Protai Adds $12 Million to Seed Round – Bringing the Total to $20 Million – to Build an Oncology Drug Discovery Pipeline
Since its initial funding last year, Protai has launched collaborations with leading hospitals, opened a wet lab and expanded its advisory board with world-renowned oncology experts, including MD Anderson’s CSO, Prof. Giulio Draetta
Protai, a proteomics and AI-powered drug discovery startup revolutionizing the way new drugs are discovered, today announced that it has added $12 million to its seed round, bringing the total amount to $20M. The round includes existing investors Grove Ventures and Pitango HealthTech and was joined by Copenhagen-based Maj Invest Equity Fund. The additional funding will be used to build Protai...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - March 23, 2023 Category: Information Technology Authors: Healthcare IT News Tags: AI/Machine Learning Health IT Company Healthcare IT Artificial Intelligence Bradley J. Monk Data Acquisition Dr. Jurgen Moll Dr. Sharon Shacham Drug Discovery Eran Seger Funda Meric-Bernstam Genomic Biomarkers Giulio Draetta Grov Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, March 20th 2023
This study also provides the potential for de novo generation of complex organs in vivo.
T Cells May Play a Role in the Brain Inflammation Characteristic of Neurodegenerative Conditions
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2023/03/t-cells-may-play-a-role-in-the-brain-inflammation-characteristic-of-neurodegenerative-conditions/
Alzheimer's disease, and other forms of neurodegenerative condition, are characterized by chronic inflammation in brain tissue. Unresolved inflammatory signaling is disruptive of tissue structure and function. Here, researchers provide evidence for T cells to become involved in thi...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 19, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Microglia Packed Full of Lipofuscin are Harmful in the Aging Brain
In this study we found - in aged animals - that these microglia adopt a unique, dysfunctional state, which has a number of problematic impacts. For example, there is an increase in cellular stress and damage, an accumulation of fats and iron, alterations to metabolic processes and an increase in production of molecules that overstimulate the immune response. Increasing evidence now suggests that the accumulation of autofluorescent microglia contributes to diseases of ageing and neurodegeneration. If these sub-populations of microglia are highly inflammatory and damaging to the brain, then targeting them could be a new stra...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 15, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Slideshow: Circles of Life
Every year on March 14, many people eat pie in honor of Pi Day. Mathematically speaking, pi (π) is the ratio of a circle’s circumference (the distance around the outside) to its diameter (the length from one side of the circle to the other, straight through the center). That means if you divide the circumference of any circle by its diameter, the solution will always be pi, which is roughly 3.14—hence March 14, or 3/14. But pi is an irrational number, which means that the numbers after the decimal point never end. With the help of computers, mathematicians have determined trillions of digits of pi.
To celebrate Pi ...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - March 14, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Chrissa Chverchko Tags: Cells Molecular Structures Cellular Imaging Cool Images Microbes Research Organisms Source Type: blogs
Loss of Odor Discrimination is the Earliest Age-Related Loss of Olfaction
Aspects of the sense of smell are some of the earlier casualties of central nervous system aging. Assessments of age-related olfactory dysfunction can provide some insight into the road to neurodegenerative conditions, as the same underlying mechanisms are at work. Researchers here assessed different aspects of olfaction in aging mice, finding that odor discrimination is first loss. Given the data provided to show that upregulation of NAD+ can slow this loss, we might think that mitochondrial dysfunction is an important contributing mechanism in this form of neurodegeneration.
Olfactory dysfunction is a prevalent...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 14, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, March 13th 2023
In this study, we report the extensive and progressive accumulation of misfolded proteins during natural aging/senescence in different models, in the absence of disease. We coined the term age-ggregates to refer to this subset of proteins. Our findings demonstrate that age-ggregates exhibit the main characteristics of misfolded protein aggregates implicated in PMDs, including insolubility in detergents, protease-resistance, and staining with dyes specific for misfolded aggregates. Misfolded protein aggregates with these characteristics are thought to be implicated in some of today most prevalent diseases, including Alzheim...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 12, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Inhibiting the NLRP1 Inflammasome Reduces the Senescence-Associated Secretory Phenotype
A sizable portion of the chronic inflammation of aging is produced by the growing presence of senescent cells in tissues throughout the body. Senescent cells secrete a mix of pro-growth, pro-inflammatory signals (the senescence-associated secretory phenotype, SASP), useful when present in the short-term in the context of wound healing and suppression of cancer risk resulting from cell damage. When sustained over the long-term, however, this signaling becomes highly disruptive to tissue structure and function. The inflammatory mechanisms inside senescent cells that produce pro-inflammatory components of the SASP include the...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 8, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Extracellular Vesicles in Aging
Extracellular vesicles of varying size classes carry a sizable fraction of all cell signaling. These are membrane-wrapped collections of molecules, generated in various ways and under various circumstances by sources cells. When researchers discuss extracellular vesicles in the context of aging, this is really a discussion of cell signaling in general. In the context of aging, vesicles are perhaps a more interesting topic than cell signaling in general because they are readily harvested and delivered as a therapy. Initially, this is being used to recapitulate the effects of stem cell transplants, delivering vesicles harves...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 8, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, March 6th 2023
In this study, we develop a rFOXN1 fusion protein that contains the N-terminal of CCR9, FOXN1, and TAT. We show here that, when injected intravenously (i.v.) into aged mice, the rFOXN1 fusion protein can migrate into the thymus and enhance T cell generation in the thymus, resulting in increased number of peripheral T cells. Our results suggest that the rFOXN1 fusion protein has the potential to be used in preventing and treating T cell immunodeficiency in the older adult.
