RNAs carry information between protein and DNA in cells, and the research proved that these molecules can be produced and organised into tailor-made sequences of commands—similar to codes for computer software—which feed specific instructions into cells, programming them to do what we want.

Cells have the capacity to process and respond to instructions and codes inputted into their main system, said lead researcher Alfonso Jaramillo, Professor at University of Warwick in Britain.

Similar to software running on a computer, or apps on a mobile device, many different RNA sequences could be created to empower cells with a ‘Virtual Machine’, able to interpret a universal RNA language, and to perform specific actions to address different diseases or problems, the study said.

This will allow a novel type of personalised and efficient healthcare, allowing us to ‘download’ a sequence of actions into cells, instructing them to execute complex decisions encoded in the RNA.

The researchers made their invention by first modelling all possible RNA sequence interactions on a computer, and then constructing the DNA encoding the optimal RNA designs, to be validated on bacteria cells in the laboratory.

After inducing the bacterial cells to produce the genetically engineered RNA sequences, the researchers observed that they had altered the gene expression of the cells according to the RNA programme—demonstrating that cells can be programmed with pre-defined RNA commands, in the manner of a computer’s microprocessor.

”The capabilities of RNA molecules to interact in a predictable manner, and with alternative conformations, has allowed us to engineer networks of molecular switches that could be made to process arbitrary orders encoded in RNA,” Jaramillo said.

As well as fighting disease and injury in humans, scientists could harness this technique to control plant cells and reverse environmental and agricultural issues, making plants more resilient to disease and pests.

“Throughout last year, my group has been developing methodologies to enable RNA sensing the environment, perform arithmetic computations and control gene expression without relying on proteins, which makes the system universal across all living kingdoms,” Jaramillo said.

“The cells could read the RNA ‘software’ to perform the encoded tasks, which could make the cells detect abnormal states, infections, or trigger developmental programmes,” he added.

IANS

Picture courtesy: Alamy

The post Programming cells like computers to fight disease appeared first on KT10.

“It is designed to continue what naturally occurs in the womb,” said Alan Flake, a foetal surgeon at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and senior author of a study in Nature Communications that details the breakthrough.

“That’s the beauty of it, and why I’m optimistic we will improve on what is currently done for extremely premature babies,” he told journalists by phone.

Today, infants brought into the world after only 22 or 23 weeks of gestation rather than the full 40 have a 50/50 chance of living, and — for those that survive — a 90 percent change of severe and lasting health problems.

The new system mimics life in the uterus and could, if approved for human use, dramatically improve those odds.

The researchers are working with the US Food and Drug Administration to prepare human trials, which could start within three years.

The foetus — breathing liquid, as it would in the womb — lies in a clear-plastic sack filled with a synthetic amniotic fluid.

“A fluid environment is critical for foetal development,” said Flake.

The umbilical cord is attached via tubes to a machine outside the bag, which removes CO2 and adds oxygen to blood passing through it.

There are no mechanical pumps — it is the foetus’s heart that keeps things moving.

Current treatment has pushed the boundary of survivability to 22 or 23 weeks, but comes at a high cost.

Beyond a high mortality rate, tiny lungs and hearts of preemies barely a half-a-kilo (a pound) in weight are ill-equipped to withstand the trauma of intubation, ventilators and artificial pumps.

Extremely premature infants who survive often have chronic lung infections and other crippling health problems.

“One of the major advantages of our system is the avoidance of heart failure, which comes from the imbalance of blood flows created with pump circuits,” said co-author Marcus Davey, an investigator with the hospital’s Center for Fetal Research and the project’s lead engineer.

For the study, the researchers tested six preterm lambs transferred from their mothers’ wombs to the device at 105 to 112 days of gestation — the equivalent of 23 to 24 weeks in a human. They remained in the artificial wombs for up to 28 days.

In humans, the high-risk period for premature babies is 22 to 27 weeks. “At 28 weeks, you are at a point where the mortality and morbidity of prematurity is finished,” said Flake.

Sheep have long been used in experiments for prenatal treatment, especially because lung development is highly similar.

While nestled in the devices, “the lambs showed normal breathing and swallowing, opened their eyes, grew wool, became more active, and had normal growth, neurological function and organ maturation,” said Flake.

After the experiments, most of the animals were humanely put down so that their brains, lungs and other organs could be examined.

