Medical Breakthroughs, Research, and News

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More kidney hope

For First Time, Pig Kidneys Provide Life-Sustaining Organ Function in Human: Hope for 100,000 on Donor List

For the first time, genetically modified pig kidneys provided “life-sustaining kidney function” during the course of a planned seven-day clinical study—a first step in addressing the critical crisis worldwide of kidney donor organ shortage.

The University of Alabama’s pre-clinical human study at Birmingham also advances the science and promise of xenotransplantation as a therapy to potentially cure end-stage kidney disease—just as a human-to-human transplants can.

“It has been truly extraordinary to see the first-ever preclinical demonstration that appropriately modified pig kidneys can provide normal, life-sustaining kidney function in a human safely and be achieved using a standard immunosuppression regimen,” said UAB transplant surgeon scientist Jayme Locke, M.D., director of UAB’s Comprehensive Transplant Institute and lead author of the paper.

“The kidneys functioned remarkably over the course of this seven-day study,” she said. “We were able to gather additional safety and scientific information critical to our efforts to seek FDA clearance of a Phase I clinical trial in living humans and hopefully add a new, desperately needed solution to address an organ shortage crisis responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year.”

The peer-reviewed findings published last month in JAMA Surgery describes the pioneering pre-clinical human research performed on a recipient experiencing brain death by the Locke and Heersink School of Medicine team. It comes 19 months after last year’s groundbreaking peer reviewed UAB xenotransplant study in which genetically modified pig kidneys were successfully transplanted into a recipient after brain death.

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Serious question: would someone whose religion forbid pork take a pig kidney transplant if it was the only life saving choice?

[Kung Wu]

Serious question: would someone whose religion forbid pork take a pig kidney transplant if it was the only life saving choice?

If it was an Iraqi cleric needing the pig kidney there would be a Fatwah faster than fast explaining why it's okay.

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Some interesting research on bats that could lead to a healthier human down the road.

Bats Hold Vital Clues for Cancer Prevention as Scientists Study Their 'Extraordinary' Immunity

A new study shows that bats evolved to avoid cancer and the data may uncover how humans can treat or prevent viruses as well as cancer.

A rapid evolution in bats, the only winged mammal, may account for their “extraordinary” ability to both host and survive infections and even to avoid cancer—and that success is in their genes.

Bats are exceptional among mammals for not only their ability to fly but also their long lives, low cancer rates, and robust immune systems.

The ability of bats to tolerate viral infections may stem from unusual features of their innate immune response—and these characteristics may have implications for human health.

For example, by better understanding the mechanisms of the bat immune system that allow bats to tolerate viral infections, researchers may be better able to prevent disease outbreaks from animals to people.

Comparative genomic analyses of bats and cancer-susceptible mammals may eventually provide new information on the causes of cancer and the links between cancer and immunity. Studies of bats and other organisms complement studies based on mouse models; mice are more amenable than bats to experimental manipulation but exhibit fewer characteristics with implications for human disease.

In a paper published in Genome Biology and Evolution by Oxford University Press this week, researchers used the Oxford Nanopore Technologies long-read platform, and bat samples collected with help from the American Museum of Natural History in Belize, to sequence the genomes of two bat species—the Jamaican fruit bat and the Mesoamerican mustached bat.

The researchers at of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York carried out a comprehensive comparative genomic analysis with a diverse collection of bats and other mammals.

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Peanut and Food Allergies May Be Reversed with Compound Produced by Healthy Gut Bacteria

Why do we need fiber? it feeds the bacteria in our gut, which in turn produces something that could prevent food allergies and irritations such as those triggered by peanuts, a study this year showed.

A short-chain fatty acid called butyrate is produced by Clostridium bacteria in our stomach as they ferment fiber that reinforces the walls of the GI tract and protects against colon cancer, among other things.

In a mouse model, researchers at the University of Chicago used an oral solution of butyrate to stymie a life-threatening anaphylactic response in the allergic animals when they were exposed to peanuts.

Without enough fiber in the diet, humans can experience die-offs of these beneficial, butyrate-producing gut microbes. Too much eating of simple sugars and carbs instead makes room for harmful species, resulting in a condition known as “gut dysbiosis.”