Increased miR-181a-5p Expression Improves Neural Stem Cell Activity, Learning, and Memory in Old Mice
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/20...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 5, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Whoops! AI might have invented 40000 new toxic nerve agents … but probably not
TL:DR – Software used to predict which chemicals in a database have potential as new medicines has been flipped as a warning demonstrating that the same system could be used to predict whether they are highly toxic.
Artificial intelligence, AI, machine learning, language models, neural networks, generative models, algorithms trained on big data. A lovely collection of buzzwords that have been littering grant proposals for years and are now emerging into the real world as apps and websites and citizen science projects. For chemists and pharmaceutical scientists, AI has been a tool to experiment with for a long time. ...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - March 4, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Artificial Intelligence Chemistry Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, February 27th 2023
This study tested the hypothesis that ischemic vascular repair in aging by Ang-(1-7) involves attenuation of myelopoietic potential in the bone marrow and decreased mobilization of inflammatory cells.
Young or Old male mice of age 3-4 and 22-24 months, respectively, received Ang-(1-7) for four weeks. Myelopoiesis was evaluated in the bone marrow (BM) cells by carrying out the colony forming unit (CFU-GM) assay followed by flow cytometry of monocyte-macrophages. Expression of pro-myelopoietic factors and alarmins in the hematopoietic progenitor-enriched BM cells was evaluated. Hindlimb ischemia (HLI) was induced by ...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 26, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Propelling Rare Disease Research for More Than 50 Years
Vials of samples from the NIGMS HGCR. Credit: Coriell Institute for Medical Research.
The year 2022 marked 50 years since the creation of the NIGMS Human Genetic Cell Repository (HGCR) at the Coriell Institute for Medical Research in Camden, New Jersey. The NIGMS HGCR consists of cell lines and DNA samples with a focus on those from people with rare, heritable diseases. “Many rare diseases now have treatments because of the samples in the NIGMS HGCR,” says Nahid Turan, Ph.D., Coriell’s chief biobanking officer and co-principal investigator of the NIGMS HGCR. She gives the example of a rare disease advocacy group wh...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - February 22, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Chrissa Chverchko Tags: Cells Genes Injury and Illness Diseases Genomics Scientific Process Source Type: blogs
Towards Ferrous Iron-Activated Senolytic Prodrugs to Clear Senescent Cells
Senescent cells accumulate with age throughout the body, and cause considerable disruption to tissue structure and function via their pro-inflammatory secretions. Clearing senescent cells is an important approach to rejuvenation and reversal of age-related disease, based on the impressive results produced in mice to date. One of the challenges inherent in the destruction of senescent cells is the variation shown in their biochemistry, depending on how they become senescent and on which tissue they reside in. Different treatments exhibit widely varying outcomes for different varieties of senescent cell, and those varieties ...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 21, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Thoughts on How to Help Advance Work on the Treatment of Aging
This article lists a variety of types of activity and project that might be undertaken to help to speed up the development of ways to treat aging as a medical condition. If you don't have a background in the life sciences, but nonetheless find human longevity a compelling topic, and would like to work in the field, what can you do? That is a good question, and often asked. There are many options that don't involve working as a scientist in a laboratory, though educating yourself about the science helps a great deal when it comes to picking the better options from the array of choices on the table.
Aging is a set o...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 21, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, February 20th 2023
In this study, researchers stimulate the ghrelin receptor using a suitable small molecule for much of the lifespan of mice, and observe the results. The overall extension of life span is a quarter of that produced by calorie restriction, and so we might draw some conclusions from that as to the relative importance of hunger in the benefits resulting from the practice of calorie restriction or fasting. Interestingly, the short term weight gains observed in mice given this ghrelin receptor agonist in the past don't appear in this long term study, in which the controls are the heaver animals. This is possibly because the rese...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 19, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
