alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: According to a study of 38 adult human brains donated to science, superagers -- people who retain exceptional memory as they age -- have roughly twice as many immature neurons as their peers who age more typically. Moreover, people with Alzheimer's disease show a marked reduction in neurogenesis compared to a normal baseline. [...]

Led by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, the team set out to examine a variety of postmortem hippocampal tissue samples to see if they could identify markers of neurogenesis -- and if different groups had any notable differences. The brain samples were donated from five groups: eight healthy young adults, aged between 20 and 40; eight healthy agers, aged between 60 and 93; six superagers, aged between 86 and 100; six individuals with preclinical Alzheimer's pathology, aged between 80 and 94; and 10 individuals with an Alzheimer's diagnosis, aged between 70 and 93. The young healthy adult brain tissue was first analyzed to establish the neurogenesis pathways in the adult brain. Then, they analyzed 355,997 individual cell nuclei isolated from the hippocampus, searching for three different stages of cell development: Stem cells, which can develop into neurons; neuroblasts, which are stem cells in the process of that development; and immature neurons, on the verge of functionality. The results were striking.

"Superagers had twice the neurogenesis of the other healthy older adults," [says neuroscientist Orly Lazarov of the University of Illinois Chicago]. "Something in their brains enables them to maintain a superior memory. I believe hippocampal neurogenesis is the secret ingredient, and the data support that." That's an interesting result on its own, but the data from the individuals with preclinical Alzheimer's pathology and Alzheimer's diagnoses is where the real meat of the study sits. In the preclinical group, subtle molecular changes hinted that the system supporting new neuron growth was beginning to falter. In the Alzheimer's group, a clear drop in immature neurons was evident. A genetic analysis of the nuclei also showed that superager neural cells have increased gene activity linked to stronger synaptic connections, greater plasticity, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a critical protein for neural survival, growth, and maintenance. Taken together, these three things can be interpreted as resilience. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

San Francisco-based startup Orchid Health "screens embryos for thousands of potential future illnesses," reports the Washington Post, calling it "the first company to say it can sequence an embryo's entire genome of 3 billion base pairs." It uses as few as five cells from an embryo to test for more than 1,200 of these uncommon single-gene-derived, or monogenic, conditions. The company also applies custom-built algorithms to produce what are known as polygenic risk scores, which are designed to measure a future child's genetic propensity for developing complex ailments later in life, such as bipolar disorder, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and schizophrenia. Orchid, [founder Noor] Siddiqui said in a tweet, is ushering in "a generation that gets to be genetically blessed and avoid disease." Right now, at $2,500 per embryo-screening on top of the average $20,000 for a single cycle of IVF, Siddiqui's social network in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs is an ideal target market...

Yet several genetic scientists told The Post they doubt Orchid's core claim: that it can accurately sequence an entire human genome from just five cells collected from an early-stage embryo, enabling it to see many more single- and multiple-gene-derived disorders than other methods have. Experts have struggled to extract accurate genetic information from small embryonic samples, said Svetlana Yatsenko, a Stanford University pathology professor who specializes in clinical and research genetics. Genetic tests that use saliva or blood samples typically collect hundreds of thousands of cells. For its vastly smaller samples, Orchid uses a process called amplification, which creates copies of the DNA retrieved from the embryo. That process, Yatsenko said, can introduce major inaccuracies. "You're making many, many mistakes in the amplification," she said, rendering it problematic to declare any embryo free of a particular disease, or positive for one. "It's basically Russian roulette...."