A few were bottle-fed and “appear to have normal development in all respects,” said Flake. One has been retired to a farm in rural Pennsylvania.

If the Food and Drug Administration trials go ahead it could be another three to five years before the devices — assuming they are proven safe and effective for newborns — are in use, Flake said.

Colin Duncan, a professor of reproductive medicine at the University of Edinburgh, said: “This is a really attractive concept and this study is a very important step forward.”

The devices, he added, “will require a lot of additional preclinical research and development.”—AFP

Image: AFP

The post Artificial womb for super-preemies works with sheep appeared first on KT10.

One of the studies in the findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association included 1.5 million infants in Sweden from 1996 to 2012, making it one of the largest populations ever analyzed to understand the impact of antidepressant use during pregnancy.

The study found that mothers’ use of antidepressants early in pregnancy did not increase the risk of their children developing autism.

The report said these findings ran counter to several previous studies, and the reason for the discrepancy could come down to how scientists adjust for a variety of potential confounding factors.

“To our knowledge, this is one of the strongest studies to show that exposure to antidepressants during early pregnancy is not associated with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or poor fetal growth when taking into account the factors that lead to medication use in the first place,” said lead author Brian D’Onofrio, professor at Indiana University.

“Balancing the risks and benefits of using antidepressants during pregnancy is an extremely difficult decision that every woman should make in consultation with her doctor,” he added.

“However, this study suggests use of these medications while pregnant may be safer than previously thought.”

Most of the antidepressants examined for the study were selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a common class of drugs that includes Prozac, Zoloft and Celexa.

A second study looked at more than 35,000 children in Canada from 2002 to 2010 and found a slightly higher risk of autism among the children of women who took antidepressants, but the risk was no longer statistically significant after tweaking the adjustments for other factors, like genetics and environment.

Both studies stopped short of proving any cause-and-effect.

“Although a causal relationship cannot be ruled out, the previously observed association may be explained by other factors,” said the second study.

In 2015, a major Canadian study in JAMA, based on more than 145,000 pregnancies, found an 87 percent higher risk of autism when mothers took antidepressant medications later in pregnancy, a crucial time for brain development in the fetus.

As many as one in 45 children are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in the United States, according to a recent study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists still do not fully understand what causes autism, though both genetics and environment are believed to play a role.

Around 10 percent of pregnant women are currently being treated with antidepressants.—AFP

Image: Alamy

The post Studies question autism link to antidepressants in pregnancy appeared first on KT10.

The range of antimicrobial medicines able to kill the growing number of drug-resistant infections is dwindling and health experts warn that within a generation the death toll from such “superbug” infections could reach 10 billion.

Announcing its first funding, a new U.S.-U.K. alliance known as CARB-X, short for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator, said it would invest an initial $24 million in 11 biotech companies pursing various projects to develop antibiotics and diagnostic. Another $24 million will be given in staged payments over three years as projects progress.

Added to private funds from the companies, the CARB-X funding could lead to an investment of more than $75 million in projects that show success, it said in a statement. Britain’s Wellcome Trust global health charity is committing 125 million pounds ($155.5 million) over five years.

Public health specialists have been warning for years that the world is facing an urgent global health threat from antibiotic-resistant superbug bacteria and that the pipeline of novel therapies to treat them is precariously thin.

Drug-resistant infections kill 700,000 people a year worldwide, and the last new antibiotic class to be approved for market was discovered in 1984.

With CARB-X funds, three of the 11 projects are working on potential new classes of antibiotics, while four are exploring new ways of targeting and killing bacteria.

Tim Jinks, head of drug resistant infection at the Wellcome Trust, said antibiotic resistance is already “a huge global health challenge” and is getting worse. “Without effective drugs, doctors cannot treat patients,” he said in a statement.

Kevin Outterson, CARB-X’s executive director and a professor of law at Boston University in the United States, added: “By accelerating promising research, it is our hope that we can speed up the delivery of new effective antibacterials, vaccines, devices and rapid diagnostics to patients who need them.”—Reuters

Image: Reuters

The post U.S.-UK alliance targets the world’s deadliest superbugs appeared first on KT10.

“As residents seeing patients in the hospital, there are often times when we are not allowed to dilate patients—neurosurgery patients for example,” said Dr Bailey Shen, an ophthalmology resident at University of Illinois’ Chicago College of Medicine.

