A silver-based compound that could stop cancer from spreading
New research indicates that a silver- based compound is able to tackle the energy centre (the mitochondria) of cancer cells, preventing them from growing and spreading. The compound still needs to go to extensive clinical trials before it can become available as a chemotherapeutic agent. However the findings pave the way for a new chemotherapeutic drug that could be more effective and less toxic, with fewer side effects. http://www.inkl.com/newsletters/morning-edition/news/novel-silver-compounds-offer-a-potential-cancer-treatment-breakthrough?
The artificial heart is made by a French company called Carmat, and is designed for people with end-stage biventricular heart failure. That’s when both of the heart’s ventricles—chambers near the bottom of the heart that pull in and push out blood between the lungs and the rest of the body—are too weak to carry out their function.It’s been approved as a temporary replacement while patients wait for donor hearts, and is estimated to last about five years.Carmat’s artificial heart will launch commercially in Germany and France in the second quarter of this year. https://singularityhub.com/2021/01/20/this-artificial-heart-will-soon-be-on-the-market-in-europe
Australian company Microbio has been awarded a Federal Government Accelerating Commercialisation Grant to commercialise a new diagnostic assay to rapidly identify 26 of the most common pathogens that cause bloodstream infections and sepsis. The InfectID-Blood Stream Infection (BSI) diagnostic
assay is a real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) identifies the
pathogen causing the infection in about two hours to enable patients to be
treated with targeted antimicrobials in a timely manner. Sepsis kills around 11 million people around the world
each year. | https://microbio.com.au/news-and-events/
DNA has been the predominant information storage medium for biology and holds great promise as a next-generation high-density data medium in the digital era.Researchers from Columbia University have demonstrated a new approach that can directly convert digital electronic signals into genetic data stored in the genomes of living cells. That could lead to a host of applications both for data storage and beyond, says Harris Wang, who led the research published in Nature Chemical Biology.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-020-00711-4