Without butyrate, the gut lining can become permeable, and bits of food leak out of the GI tract and into circulation, triggering an anaphylactic response in one pattern of allergic reactions.

One of the ways to rapidly treat this has been a microbiome transplant, also known unpleasantly as a fecal biota transplant. But this has had mixed results in the lab, said Dr. Jeffery Hubbell, Ph.D., one of the project’s principal investigators.

“So we thought, why don’t we just deliver the metabolites like butyrate that a healthy microbiome produces?” he said in a news release.

Hubbell and his colleagues at the University of Chicago did just that in a mouse model in early 2023, but the solution is vile to taste and smell, so a new configuration of polymers that cloak the butyrate has been developed by him and his team.

The researchers administered these “polymer micelles” to the digestive systems of mice lacking either healthy gut bacteria or a properly functioning gut lining.

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World's First 'Tooth Regrowth' Medicine Moves Toward Clinical Trials in Japan

UPDATE - World's First Drug to Regrow Teeth Enters Clinical Trials

In June, GNN reported on the first evidence of a drug that was able to regrow adult teeth in mice, after it was discovered by a dental scientist named Takahashi in Japan years ago.

Now, a pharmaceutical firm called Toregem Biopharma, funded by Kyoto University where Takahashi is based, is moving forward with clinical trials in healthy human adults.

Slated to begin in July of next year, the trials will investigate whether or not Takahashi’s antibody-based drug that targets a protein which suppresses the growth of new teeth from our “teeth buds,” is successful in adults.

If so, the next trial will include children with anodontia, a condition where they are born without some of their teeth.

In 2018, Takahashi showed that ferrets, who like humans have tooth buds, baby teeth, and permanent teeth, were able to regrow their teeth when given the drug.

“The idea of growing new teeth is every dentist’s dream. I’ve been working on this since I was a graduate student. I was confident I’d be able to make it happen,” Mr. Takahashi said.

Anodontia is a congenital condition present in about 1% of the population that impedes the development of teeth. About 10% of those patients have oligodontia, in which they lack 6 or more natural teeth.

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Scientists Discover a Small Strand of RNA to Be Key to Fighting Cancer With Our Immune System

A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has shown how a single, small strand of microRNA, known as let-7, governs the ability of T-cells to recognize and remember tumor cells.

This cellular memory is the basis for how vaccines work. Boosting cellular memory to recognize tumors could help improve cancer therapies.

The research, supported by the National Institutes of Health and published recently in Nature Communications, suggests a new strategy for the next generation of cancer-fighting immunotherapies.

“Imagine that the human body is a fortress,” says Leonid Pobezinsky, associate professor of veterinary and animal sciences at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author, along with a research assistant professor Elena Pobezinskaya.

Our bodies have T-cells, which are white blood cells that specialize in fighting both pathogens, think of the common cold, and altered cells of the organism itself, like tumor cells. Most of the time, the T-cells are “naïve”—mustered out of duty and resting. But when they recognize foreign antigens after bumping into them, they suddenly wake up, turn into killer T-cells and attack whatever the pathogen may be, from the sniffles to COVID, or even cancer.

After the killer T-cells have won their battle, most of them die.

“But,” said Pobezinsky, “somehow a few survive, transform into memory cells and form an elite task force called the ‘memory pool’—they remember what that particular antigen looked like, so that they can be on the lookout for the next time it invades the body.”

This is one of the mechanisms behind how vaccines work: infect the body with a weakened dose of a pathogen—say, the chicken pox virus—and the memory cells will remember what that virus looks like, turn into killer T-cells, annihilate the virally infected cells and then transform back into memory cells, waiting for the next time the chicken pox virus shows up.

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Scientists Are 3D-Printing Stem Cells that Can Be Implanted as Brain Tissue

An exciting advance from Oxford Univ. has raised the prospect of tailoring stem cells quickly to treat brain injuries in humans in the future, by essentially 3D printing brain cells.

In experiments, the implanted cells integrated into the animals’ brains both structurally and functionally.

The innovative study, published in the journal Nature Communications, marks the first time neural cells have been 3D printed to mimic the architecture of the cerebral cortex.

The success of the study, part of a 10-year span of published research on 3D printing cultured cells and synthetic tissues, has increased hopes that similar technology could one day be used to treat brain injuries.