“There are times when we find something abnormal in the back of the eye but it is not practical to wheel the patient all the way over to the outpatient eye clinic just for a photograph,” Shen added.

The prototype camera can be carried in your pocket and can take pictures of the back of the eye without eye drops. The pictures can be shared with other doctors, or attached to the patient’s medical record.

The camera is based on the Raspberry Pi 2 computer, a low-cost, single-board computer designed to teach children how to build and programme computers.

A handful of other components—a lens, a small display screen and several cables—make up the rest of the camera.

Shen and his co-author Dr Shizuo Mukai, associate professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and a retina surgeon at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, describe their camera and provide a shopping list of parts, instructions for assembly and the code needed to programme the camera in the Journal of Ophthalmology.

“This is an open-source device that is cheap and easy to build,” said Mukai. “We expect that others who build our camera will add their own improvements and innovations.”

“The device is currently just a prototype, but it shows that it is possible to build a cheap camera capable of taking quality pictures of the retina without dilating eye drops, “ Shen said.

IANS

Picture source: IANS- Photo by Bailey Shen

Image used for illustrative purposes

The post No dilating required with this pocket-sized retina camera appeared first on KT10.

Over 70,000 people die from breast cancer in China every year, according to the national cancer centre.

Triple-negative breast cancer is particularly aggressive among the four clinical subtypes of breast cancer, Xinhua news agency quoted Dong Chenfang, a professor at Zhejiang University School of Medicine, as saying.

It has a tendency to quickly spread or metastasize to the brain and lungs. There are currently no effective targeted therapies for this form of breast cancer, which is therefore often fatal, he said.

Dong and his colleagues found that the levels of a metabolic enzyme called AKR1B1 were significantly elevated in triple-negative breast cancer cells and that this was associated with increased rates of metastasis and shorter survival.

The researchers also found epalrestat, a drug that inhibits AKR1B1 and is approved in Japan to treat diabetic complications, was able to block the growth and metastasis of the cancer cells.

Dong said the finding is still in the experimental stage. —IANS

Image: Alamy

The post Diabetes drug may help treat breast cancer appeared first on KT10.

What’s called genome editing already is transforming biological research, and being used to develop treatments for patients struggling with a range of diseases.

The science is nowhere near ready for a huge next step that raises ethical questions — altering sperm, eggs or embryos so that babies don’t inherit a disease that runs in the family, says a report Tuesday from the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine.

But if scientists learn how to safely pass alterations of the genetic code to future generations, the panel said “germline” editing could be attempted under strict criteria, including that it targets a serious disease with no reasonable alternative and is conducted under rigorous oversight.

“Caution is absolutely needed, but being cautious does not mean prohibition,” said bioethicist R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“This committee is not saying we will or should do germline — heritable — editing. What we are saying is that we can identify a set of strict conditions under which it would be permissible to do it,” Charo added. “But we are far, far away from being ready to try.”

Genome editing should not go beyond healing the sick and enhance traits such as physical strength, what’s commonly called “designer babies,” the panel stressed.

But the public should get involved in these debates now, to say what might one day be acceptable.

The long-awaited report offers advice — the prestigious academies cannot set policy. But it is considered a step toward creating international norms for responsible development of this powerful technology. The U.S. National Academies and its counterparts in Britain and China have been holding international meetings with the hope of doing just that.

“Genome editing is a new tool for gene therapy and it has tremendous promise,” Charo said. But, she added, it has to be pursued in a way that promotes well-being and is responsible, respectful and fair.

Genome editing is essentially a biological version of cut-and-paste software, allowing scientists to turn genes on or off, repair or modify them inside living cells. There are a few older methods but one with the wonky name CRISPR-Cas9 is so much faster, cheaper and simpler to use that it has spurred an explosion of research.

Under development are ways to treat a range of diseases from sickle cell and hemophilia to cancer. In lab experiments using human cells or animals engineered with humanlike

e disorders, scientists are unraveling how gene defects fuel disease — and are even trying to grow transplantable human organs inside pigs.

That kind of research is very promising, is adequately regulated today and should continue at full speed, the National Academies panel concluded.

When it comes to the more sci fi-sounding uses, it’s quite possible scientists will learn how to perform germline editing in five to 10 years, said panel co-chair Richard Hynes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Safety is one reason for caution, he said, as scientists will have to learn whether editing one gene has unwanted downstream effects.

