Scientists have discovered a way to blow up the "gates" leading to the heart of cancerous tumors, opening them to drug treatment.
This strategy works by setting off a "time bomb" on the cells lining the blood vessels associated with the tumor.
These vessels control access to tumor tissue, and until they are penetrated, immune cells cannot easily enter the tumor to fight it.
In fact, the time bomb on the cells is this “death” receptor, called Fas (or CD95).
When activated by the appropriate antibody, it leads to programmed cell death.
Until recently, Fas was “undervalued in cancer immunotherapy,” say scientists at the University of California, Davis (UCD) and Indiana University.
In recent experiments using mouse models and human cell lines, scientists at University College Dublin were finally able to identify specific antibodies that effectively trigger self-destruction when bound to Fas receptors.
An antibody that binds to a specific part of the death receptor is the key to killing the cell.
Once this immune gate is opened, other cancer treatments, such as CAR-T, can reach more of their targets, which are often clustered together and hidden within the tumor.
CAR-T therapy works by programming a patient's own white blood cells, called T cells, to bind to and attack certain types of cancer cells.
However, CAR-T has only been approved to treat blood cancers, where it has failed to provide consistent success against solid tumors.
In recent experiments, scientists developed two engineered antibodies that were “highly effective” in binding to Fas receptors and causing cells to self-explode. This has been practical in ovarian cancer models and many other cancer cell lines tested in the laboratory.
If CAR-T cells can one day be engineered to target these receptor parts in neighboring cells as well, the treatment could be more effective against tumors.
The study was published in the journal Cell Death & Differentiation.
Revealing the face of an ancient Egyptian mummy with a huge, puzzling brain!
Researchers have revealed the face of an ancient Egyptian mummy with an abnormally large brain, for the first time in 2,300 years.
The mummy belongs to a young man from the ancient Egyptian elite, who was only 14 years old when he died.
Menerides was the scion of a sacred family, and before his death, was destined to inherit from his father, Inaros, a priest of the Egyptian fertility god, Min.
But he died at the age of approximately fourteen, and his mummified remains were buried in the Akhmim cemetery in Upper Egypt, where the mummy was found in 1925.
Now, scientists trying to reconstruct the face have diagnosed a rare medical condition in the young man.
Cicero Moraes, the lead author of the study, says that Menerdes suffered from megaloblastic encephalopathy, a disorder characterized by abnormally large brain size.
He said: "I noticed that the coffin appears to be of a person older than the mummy, but nevertheless, the head occupies almost its entire length. Therefore, the death mask was rotated, otherwise the coffin would not have been able to be closed."
Menerdis' figure was reconstructed using a digital model of his skull, to which soft tissue was added, with the process guided by data from living people, including the relevant age range.
“It is the face of an innocent young man,” said Moraes, the Brazilian graphics expert. “For thousands of years, eyes have been watching the inhabitants of the present who are searching for answers about their past.”
The name of the mummy and his father was known from the inscription on the coffin. Cicero said the teenager would have had a golden life.
He continued: "It is clear that his life was full of material and spiritual abundance, because his father was part of the religious elite."
Despite his diagnosis, the cause of his death remains a mystery.
Encephalopathy can be benign, but it can also cause developmental delays, intellectual disability, seizures, and even paralysis.
Menerdis' remains are in the collection of the Field Museum of Chicago.
Moraes and his co-authors, Francesco Maria Galassi and Michael Habicht, are awaiting formal academic status before publishing their study.
A joint Russian-Indonesian project to extract hydrogel from food waste for “water purification”
Scientists at the Russian University of Tomsk, in cooperation with their colleagues from the Indonesian University of Brawijaya, were able to obtain a hydrogel from food waste that is suitable for purifying natural water from heavy metals.
“The unique advantage of our method is the use of an integrated approach that includes ultrasonic processing,” says Antonio Di Martino, assistant professor at the Faculty of Chemical and Biomedical Process Research at Tomsk Technical University. “Ultrasonic extraction is an unconventional way to improve extraction processes. It has several advantages over traditional processes.” "This method requires lower temperatures, passes faster and allows a large amount of polysaccharide to be obtained in the form of a dry powder."
The researchers mixed the resulting polysaccharide extract with a stabilizer to obtain a hydrogel with high porosity, allowing it to absorb a lot of water over a large area. Its main advantage is the high ability to absorb heavy metals: chromium, lead, cadmium, mercury and cobalt. This hydrogel can also be easily separated from water by simple drying, allowing it to be used in filters and water purification units.
It should be noted that the hydrogel currently used is made from synthetic materials. But in this method, scientists used alternative raw materials - bananas, apples and oranges to extract polysaccharides. A similar technology was tested in Indonesia within the framework of a joint project between Tomsk University and Indonesian scientists, based on sugars from other fruits - mango and papaya. It turned out that the difference in the amount of pectin, cellulose and starch affects the structure and properties of the hydrogel. Therefore, researchers are trying to develop technology to extract harmful impurities from it for reuse.
The next stage of the project includes studying the ability of the hydrogel to remove various heavy metals from water - first on model mixtures, and then on real samples of polluted water in the Tomsk region and the Java region in Indonesia.