Three promising medical breakthroughs were in the news this week: Reseachers announced that small membrane bubbles that serve as the body’s “message in a bottle” can be loaded with medicines and targeted to specific tissues, potentially transforming treatment for cancer and other diseases; molecular markers have been identified that allow Alzheimer’s disease to be detected as much as 20 years before the onset; and a bio-inspired haptic technology developed in the UK could help patients who have lost sensitivity in their hands and fingers and give a sense of feeling to robotics for medical surgery and nuclear decommissioning.
Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said have succeeded in delivering targeted cancer treatment via small membrane bubbles that cells in the human body use to communicate. A new study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering shows that the treatment reduces tumor growth and improves survival in mice.
When cells communicate, they send out small membrane bubbles known as extracellular vesicles which contain various signaling molecules. Interest in these tiny bubbles, sometimes referred to as the body’s ‘message in a bottle’, has increased in recent years as they could be used to deliver medicines.
“By attaching different antibodies to extracellular vesicles, we can target them to virtually any tissue and we can load them with other types of drugs as well,” says Oscar Wiklander, physician and researcher at the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and joint first author with Doste Mamand, researcher at the same department. “Therefore, the treatment has the potential to be used against other diseases and cancer types.”
The hope is that the new treatment will be more specific and effective in eliminating tumor cells without affecting healthy tissue, compared to current treatment strategies. The researchers plan to investigate whether different combinations of antibodies and drugs can further improve treatment.
Meanwhile, in what they said was a world first, researchers at Israel’s Hebrew University said they have discovered a distinct cellular pathway in the brain that indicates markers for future onset of Alzheimer’s disease, some 20 years before symptoms would be exhibited. This early detection could eventually lead to a treatment to prevent the degenerative disease.
The study -which was published in the peer-reviewed scientific publication Nature -shows that Alzheimer’s disease is not just a form of accelerated aging but follows a different cellular path, according to Prof. Naomi Habib, and PhD students Anael Cain and Gilad Green of Hebrew University, who led the team of researchers at Columbia, Harvard University, and Rush Medical Center in Chicago.
Now that research has found the “molecular markers,” said Prof. Habib, “we can predict if an individual is on the cellular path to healthier aging, or a path to Alzheimer’s. “We now believe we know what’s driving the disease, but we need to prove that changing the response would reverse that,” she said.
Using a data set from the prefrontal cortex of 437 aging brains, the researchers mapped 1.65 million brain cells and showed that these cellular changes — that start at least 20 years before the first signs of dementia — determine the fate of the aging brain and the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.
A new haptic system unveiled on September 11 by researchers at University College London promises to offer the “most natural” sensory feedback developed so far, reports The Financial Times. Speaking at the British Science Festival, the project leaders, Helge Wurdemann and Sara Adela Abad of UCL, told the audience their “bio-inspired haptic system” simulated sensations of touch with unrivalled sensitivity. While haptic technology has long existed, the system created by UCL scientists offers potential new medical, industrial and commercial applications. The soft fingertip device mimics sensation by stimulating touch receptors in human skin, using vibrations at different frequencies and strengths. Abad said the technology offers a way of “incorporating touch into our virtual social interactions” and could act as “a diagnostic tool” for patients who experience sensitivity loss.
In a clinical trial due to begin within three months at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, the device will be compared with conventional methods of assessing touch, reports the FT. In future, the technology could be used to treat people whose sense of touch has been damaged by disease or injury, Wurdemann said. The team is also exploring applications in robot-assisted surgery. Palpation — physically feeling a patient’s organs or tissues to assess their healthiness — could be enhanced by haptic feedback. “If cancerous tissue is embedded inside some other tissue or an organ so that you can’t see it, we can detect the softness of the tissue beneath the surface with a sensor and feed the information to the haptic device on the console,” Abad said. It could also have a role in nuclear decommissioning. In future, there could be consumer applications for social media, with the technology adapted to make a glove that people could wear to hold virtual hands on video calls across the world. The researchers are discussing with UCL Business, the university’s technology transfer subsidiary, how to commercialize the technology.
IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEK
TECHNOLOGY SOVEREIGNTY
France’s Probabl Welcomes New Investors
Probabl, a spin-off of French research center Inria that has been financing a global open source data science library called scikit-learn, an approach widely used for performing complex AI and machine learning tasks, announced new investors on September 12. The €5.5 million round was financed by 70 individuals through a specialist micro fund as well as two venture firms: Mozilla Ventures and Apertu Capital. The round was completed with support and funding from the French State through the French Tech Souveraineté Fund which is part of France 2030 investment plan managed on behalf of the French State by Bpifrance.The influx funds will help Probabl execute on its business plan in the runup to a full equity round in early 2024, CEO Yann Lechelle, serial entrepreneur said in an interview with The Innovator.
Probabl has hired the entire team of French tech company Mnemotix and started offering professional services to help companies adopt its technology.
Scikit-learn, Probabl’s capstone software, is a Python library, which is widely used by machine learning teams working on tabular and quantitative data. The approach specializes in the resolution of a large range of problems, notably classification, regression, regroupment, and dimension reduction. Scikit-learn can handle diverse algorithms, ranging from traditional statistics models to neural networks.Its motto is “own your data science” . We need to take advantage of open source to minimize dependencies on monolithic, proprietary and captive technologies,” says Lechelle. “The U.S. enjoys near supremacy when it comes to chips, Cloud and software. This isn’t great for Europe or any other nation for that matter. If you don’t control your technological infrastructure, you have no sovereignty.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
OpenAI Unveils New ChatGPT That It Says Can Reason
OpenAI unveiled a new version of ChatGPT on September 12 that it said could “reason” through tasks involving math, coding and science. The new technology is part of a wider effort to build AI that can reason through complex tasks. Companies like Google and Meta are building similar technologies, while Microsoft and its subsidiary GitHub are working to incorporate OpenAI’s new system into their products. The goal is to build systems that can carefully and logically solve a problem through a series of discrete steps, each one building on the next, similar to how humans reason. These technologies could be particularly useful to computer programmers who use A.I. systems to write code. OpenAI said its new technology could also help physicists generate complicated mathematical formulas and assist health care researchers in their experiments.
Taiwan Uses AI To Predict Typhoon Paths
As tropical storm Bebinca was barreling towards waters off northern Taiwan September 13, gathering strength into a possible typhoon, weather forecasters in Taipei tested a new and, so far, successful method to help track its path – artificial intelligence (AI), reports Reuters. AI-generated forecasts have so far outperformed traditional methods in predicting typhoon tracks.
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