Some critics argue that families plagued by inherited diseases already have other alternatives — adopt, use donated eggs, or undergo in vitro fertilization and discard resulting embryos that inherit the bad gene. But Charo noted that sometimes parents carry two copies of a lethal gene, guaranteeing any children inherit it. Others oppose the discarding of embryos for religious reasons.

For some families, “you can see there would be strong arguments for doing it” if the other criteria are met, said Robin Lovell-Badge of Britain’s Francis Crick Institute.

Some countries prohibit any germline editing research. Others, such as Britain, allow laboratory research with genome editing in embryos, not for pregnancy but to understand human development.

In the U.S., scientists can perform laboratory embryo research only with private, not government, funding. Any attempt at pregnancy would require permission from the Food and Drug Administration, which is currently prohibited from using federal funds to review any such request.

“The bottom line is there is no planetary government with enforcement power,” Charo noted Tuesday.—AP

Image: Alamy

The post Could gene editing help avoid disease? Maybe appeared first on KT10.

Pacemakers are the most common way to treat bradycardia to help restore the heart’s normal rhythm and relieve symptoms by sending electrical impulses to the heart to increase the heart rate.

Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas is now offering a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Micra Transcatheter Pacing System (TPS) — the world’s smallest pacemaker for patients with bradycardia, a condition characterized by a slow heart rate, usually fewer than 60 beats per minute.

The device is the size of a large vitamin, and unlike traditional pacemakers, it does not require cardiac wires (leads) or a surgical “pocket” under the skin to deliver a pacing therapy.

“The device is small enough to be delivered through a catheter and implanted directly into the heart, providing a safe alternative to conventional pacemakers without the complications associated with leads,” said Paul Schurmann, Managing Director at Houston Methodist Hospital.

“The device also allows us to automatically adjust pacing therapy based on a patient’s activity levels and another positive is the battery can last up to 10 years,” added Schurmann.

Micra TPS was designed with a unique feature that enables it to be permanently turned off so it can remain in the body and a new device can be implanted without risk of electrical interaction.—IANS

Image: YouTube

The post Normalise heart rate with world’s smallest pacemaker appeared first on KT10.

Rather than relying on human eyes, the new method scans a photo of a patch of skin to look for common and dangerous forms of skin cancer. The authors report their approach performs on par with board-certified dermatologists to distinguish two forms of cancer, keratinocyte carcinoma and malignant melanoma, from benign skin lesions.

The skin cancer diagnostic tool is based on a powerful type of machine learning that extracts information from images. The critical factor in achieving the accuracy and reliability required for a medical diagnostic tool is the large volume of training data the authors have used. This data consists of 129,450 skin images, and a label for each which indicates whether it contains a cancerous region. The machine is trained on this data to make the distinction automatically.

Part of what distinguishes this approach is that it can analyse images taken with a simple hand-held camera, such as the ones on most phones. This means a GP, or even a patient, could take a photo of a patch of skin that presents concerns and receive an indication as to whether it contains a cancerous region.

But translating this research result into a clinical product that can be used for practical diagnosis will require significant further development, documentation, and testing.

Like humans, machines can learn through experience

At its core, machine learning is a very simple idea. Instead of telling a computer how to solve a problem, you instead give it a set of examples from which to learn how to solve the problem itself.

As an example, the task of distinguishing images of cats from those of dogs seems relatively simple, to the point where a toddler can do it. However no human can write down a set of instructions for a computer to perform it accurately. Both sets of images contain furry animals in various poses, but no obvious distinction between the two sets is suitable to form the basis of a computer program to partition them.

Machine learning solves this problem by avoiding the need for a human to articulate a decision rule separating the two classes. Instead, under the machine learning approach, we simply provide labelled examples of both classes, and the system learns to make the distinction on its own.

Many problems in the interpretation of medical data can be cast in terms that machine learning can understand. The problem of identifying cancerous skin legions is very similar to that of separating pictures of cats and dogs. A set of examples of each class is provided, suitably labelled, and the machine learning system learns to distinguish between them.

Machine learning works a bit like your brain

In this recently published case, the machine learning system is based on a neural network, and is particularly well suited to processing images. A neural network is a form of machine learning that is loosely based on the architecture of the brain, as it is made up of a large, hierarchical collection of small, simple processing units.

