I'll avoid specifics: I don't want to put someone "on blast."
Fundamentally it was a talk about a possible therapeutic treatment. The system was a novel way to deliver a therapy that was risky, but held great promise. Clinical trials were a decade away, assuming research validated its promise.
I thought it was neat and innovative.
2/n #AcademicChatter
Maybe the most impactful talk I've seen in the last few years was a simple weekly talk by a dept post-doc.
The article I just shared (https://fediscience.org/@MarkHanson/110489681649296930) reminded me of this talk... thinking about science exploration...
What was special? I asked a question that got laughed at by the speaker and room. I've wondered ever since whether that was because I was just ignorant? Or was everyone else just creatively restrained? I still don't know the answer... 1/n
'There are 14 oncology medicines listed “in shortage” by US regulators, including the generic chemotherapy drugs cisplatin and carboplatin, which are first-line treatments for many common types of cancer.'
https://www.ft.com/content/9225ccd6-df7f-4221-99eb-7ff7142e89f1
As with organ transplants, stem cells trigger an immune response when used in medical treatments, potentially leading to rejection of the cells.
To prevent this, Sana Biotechnology scientists have developed stem cells with removed HLA markers that survived uninhibited in rhesus macaques for months.
This opens up whole new prospects for medical treatment of organs and tissues.
#Medicine #Science #Biotech #Biotechnology #StemCell #StemCells #HLA #Biology #Scicomm
'The importance of this work was also stressed by Teichmann. “This first Human Cell Atlas of early pregnancy is going to transform our understanding of healthy development. It will also shed light on disorders of pregnancy.”
Over in the bad place, Elon Musk this week re-platformed a Unite the Right nazi and a white supremacist who promotes accelerationism and says we should celebrate mass murderers like Dylann Roof and Brenton Tarrant. This comes amid an “unprecedented” rise in hate speech, and it’s creating a national security crisis that no one is prepared to address.
I wrote about this — and more: https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/elon-musk-allows-domestic-extremists
That is why I am chuffed to introduce our most recent work, about the evolution of sleep in the Drosophila genus. Non peer-reviewed pre print available on biorXiv. Let me tell you what we did and what we found. 6/24
Evolution is one of the great mysteries of sleep. Why do some animals require 20 h, while others can cope with 1? Whatever sleep function is, how can it be accomplished in 10 hours in one season and 40 minutes in another, as it happens in migratory birds? We won't really understand what sleep is and what it does if we keep thinking about it in an anthropocentric way. We need to look at it from the evolutionary standpoint and only then we will be able to grasp what its role in nature is. 5/24
For brain researchers who are more genetically/molecularly/cellularly inclined ...
What are you most excited about along a timeline of the next next 10-20 years or so? Is it, say, the ability to manipulate DNA in living creatures (eg CRISPR), leveraging the immune system to tackle disease via antibody based therapies (like the new Alzheimer's drugs), cell type atlases, or something else altogether?
Grad students and postdocs, come present your neuroscience research at @HHMIJanelia
from Nov 5-10 (before SfN, we're near DC!) All model organisms welcome, all ideas/work welcome 🐭🐟🪰🪱🐦🐒
Apply by July 12 here: https://www.janelia.org/you-janelia/conferences/junior-scientist-workshop-on-mechanistic-cognitive-neuroscience-2
(fully funded: travel + housing + meals covered by HHMI!)
19.8 million deaths from COVID 19 averted during the first year of vaccinations.
#COVID #covid19 #vaccines #vaccine #vaccinessavelives #Coronavirus
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00320-6/fulltext
'Meanwhile, a large cache of gene variants thought to be unique to humans, because they are found in Homo sapiens but not in the archaic human relatives called Neanderthals and Denisovans, has turned out to be widespread across primates. Almost two-thirds of the variants thought to be solely human were present in at least one other primate species, and more than half were found in two or more.'
"Our investigation reveals that the fetal HSCs respond to T. gondii infection with virulence-dependent changes in proliferation, self-renewal potential, and lineage output. Furthermore, maternal IFNγ crosses the fetal–maternal interface, where it is perceived by fetal HSCs."
'It is instructive to recall (as Davis notes) the legendary six-word short story—“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”—attributed by the literary agent Peter Miller to Ernest Hemingway. Miller claimed that Hemingway won a bet from his fellow writers on the strength of the tale. Arthur C. Clarke wrote to a friend that he could not “think of it without crying.”
(via The Browser)
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-art-of-compression?ref=thebrowser.com
'On the assumption that a human SNP with commonly observed counterparts in primates probably doesn’t cause disease, Farh exonerated many human variants. His team also used the “benign” primate SNPs to train a neural network, called Primate AI-3D. With AlphaFold, a protein-structure prediction tool based on artificial intelligence (AI), as its scaffold, his program builds 3D models of each protein. Based on the benign SNPs, it identifies regions where changes to the protein’s structure would not disrupt its function. Conversely, changes in other regions were more likely to cause problems.'
If people want to share posts from #Evol2023 on other social networks:
https://ecoevo.social/tags/evol2023 for all the posts with the tag
https://ecoevo.social/tags/evol2023.rss for an RSS feed of all the posts
Or you can click on the ... on a post and then choose to share a link to the post or embed it.
Thanks to all the work the organizers and speakers put into this, and see many of you in New Mexico later this month! https://www.evolutionmeetings.org/
[This ends my rapid set of posting on this; safe to unmute for now]
Chromatin-associated condensates dysregulation in mendelian disorders
Università di Trento
#EU-funded #PhD project to address the contribution of #chromatin #condensates to define of the #genome architecture and nuclear #mechanobiology
See the full job description on jobRxiv: https://jobrxiv.org/job/universita-di-trento-27778-chromatin-associated-condensa...
https://jobrxiv.org/job/universita-di-trento-27778-chromatin-associated-condensates-dysregulation-in-mendelian-disorders/?feed_id=47152
'Além de oportunidades para o desenvolvimento das carreiras científicas, faltam também posições especializadas de apoio à investigação, tais como técnicos laboratoriais, gestores de ciência e tecnologia ou de comunicação de ciência. Estes profissionais são peças fundamentais nas atividades de investigação e desenvolvimento do século XXI.'
'We find that stromal and hematopoietic cells in the mouse thymus express the vitamin D receptor (Vdr) and Cyp27b1, the enzyme that produces hormonal 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25D). Treatment of cultured thymic slices with 1,25D enhances expression of the critical medullary thymic epithelial cell transcription factor autoimmune regulator (Aire), its colocalization with the Vdr, and enhances tissue-restricted Ag gene expression.'
'The cGAS-STING pathway has long been recognized as playing a crucial role in immune surveillance and tumor suppression. Here, we show that when the pathway is activated in a cancer-cell-autonomous response manner, it confers drug resistance.'
https://www.cell.com/cell-chemical-biology/fulltext/S2451-9456(23)00141-1
I've worked on all of science, from B cells to T cells.
https://fellowsherpa.com