that early in life, the mammalian heart could actually do it by itself.” In 2011, Mahmoud and colleagues reported that mammals’ hearts can regenerate at very young ages: One-day-old mice recovered from having small slivers of their hearts cut out; seven-day-old mice didn’t.

Read the full story in Drug Discovery News

Gene-edited stem cells aim to reverse rheumatoid arthritis

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Drug Discovery News

A new approach for gene editing will get its shot in a common and chronic autoimmune disorder.

At the root of anything good or bad in the human immune system is a question about recognition. When the immune system functions correctly, it clocks unrecognized bacteria and viruses. When it misbehaves, immune cells misidentify the body’s tissue as its own. Such autoimmune disorders attack the pancreas in type 1 diabetes, nerve fibers in multiple sclerosis, and joints in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Recognition also stifles the drugs designed to treat immune symptoms: Our bodies can develop drug-specific antibodies that target them.

Read the full story in Drug Discovery News

Tell me what you don’t know

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Sequencer

Scientific misinformation is a community problem. We can fight back by embracing uncertainty.

Twenty-five floors above the clouds of indoor cigarette smoke at the Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, hundreds of self-described “skeptics” gathered to discuss science, health, and paranormal claims. But far from conspiracy thinking, this group organized by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry defines skepticism as questioning facts in good faith. They arrived to learn how to recognize and combat misinformation. And ten days before the 2024 presidential election, I traveled to their Las Vegas conference as a science reporter with a similar goal.

Read the full story at Sequencer

The drugs of the future are in the animals of the past

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SEQUENCER

The genomes of extinct creatures like mammoths and giant sloths code for natural antibiotics we’ve never seen. So, now what?

César de la Fuente’s lab has a knack for finding antibiotics in usual places. He doesn’t trudge through swamps or remote forests like a pharmacological Indiana Jones. His lab instead combs through genetic data collected from creatures across all time.  

In just the last few years, they’ve documented unreported antimicrobial compounds hidden in the genomes of Neanderthals, the world’s microbes, and within ourselves. Now, their latest feat carries the torch thanks to a brand new machine learning algorithm they call APEX: antibiotic peptide de-extinction. 

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An emotional public hearing on MDMA: ‘Today you will vote on whether my friends live or die’

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Sequencer

The FDA may approve psychedelic-assisted therapy for PTSD, but at a recent public hearing it was the therapy — not the drug — that burned in the hot seat.

Yesterday, June 4th, an advisory committee convened to discuss whether to recommend that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve MDMA psychedelic-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when the agency renders a decision this summer. The drug application’s sponsor, Lykos Therapeutics, a biopharma company focusing on mental health treatments, had led two Phase 3 clinical trials combining MDMA with a therapy philosophy allegedly rooted in controversial New Age ideas. The advisory committee invited members of the public to speak. More than 30 individuals shared their testimony in favor or against approval. 

Rather than a straightforward, dusty bureaucratic session, the hearing was eye-opening, puzzling, fascinating, and profoundly sad. 

Read the full story in Sequencer

Saunas Are the Next Frontier in Fighting Depression

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WIRED

The preliminary results of a clinical trial of using heat exposure to combat depression are in—and are fueling cautious optimism that sauna practice could become an accepted treatment.

Depression runs hot. In the 1980s, psychiatrists began noticing that patients with depressive symptoms had higher body temperatures compared to people without, and that their body temperatures didn’t ebb and flow as much throughout the day. The more severe a patient’s depression, the higher their temperature tended to be.

Researchers have since noticed that when someone’s depression improves, their body temperature regularizes, “no matter how their depression got better—electroconvulsive therapy, psychotherapy, antidepressants, whatever,” says Ashley Mason, a clinical psychologist at the UC San Francisco Osher Center for Integrative Health. This got Mason thinking: If the two are linked, what happens to a depressed person’s symptoms if you provoke a change in their temperature?

Read the full story in WIRED