Numerous fertility doctors and scientists also told The Post they have serious reservations about screening embryos through polygenic risk scoring, the technique that allows Orchid and other companies to predict future disease by tying clusters of hundreds or even thousands of genes to disease outcomes and in some cases to other traits, such as intelligence and height. The vast majority of diseases that afflict humans are associated with many different genes rather than a single gene... And for traits such as intelligence, polygenic scoring has almost negligible predictive capacity — just a handful of IQ points... Or parents might select against an unwanted trait, such as schizophrenia, without understanding how they may be screening out desired traits associated with the same genes, such as creativity... The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics calls the benefits of screening embryos for polygenic risks "unproven" and warns that such tests "should not be offered" by clinicians. A pioneer of polygenic risk scores, Harvard epidemiology professor Peter Kraft, has criticized Orchid, saying on X that "the science doesn't add up" and that "waving a magic wand and changing some of these variants at birth may not do anything at all."
The article notes several startups are already providing predictions on intelligence. "In the United States, there are virtually no restrictions on the types of genetic predictions companies can offer, and no external vetting of their proprietary scoring methods."

A blog post from the Stanford University School of Medicine attempts to answer the question: What's the deal with the gut-brain connection? It affects your mood, your sleep, even your motivation to exercise. There's convincing evidence that it's the starting point for Parkinson's disease and could be responsible for long COVID's cognitive effects. And it sits about 2 feet below your brain. The gut plays an obvious role in our health by digesting what we eat and extracting nutrients. But there's a growing appreciation among scientists that our digestive systems affect our general well-being in a much broader fashion.

One fascinating aspect of the gut's widespread impact on health is its direct influence on and communication with the brain, a conduit known as the gut-brain axis. Through direct signals from the vagus nerve, [which] connects the brain and the gut, as well as through molecules secreted into the bloodstream from our gut microbes and immune cells that traffic from the gut to the rest of the body, our brains and our digestive tracts are in constant communication. And when that communication goes off the rails, diseases and disorders can result. The gut-brain connection is a key part of how the brain forms a picture of the rest of the body, a phenomenon known as interoception, explained Christoph Thaiss, PhD, an assistant professor of pathology at Stanford Medicine...

The gut also contains the largest number of neurons outside the brain of any structure in the body — more than 100 million neurons line the human digestive tract, from the esophagus to the anus. These cells make up what is known as the enteric nervous system, which some scientists refer to as a "second brain." The enteric nervous system is more brain-like than other peripheral nerves because it consists of lots of different types of neurons that communicate with each other, while other peripheral nerves primarily serve to communicate between the brain and the body, said Julia Kaltschmidt, PhD, the Firmenich Next Generation Faculty Scholar and an associate professor of neurosurgery. In fact, the gut's nervous system can act alone. Scientists have found that if they remove an animal's gut and bathe it in a special fluid designed to keep neurons alive, the gut continues to contract, pushing its contents from top to bottom.

U.K. public sector and critical infrastructure organizations could be banned from making ransom payments under new proposals from the U.K. government. From a report: The U.K.'s Home Office launched a consultation on Tuesday that proposes a "targeted ban" on ransomware payments. Under the proposal, public sector bodies -- including local councils, schools, and NHS trusts -- would be banned from making payments to ransomware hackers, which the government says would "strike at the heart of the cybercriminal business model."

This government proposal comes after a wave of cyberattacks targeting the U.K. public sector. The NHS last year declared a "critical" incident following a cyberattack on pathology lab provider Synnovis, which led to a massive data breach of sensitive patient data and months of disruption, including canceled operations and the diversion of emergency patients. According to new data seen by Bloomberg, the cyberattack on Synnovis resulted in harm to dozens of patients, leading to long-term or permanent damage to their health in at least two cases.

Research from Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University reveals a concerning correlation between micro and nanoplastic (MNP) concentrations in damaged human tissues and various health conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease, thrombosis, and cancer. Phys.Org reports: In the study, "Mapping micro(nano)plastics in various organ systems: Their emerging links to human diseases?" published in TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry, investigators collected 61 available research articles for MNP detection in human tissues, plus 840 articles on MNP toxicological mechanisms. Data came from spectroscopy, microscopy, and pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry investigations to identify polymer types in different tissues. Toxicological studies employed cell models and animal experiments to examine oxidative stress, inflammatory responses, and related signaling pathways.