Neural networks came to rise in the 1980s but faded from prominence as their performance failed to meet expectations. The revolution in machine learning, and the resurgence of neural networks, is due to rapid and recent advances in the collection and storage of large volumes of data, and the computing power required to process these.

Developments in computer graphics technology, developed largely for computer games, has given rise to hardware capable of processing thousands of images a second. Achieving reasonable results can still take millions of images and weeks of processing, as more than a billion factors may need to be fine-tuned, but computer graphics technology makes this achievable.

Machines are better than humans for some types of decisions

For medical and other decisions, humans have the edge when high-level analysis, or background knowledge, is required. Answering general questions about the content of an image (for example, “Is the tall girl wearing a red shirt?”, or “What kind of party is this?”) requires background knowledge about the types of objects humans are interested in.

In situations where the only information required to make the decision is in the signal itself, machine learning wins by a small margin. The first prominent example of this was in street sign recognition in images. Street signs are designed specifically to attract the attention of the human visual system, and yet the machine learning approach outperforms humans in both accuracy and reliability. This result has been repeated for all types of signals, however, from speech to medical records, and now to images of skin legions.

The value of the machine learning approach is not only that it is more accurate than humans, though. It is also cheaper, and more consistent in its diagnoses.

These factors combined will allow the deployment of machine learning based medical devices in GP’s offices, and in country and military hospitals. These systems will provide near instant access to information that would previously have required a scan and a trip to a specialist, thus allowing the doctor to react immediately to the information, rather than months down the track. This will greatly improve patient outcomes and reduce medical costs.

The Conversation

Picture source: Alamy

Picture used for illustrative purposes alone

The post Algorithms to identify skin cancers through photographs appeared first on KT10.

The potentially life-saving technology could soon be incorporated in a smart phone, the researchers said, an advance reminiscent of the diagnostic device wielded by Dr McCoy in the 1960s Star Trek sci-fi series.

Adapting a Google algorithm designed to distinguish between categories of objects based on images — telling a cat from a dog, for example — the Stanford team compiled a database of nearly 130,000 photos of skin disease.

To be effective, the software would need to tell a benign lesion from a malignant carcinoma.

Computer scientists “trained” the algorithm to combine visual processing with a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning.

From the very outset, the results were startlingly good.

“That’s when our thinking changed,” said senior author Sebastian Thrun, a professor in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“We said, ‘Look, this is not just a class project for students; this is an opportunity to do something great for humanity’.”

Fine-tuned with the help of physicians, the app they created performed just as well as a panel of 21 board-certified dermatologists, the researchers reported in the science journal Nature.

In the United States alone, more than five million new cases of skin cancer are diagnosed every year.

For melanoma detected in its earliest stages, the five-year survival rate is about 97 percent. If the disease is uncovered only later, that drops to about 14 percent.

Dermatologists inspect skin for signs of cancer, relying on their training and experience.

If a lesion is spotted, the next step is typically a closer look with a hand-held microscope called a dermatoscope.

If doubt remains, the final phase of diagnosis is a biopsy — taking a skin sample to be tested in a lab.

The images used in the new app — representing over 2,000 different skin diseases — were gathered from the internet and vetted by dermatologists.

“There’s no huge dataset of skin cancer, so we had to make our own,” said Brett Kuprel, co-author and Stanford graduate student.

In a final contest, the app was pitched against 21 dermatologists to identify cancerous and non-cancerous lesions in over 370 images.

Human and machine performed equally well.

The next step is to create a smart phone version, the researchers said.

“Everyone has a supercomputer in their pockets with a number of sensors in it, including a camera,” noted co-lead author Andre Esteva, also a graduate student.

A smart phone app of this kind “might enable effective, easy and low-cost medical assessments of more individuals than is possible with existing medical-care systems,” Sancy Leachman of Oregon Health and Science University and Glenn Merlino of the US National Cancer Institute wrote in a comment also published in Nature.

“Star Trek presented a vision of the future in which (McCoy) used a portable diagnostic device known as a tricorder, to assess the medical condition of Captain James Kirk and other Enterprise crew members.

“Although fanciful then, machines capable of the non-invasive diagnosis of human disease are becoming a reality,” they added.—AFP

Image: Alamy

The post Software as good as doctors at diagnosing skin cancer appeared first on KT10.