Each year, around 70 million people across the globe suffer from traumatic brain injuries (TBI), with five million of those being severe or fatal. There is no effective or reliable treatment.

However, cutting-edge tissue regenerative therapies are seen as a promising route to treatment; especially those which incorporate implants derived from patients’ own stem cells.

In this latest study, researchers used 3D printing techniques to create a two-layered brain tissue using human neural stem cells. When implanted into the brains of mice, these cells encouragingly showed convincing structural and functional integration with the host tissue, despite the species difference.

The cells were then dipped in a solution to generate two ‘bioinks’, which were then printed to produce a two-layered structure that was maintained for weeks.

The researchers used modern human pluripotent stem cells, which are created by activating genes that cause a reset into the tissue of a skin sample to a base state that can then be reprogrammed into most tissue types.

The things we could be capable of down the road...

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The things we could be capable of down the road...

And some things I may not want to know.

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Fascinating!

Woman Becomes First Human to be Fitted with Nerve and Bone Fused Bionic Limb

A Swedish woman named Karin has become the first person to ever receive a below-the-elbow prosthetic that fuses bone with metal and electrodes.

An incredible feat of robotics and biology, it’s seen to represent an eventual gold standard of prosthetics and has encouraged the interdisciplinary science team to believe it will be available to other amputees in other circumstances in the future.

Mechanical attachment and reliable control of prosthetic limbs are two of the biggest obstacles in artificial limb replacement, with many amputees opting to reject even the most sophisticated, commercially available artificial limbs due to fears of painful and uncomfortable attachment and limited, unreliable control.

Karin lost her right arm in a farming machinery accident 20 years ago and was one of those who decided against existing prostheses

A multidisciplinary group of engineers and surgeons from Sweden, Australia, and Italy aimed to solve these problems by developing a remarkable interface that fuses human and machine to allow the limb to be comfortably attached whilst enabling electrical connection with the nervous system.

Called ‘osseointegration,’ it’s a process where bone tissue embraces titanium creating a strong mechanical bond and enabling connection with the nervous system via electrodes implanted in the nerves and muscles.

Karin, an engineer, says her groundbreaking bionic arm has reduced the terrible phantom pain she used to feel, and has been ‘life-changing’ in returning her capabilities in everyday life and regaining her independence.

In the years following her accident, she endured excruciating phantom limb pain and found that existing, conventional prosthetic limbs were of little help in daily life, as well as being uncomfortable.

“It felt like I constantly had my hand in a meat grinder, which created a high level of stress and I had to take high doses of various painkillers,” she said. “I now have better control over my prosthesis, but above all, my pain has decreased.”

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Tumor-Destroying Sound Waves Treatment Coming to a Hospital Near You For Liver Cancer

Oncologists have a new tool to target liver cancers with thanks to an academia-marketplace-based solution that uses high-energy acoustics to destroy tumors with sound.

Known as “histotripsy,” the method and machinery have already been tested successfully in animals and humans, and has just been approved for use by the FDA.

HistoSonics is a company founded in 2009 to create an ultrasound device that both screens for tumors and administers histotripsy. It was born from the efforts of scientists at the University of Michigan who co-founded the firm.

“Histotripsy is an exciting new technology that, although it is in early stages of clinical use, may provide a noninvasive treatment option for patients with liver cancer. Hopefully it can be combined with systemic therapies for a synergistic therapeutic effect,” said Mishal Mendiratta-Lala, professor of radiology with Michigan Medicine.

Mendiratta-Lala was the principal investigator of an FDA human trial started in 2021 which confirmed that HistoSonic’s device, called Edison, can destroy cancer tumors.

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New Way of Treating Aggressive Prostate Cancer Shows 'Promise' in Cedars-Sinai Phase III Clinical trial

Two new treatment options for aggressive prostate cancer have shown promise in a major clinical trial that demonstrated improved survival odds.

Both of the treatments for men with recurrent prostate cancer helped patients live longer than the current standard treatment without their disease progressing.

“If these treatments are approved by the Food and Drug Administration, our results will be practice changing,” said Stephen Freedland, MD, a prostate cancer researcher at Cedars-Sinai, and lead author of the study. “Both of these new options improved metastasis-free survival while preserving quality of life.”

