Two very different roles were reported for the protein REST last week. In adults, REST activation appeared to extend lifespan by reducing overall brain activity. Principal investigator Bruce Yankner, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging, told BioWorld MedTech that in postmortem brain samples of individuals who had had no cognitive impairments at the time of their death, his team found "a correlation between down-regulation of excitation and extended longevity."
Australian scientists have discovered promising new candidate analgesic molecules derived from a Penicillium fungus, which represents a promising resource for the development of safer new analgesics, they reported in the Oct. 14, 2019, edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Radiologists review thousands of images a day. The hope is that artificial intelligence (AI) applications will become useful soon to verify diagnoses, prioritize queued images and even to offer a level of detection and measurement that aren't feasible for humans. One of the latest efforts on this front is by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and the University of California at Berkeley.
Researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania have developed an algorithm to better personalize immunotherapy treatment. The algorithm works by examining neoantigen quality, not just their quantity. Neoantigens are proteins that are the result of genetic mutations in a tumor.