The studies documented particles detected in skin, arteries, veins, thrombi, bone marrow, testes, semen, uterus, and placenta. MNPs were found in the digestive system, from saliva to feces, liver, and gallstones. Within the respiratory system, MNPs were everywhere, including lung tissue, with microscopic fibers common in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and sputum. Positive correlations emerged between particle abundance and specific disorders, such as inflammatory bowel disease, thrombosis, cervical cancer, and uterine fibroids. Toxicological tests showed possible MNP-triggered oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammatory responses, and apoptosis in various cell types, along with organ-level concerns like neurodegenerative disease onset when crossing the blood-brain barrier.

A critically important signal in the metadata discovered by the researchers was that measured levels of MNPs tended to be higher in tissues with lesions than in non-lesioned tissues. These included inflamed intestines, fibrotic lungs, or cancerous growths, suggesting a potential link between MNP buildup and local pathology. There is an intriguing "what came first, the chicken or the egg" problem with lesions having higher concentrations of MNPs. [...] In the case of "what came first, the lesion or the microplastic," it is possible that MNPs contribute to inflammation, oxidative stress, and cellular damage, which can cause or worsen tissue lesions. But it is also possible that these lesions accumulate more MNPs in already damaged tissue areas. While the current findings do not provide a direct cause-and-effect relationship, they offer good targets for further study.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Scientists in Brazil found microplastics in the brain tissue of cadavers, according to a new study published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open. Mounting research over the last few years has found microplastics in nearly every organ in the body, as well as in the bloodstream and in plaque that clogs arteries. Whether these ubiquitous pollutants can reach the human brain has been a primary concern for scientists. The latest research looked at a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb, which processes information about smell. Humans have two olfactory bulbs, one above each nasal cavity. Connecting the olfactory bulb and the nasal cavity is the olfactory nerve.

Some researchers worry the olfactory pathway may also be an entry point for microplastics getting into the brain, beyond the olfactory bulb. "Previous studies in humans and animals have shown that air pollution reaches the brain, and that particles have been found in the olfactory bulb, which is why we think the olfactory bulb is probably one of the first points for microplastics to reach the brain," said lead study author Dr. Thais Mauad, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Sao Paulo Medical School in Brazil.

Mauad and her team took samples of olfactory bulb tissue from 15 cadavers of people who died between the ages of 33 and 100. Samples from eight of the cadavers contained microplastics -- tiny bits of plastic that ranged from 5.5 micrometers to 26.4 micrometers in size. In total, the researchers found 16 plastic fibers and particles in the tissues. The smallest were slimmer than the diameter of a human red blood cell, which measures about 8 micrometers. The most common type of plastic they found was polypropylene, followed by polyamide, nylon and polyethylene vinyl acetate. "The nose is a major point of defense to keep particles and dust out of the lungs," Campen wrote in an email. "So seeing some plastics in the olfactory system, especially given how they are being found everywhere else in the body, is completely expected." [...] "There is evidence that very small airborne particles can move to the brain via the olfactory bulb, but this is not known to be a major route of trafficking material to the brain," Campen said. Campen notes it's more likely that nanoplastics enter the brain through the bloodstream, which picks up plastic bits from the lungs or digestive tract, rather than the olfactory bulb. "However, it's extremely difficult for particles, even those in pharmaceuticals, to enter the brain through the blood," notes NBC News. "That's because the brain is surrounded by a semipermeable membrane called the blood-brain barrier."

Scientists have developed a blood test that accurately identifies Alzheimer's disease in patients with memory issues 90% of the time (source may be paywalled; alternative source), significantly outperforming standard diagnostic methods. The findings have been published in the journal JAMA. The New York Times reports: The new study used a blood test that focuses on a form of a protein called tau that sprouts into tangles in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. Measuring that form, called ptau-217, was found to give the most accurate assessment of Alzheimer's pathology in a comparison of various Alzheimer's blood tests that will also be presented at the Alzheimer's Association conference. Tau is more closely linked to cognitive decline than amyloid, and tau tangles form later than amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's patients. The test in the study also tracks amyloid. Tests like this are available in the United States for use by doctors, not consumers.