The results of the Phase III international study led by Cedars-Sinai Cancer investigators were published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Cancer of the prostate, a walnut-sized gland that helps make semen, is not always a deadly diagnosis. For some, treatment may never be needed because they have a slow-growing form of the disease, but those with more aggressive prostate cancer are often first treated with surgery or radiation therapy.

Unfortunately, in about a third of those patients, the cancer recurs within 10 years.

Patients with aggressive recurrence are treated with a hormone therapy called androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), which reduces the patient’s production of the male sex hormone testosterone, which aids in the growth and spread of prostate cancer cells—as the hormone therapy effectively reduces the growth-stimulating effects.

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Medical Breakthrough Cures 5-Year-Old Boy of Sickle Cell Anemia

Today's good news story comes from Hackensack, New Jersey.

In a groundbreaking medical achievement, a young boy from New Jersey has triumphed over sickle cell anemia, thanks to an extraordinary medical breakthrough.

obi Okunseinde, a resilient five-year-old hailing from Haworth, owes his newfound health to his younger brother, Kwasi, whom he lovingly acknowledges as his savior.

Their father, Folu Okunseinde, expressed profound gratitude, saying, "He definitely changed his life. He definitely saved his life."

Tobi's battle with sickle cell anemia began when he was not even a year old. At that time, the condition was widely perceived as incurable. However, the Okunseinde family discovered a ray of hope in the form of curative therapy involving a bone marrow transplant, with the ideal donor being none other than his younger sibling, Kwasi.

In a remarkable turn of events, just a year after receiving the life-changing bone marrow transplant from one-year-old Kwasi, Tobi was officially declared free from the grip of sickle cell anemia.

Video in the link.

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New Nanoparticle Treatment Could Ease Arthritis Pain Following Breakthrough Research in Mice

A new treatment of nanoparticles has been found to be effective for easing the pain of rheumatoid arthritis in the lab.

Just one dose of the state-of-the-art medicine could provide patients with relief if clinical trials using lab mice can be replicated in humans.

A team of Korean scientists published their research after developing a new solution for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), which currently has no cure.

First author of the study Dr. Sagang Koo explained that one of the major hurdles in RA treatment is the inability to restore the immune system to its healthy state.

“The disease triggers a mix of troublesome symptoms like inflamed joints, harmful cytokines, and immune system imbalances, which work together to create a relentless cycle of worsening symptoms.

“While targeting some of these factors can provide short-term relief, others remain unresolved, leading to a frustrating cycle of remission and flare-ups.”

She said that leaves the body unable to control the continuous production of harmful substances—such as reactive oxygen species (ROS) and inflammatory cytokines—leading to persistent inflammation and discomfort.

“The ideal treatment for RA should not only provide immediate relief from inflammation and symptoms but also address the root cause by restoring the immune system to its normal, balanced state.”

The research team confirmed the efficacy of their approach using a collagen-induced arthritis mouse model.

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Cervical Cancer Trial Hailed as 'Remarkable' After 35% Reduced Death Rate Using Simple Intervention

Sometimes the best drug for a disease is one that’s already on the shelf, and that was the finding of a British cervical cancer trial that looked to see if a chemotherapy drug given at a specific time could increase survival rates.

Indeed it could, with the 35% reduction in mortality rate hailed as ‘remarkable’ by Cancer Research UK which funded the trial presented at the recent ESMO medical conference in Madrid.

Not nearly as prevalent a risk as breast cancer, around 14,000 cases of cervical cancer will be diagnosed this year in the US, according to estimates from the American Cancer Society.

In the trial of 500 female patients aged between 26 and 72, the scientists randomized them into two groups that received either chemoradiation therapy alone, or induction chemotherapy with a combination of the chemo drugs carboplatin and paclitaxel followed by the same chemoradiation therapy in week 7.

“Timing is everything when you’re treating cancer,” said Dr. Iain Foulkes, from Cancer Research UK, in a statement. “A growing body of evidence is showing the value of additional rounds of chemotherapy before other treatments like surgery and radiotherapy in several other cancers.

“Not only can it reduce the chances of cancer coming back, it can be delivered quickly using drugs already available worldwide.”

At the end of a 5-year follow-up, 80% of the women who received the combination chemo-drug/radiotherapy were still alive, and in 73%, the cancer had not returned.