Lifeboat Foundation

Cellular research indicates that neuropilin-1 plays a crucial role in pain signaling, presenting a potential pathway for developing or repurposing treatments to manage chronic pain.

Researchers at the NYU Pain Research Center have identified a novel receptor for nerve growth factor (NGF) that plays a critical role in pain signaling, despite being unable to signal independently. These findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, could pave the way for new treatments for arthritis, inflammatory pain, and cancer pain—addressing the limitations of previous therapies that failed in clinical trials due to side effects.

“Nerve growth factor is unusual because it’s one of the few patient-validated targets for pain,” said Nigel Bunnett, professor and chair of the Department of Molecular Pathobiology at NYU College of Dentistry and the study’s senior author. “We wanted to think of a way of circumventing side effects in an effort to find safer, non-opioid therapies for arthritis and other forms of chronic pain.”

A new review by researchers from Oxford Population Health and the University of Iceland, published in Nature Aging, reveals how your DNA shapes reproductive health, fertility, and even life expectancy.

Led by researchers from the University of Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and the University of Iceland, the review explores how genetic variations can explain differences in reproductive health and longevity.

The study provides the most comprehensive review of male and female genetic discoveries of reproductive traits to date, and provides new insights into how our DNA affects when we have children, the timing of menopause, and even how that is connected to how long we live.

Demographers estimate that in premodern societies, out of every 1,000 babies born, about 300 died before reaching their first birthday. Most of those infants succumbed to infectious diseases and malnutrition.

By 1900, infant mortality rates had fallen to approximately 140 per 1,000 live births in modernizing countries, such as the United Kingdom and the United States. Infant mortality rates in the two countries continued to fall to about 56 per 1,000 live births in 1935 and down to about 30 per 1,000 live births by 1950. In 2017, the UK and U.S. infant mortality rates were, respectively, 3.8 and 5.9 per 1,000 live births. Since 1900, in other words, infant mortality in those two countries has fallen by more than 95 percent.

In the past few decades, infant mortality rates have been falling steeply in the rest of the world. The World Health Organization estimates that the global infant mortality rate was just under 160 per 1,000 live births in 1950. By 1990, the agency reports that the global infant mortality rate had dropped to 64.8 per 1,000 live births. In 2017, the global infant mortality rate was down to 29.4 per 1,000 live births, about the level of the United Kingdom and the United States in 1950.

There are various studies that have explored the role of the body’s circadian rhythm in regulating immune activity. Disruptions in the circadian rhythms exacerbate inflammation. Researchers from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) University of Medicine and Health Sciences have previously studied how the immune cells called macrophages are affected without an internal body clock. Now, new research by RCSI describes how macrophages work differently at various times of day and could pave the way for time-targeted treatments for inflammatory diseases. The research also illuminates a key role for mitochondria in driving daily changes in immune activity.

The findings are published in The FASEB Journal in an article titled, “Time-of-day control of mitochondria regulates NLRP3 inflammasome activation in macrophages.”

Macrophages release interleukin-1 (IL-1) cytokines in response to inflammatory stimuli, and the NLRP3 inflammasome mediates IL-1-family cytokine release via pyroptosis. Mitochondria play a multifaceted role regulating NLRP3 inflammasome activity. However, whether the macrophage clock regulates the NLRP3 inflammasome via mitochondrial control remains unclear.

Scientists plan to borrow nature’s tools to develop and study fungal compounds further, which could lead to the development of new drugs.

An investigational therapy is demonstrating preclinical promise against non-Hodgkin lymphoma by boosting natural killer cells and efficiently annihilating the malignancy without toxicity to the patient, a team of cancer biologists in France has found.

The emerging therapy is for B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the most common form of lymphoma worldwide. Current therapies target the CD20⁺ protein on the surface of cancerous B cells but with limited efficacy. A newly developed antibody-based molecule targets B-non-Hodgkin lymphoma by engaging natural killer cells, warriors of the immune system. The experimental therapeutic is expected to help patients whose disease rebounds and is difficult to treat.

“Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is the most frequent hematological malignancy in humans, comprising nearly 3% of all cancer diagnoses and oncology-related mortalities,” writes Dr. Olivier Demaria, lead author of the research published in Science Immunology.

Reliably measuring the polarization state of light is crucial for various technological applications, ranging from optical communication to biomedical imaging. Yet conventional polarimeters are made of bulky components, which makes them difficult to reduce in size and limits their widespread adoption.

Researchers at the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics (SITP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutes recently developed an on-chip full-Stokes polarimeter that could be easier to deploy on a large scale. Their device, presented in a paper in Nature Electronics, is based on optoelectronic polarization eigenvectors, mathematical equations that represent the linear relationship between the incident Stokes vector and a detector’s photocurrent.

“This work was driven by the growing demand for compact, high-performance polarization analysis devices in optoelectronics,” Jing Zhou, corresponding author of the paper, told Phys.org. “Traditional polarimeters, which rely on discrete bulky optical components, present significant challenges to miniaturization and limit their broader applicability. Our main goal is to develop an on-chip solution capable of direct electrical readout to reconstruct full-Stokes polarization states.”

Scientists used AI to estimate the brain age of 739 healthy seniors and found that lifestyle and health conditions impact brain aging.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have used an AI tool to estimate the biological age of brains from MRI scans of 70-year-olds. Their analysis revealed that factors harmful to vascular health, such as inflammation and high blood sugar levels, are linked to older-looking brains, while a healthy lifestyle was associated with younger-looking brains. These findings were published today (December 20) in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.

Leveraging AI to determine brain age.

Research published in The American Journal of Human Genetics has identified a previously unknown genetic link to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The study found that variants in the DDX53 gene contribute to ASD, providing new insights into the genetic underpinnings of the condition.

ASD, which affects more males than females, encompasses a group of neurodevelopmental conditions that result in challenges related to communication, social understanding and behavior. While DDX53, located on the X chromosome, is known to play a role in brain development and function, it was not previously definitively associated with autism.

In the study, researchers from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Canada and the Istituto Giannina Gaslini in Italy clinically tested 10 individuals with ASD from eight different families and found that variants in the DDX53 gene were maternally inherited and present in these individuals. Notably, the majority were male, highlighting the gene’s potential role in the male predominance observed in ASD.