The study included about 1,200 patients with mild memory problems. About 500 of them visited primary care physicians; the rest sought specialist care at memory clinics. Dr. Sebastian Palmqvist, an associate professor of neurology at Lund University who led the study with [Dr. Oskar Hansson, a professor of clinical memory research at Lund University in Sweden and the senior author of the study], said that first, about 300 patients in each group were given the blood test, and results were compared with spinal taps or PET scans. Then the researchers wanted to see how the blood test compared with the judgment of doctors after they administered cognitive tests and CT scans. "We started asking both the primary care physicians and our own dementia specialists: After the standard evaluation, do you think your patient has Alzheimer's disease?" Dr. Palmqvist said.

In evaluations of about 200 patients, primary care doctors who thought patients had Alzheimer's were wrong 36 percent of the time. And when they thought patients did not have Alzheimer's, they were wrong 41 percent of the time. Memory specialists who evaluated about 400 patients did somewhat better -- they were wrong 25 percent of the time when they thought patients had Alzheimer's and wrong 29 percent of the time when they thought patients didn't. The blood test was wrong only about 10 percent of the time. The blood test's accuracy was highest with patients who had already progressed to dementia and was slightly lower with patients in a pre-dementia stage called mild cognitive impairment, Dr. Palmqvist said. It was not very accurate with the earliest stage, called subjective cognitive decline, when patients begin to perceive their memory to be failing. Dr. Hansson said that lower accuracy probably occurred because many people with subjective cognitive decline do not turn out to have Alzheimer's.

An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from TechCrunch, written by Zack Whittaker: We're over halfway through 2024, and already this year we have seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent history. And just when you think that some of these hacks can't get any worse, they do. From huge stores of customers' personal information getting scraped, stolen and posted online, to reams of medical data covering most people in the United States getting stolen, the worst data breaches of 2024 to date have already surpassed at least 1 billion stolen records and rising. These breaches not only affect the individuals whose data was irretrievably exposed, but also embolden the criminals who profit from their malicious cyberattacks. Travel with us to the not-so-distant past to look at how some of the biggest security incidents of 2024 went down, their impact and. in some cases, how they could have been stopped. These are some of the largest breaches highlighted in the report:

AT&T's Data Breaches: AT&T experienced two data breaches in 2024, affecting nearly all its customers and many non-customers. The breaches exposed phone numbers, call records, and personal information, risking account hijacks for 7.6 million customers.
Change Healthcare Hack: A ransomware attack on Change Healthcare resulted in the theft of sensitive medical data, affecting a substantial proportion of Americans. The breach caused widespread outages in healthcare services across the U.S. and compromised personal, medical, and billing information.
Synnovis Ransomware Attack: The cyberattack on U.K. pathology lab Synnovis disrupted patient services in London hospitals for weeks, leading to thousands of postponed operations and the exposure of data related to 300 million patient interactions.
Snowflake Data Theft (Including Ticketmaster): Cybercriminals stole hundreds of millions of records from Snowflake's corporate customers, including 560 million records from Ticketmaster. The breach affected data from multiple companies and institutions, exposing vast amounts of customer and employee information.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The latest figures suggest that around 1,500 medical procedures have been canceled across some of London's biggest hospitals in the four weeks since Qilin's ransomware attack hit pathology services provider Synnovis. But perhaps no single person was affected as severely as Johanna Groothuizen. Hanna -- the name she goes by -- is now missing her right breast after her skin-sparing mastectomy and immediate breast reconstruction surgery was swapped out for a simple mastectomy at the last minute. The 36-year-old research culture manager at King's College London and former researcher in health sciences was diagnosed with HER2-positive breast cancer in late 2023. It's an aggressive form known for spreading faster and is more commonly recurring, which necessitates urgent treatment. Hanna soon began a course of chemotherapy following her diagnosis until she was able to have what will hopefully be the first and only major procedure to remove the disease. Between then and the operation, which was scheduled for June 7 -- four days after the ransomware attack was carried out -- she had been told repeatedly that the planned procedure was a skin-sparing mastectomy which would have allowed surgeons to cosmetically reconstruct her right breast immediately after the operation.

