Tag: brain

New Study Might Lead to New Therapeutic Approach for Treating Alzheimer’s Disease

In a fresh approach, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, have aimed at treating Alzheimer’s disease using new technology. The approach involves focussing on microglia, a type of cell that stabilises the brain by getting rid of damaged neurons and proteins that are often associated with dementia and other brain illnesses. While the changes in these cells have been linked to Alzheimer’s disease, they remain to be understudied. Researchers have now used a new CRISPR technology that enables them to control these microglia cells. This, according to the team, can lead to a new approach to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

In the brain, ordinary immune cells cannot get through the blood-brain barrier. This is where microglia cells come into play. They act as the immune system of the brain and help flush out the waste and toxins while keeping the neurons functioning properly. When these microglia cells begin to lose their way, it results in brain inflammation and can damage the neurons and their networks.

The microglia cells can even end up removing the synapses between neurons under certain conditions. This process is a normal part of brain development in childhood and adolescent years. But, in adults, this can lead to disastrous effects on the brain.

The team, led by Martin Kampmann, PhD, geared up to detect the genes that were responsible for specific states of the microglial activity. With this, they could switch the genes on and off and put the dislodged cells back in their place.

They made microglia cells through stem cells donated by human volunteers and confirmed that they functioned like their ordinary human counterparts. The team then set out to develop a new platform that combines a form of CRISPR and enables the researchers to switch individual genes on and off.

With this, the team was able to zero in on the genes that were responsible for the cell’s ability to survive and proliferate. The genes also impacted how actively a cell produces inflammatory substances and the aggression with which a cell prunes synapses. The detection of the type of genes helped the researchers successfully rest them and convert the disease-ridden cell into a healthy ones.

“Our study provides a blueprint for a new approach to treatment,” he said. “It’s a bit of a holy grail,” said Kampmann. He is the senior author of the study published in Nature Neuroscience.

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Latest Melanoma Brain Metastasis Study Could Lead to New Therapies, Unearth Cause Behind Tumour in Brain

Despite some immunotherapies been proven to be effective in treating melanoma brain metastases, researchers remain clueless about the reason behind the tumour’s spread to the brain. Now, through an extensive study of the cells inside melanoma brain metastases, researchers have unravelled details about the condition which could lead to the development of new therapies.

Melanoma is a type of skin cancer and brain metastasis is a condition that occurs when cancer spreads from the original site to the brain. Brain metastasis is behind most cancer-related deaths and most of the cases have been recorded with advanced melanoma.

In the study, published in Cell, researchers from the Columbia University Irving Medical Center began by sourcing frozen metastatic tumours from dozens of melanoma patients. “Such studies are typically performed on fresh brain samples, which are in short supply, drastically limiting the number of tumours that can be analysed. In contrast, we have many frozen melanoma samples in our tissue bank,” said study leader Benjamin Izar, MD, PhD, and assistant professor of medicine at the university.

Izar added that the technique allowed them to see the biology of the tumour and its microenvironment by helping them analyse tissues from patients who were not treated. After analysing genes in more than 1,00,000 individual cells, the researchers have noted that melanoma brain metastases were more chromosomally unstable than melanoma metastases in other parts of the body.

According to Johannes C. Melms, MD, a molecular postdoctoral fellow in the Izar lab and one of the study’s first authors, the chromosomal instability process triggers signalling pathways that end up facilitating the spread of cells and suppressing the immune system.

“Several experimental drugs that reduce chromosomal instability are going to be tested in humans soon. We now have a rationale to evaluate these drugs in patients with melanoma metastases in the brain,” said Melms.

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Neuroscientists Unravel Link Between Individual Differences in Brain Anatomy and ASD Symptoms

Making use of artificial intelligence, a team of scientists from the Boston College have shed light on the differences in the behaviour of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and its link with neuroanatomy. Autism or ASD is a complicated condition that is characterised by difficulties with communication and behaviour including problems with social interaction, and restricted and repetitive patterns in interests and activities. The condition affects people differently, both in terms of neuroanatomy and symptoms. Studies have earlier suggested that there might be no single set of neuroanatomical correlation that is common in all autistic people.

Explaining the findings of the new report published in the journal Science, co-author of the study and a Boston College post-doctoral researcher, Aidas Aglinskas said, “We found that different people with ASD can have different brain areas affected, and thanks to the AI-simulated brains, we were able to identify which specific brain regions vary among ASD individuals.”

Aglinskas added that they separated ASD-related variation from the unrelated variation that helped unravel links between individual differences in brain anatomy and symptoms. The team of scientists has studied magnetic resonance imaging data of over 1,000 people with autism using artificial intelligence (AI). They, then, compared the images to AI-generated simulations that showed how the brains would look if they had not been affected by ASD.

According to Aglinskas, ASD-specific neural alterations in the brain are hard to identify. He added that brains are different due to many factors including genetic variations, and not due to ASD. However, AI helped the team tackle this problem and identify neural pathways specifically affected by ASD.

The neuroscientists explored the links between ASD-specific features of brain anatomy and the symptoms. Aglinskas has highlighted that despite observing MRI data from 1103 participants, they could not group individuals into categorical subtypes. But, he also stressed the possibility of finding subtypes with other kinds of brain measurement like functional imaging.

Now, according to Boston College Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, Stefano Anzellotti, the team is aiming at using AI tools to expand the research beyond brain structure and better understand ASD diagnosis.

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Scientists Develop New Compound That May Help Fight Elusive Cancer Types

Facebook, Google, Other Top Tech Firms Warn Indian Cybersecurity Rules May Create an Environment of Fear



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MIT Researchers Believe Targeting Treatments to This Brain Circuit May Reverse Memory Decline

As we age, the retention power of our memory often degrades. This makes performing everyday tasks difficult. It gets very difficult to remember things. For instance, elderly people could forget by afternoon what they ate for breakfast. They may even find it difficult to recall a conversation they had with someone. One key brain region linked to this type of memory is the anterior thalamus, which is primarily involved in the recollection of our surroundings and how to navigate them. The thalamus is an egg-shaped structure in the middle of the brain whose primary function is to relay incoming sensory information — such as hearing, taste, sight, and touch — from the body to the brain. However, it does not relay information related to smell.

In a recent study on mice, researchers have identified a circuit in the anterior thalamus that is key to remembering how to navigate a maze. They found that this circuit is usually impaired in older mice. But if this circuit’s activity is enhanced, it greatly improves the ability of the mice to run the maze correctly.

The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) focussed on this region of the brain in their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and say this could be an ideal target for treatments to reverse memory loss in elderly people.

They say if a non-invasive or minimally invasive technology is developed to target treatments in this part of the human brain, it could offer a way to help prevent age-related memory loss.

Guoping Feng, senior author of the study, said that instead of influencing the prefrontal cortex, which has many distinct roles, they want to uncover more specific and druggable targets in this area by studying how the thalamus affects the cortical output.

An advantage of targeting the thalamus for treatments is that it limits possible disturbances to other parts of the brain.

We can trigger anxiety-related behaviour by directly activating neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex, but this will not happen with AV (anteroventral) activation, said Ying Zhang, lead author of the study.

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Horizon Zero Dawn: Netflix Series Adaptation Reportedly in the Works

Andor, Star Wars Prequel Series, to Premiere on Disney+ Hotstar in August, Teaser Trailer Released



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