How the ordeal actually unraveled, however, was an entirely different story. Hanna was given less than 24 hours by doctors to make the daunting decision to either accept a simple mastectomy or delay a life-changing procedure until Synnovis's systems were back online. The decision was thrust upon her on the Thursday afternoon before her Friday surgery. This was after she was forced to chase the medical staff for updates about whether the procedure was going ahead at all. Hanna was told on the Tuesday of that week, the day after Qilin's attack, that despite everything going on, the staff at St Thomas' hospital in London were still planning to go ahead with the skin-sparing mastectomy as previously agreed. Per the updates Hanna requested on Thursday, it was strongly suggested that the operation was going to be canceled. The hospital deemed the reconstruction part of the procedure too risky because Synnovis was unable to support blood transfusions until its systems were back online.

The ransomware attack wasn't easy on hospitals. The situation was so dire that blood reserves were running low just a week after the attack, prompting an urgent appeal for O-type blood donations. For Hanna, though, this meant she had to make the unimaginably difficult choice between the surgery she wanted, or the surgery that would give her the best chance at survival. The mother of two young children, aged four and two, felt like she had no other choice but to accept the simple mastectomy, leaving her with only one breast. [...] At the time of writing, it's now nearly five weeks since Qilin's attack on Synnovis -- a pathology services partnership between Synlab, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, and King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. The most recent update provided by the NHS said disruption to services was still evident across the region, although some services such as outpatient appointments are returning to near-normal levels. Between June 24-30, there were 1,517 cute outpatient appointments and 136 electric procedures that needed to be postponed across the two NHS trusts partnered with Synlab. "The total number of postponements for the entire month since the attack took hold (June 3-30) stand at 4,913 for acute outpatient appointments and 1,391 for elective procedures," notes the report.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: An investigation into a ransomware attack earlier this month on London hospitals by the Russian group Qilin could take weeks to complete, the country's state-run National Health Service said Friday, as concerns grow over a reported data dump of patient records. Hundreds of operations and appointments are still being canceled more than two weeks after the June 3 attack on NHS provider Synnovis, which provides pathology services primarily in southeast London...

NHS England said Friday that it has been "made aware" that data connected to the attack have been published online. According to the BBC, Qilin shared almost 400GB of data, including patient names, dates of birth and descriptions of blood tests, on their darknet site and Telegram channel... According to Saturday's edition of the Guardian newspaper, records covering 300 million patient interactions, including the results of blood tests for HIV and cancer, were stolen during the attack.

A website and helpline has been set up for patients affected.

A group of London hospitals struggling to contain the fallout from a cyberattack against a critical supplier had known for years about weaknesses that left them vulnerable to hacks, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing internal documents. From the report: The Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, which runs five major hospitals in the London area, has failed to meet the UK health service's data security standards in recent years and acknowledged as recently as April that 'cybersecurity remained a high risk" to its operations, according to publicly available documents that outline board of directors' meetings. In January, the board of directors raised questions about the security of digital links between hospital computer systems and those of third-party companies.

Hackers last week brought down the trust's pathology services provider, Synnovis, with severe knock-on effects at hospitals. Doctors have, among other things, been forced to delay medical operations, postpone blood tests and resort to handwritten records. The attack has disrupted blood services so drastically that medical facilities are asking the public for donations, and one hospital is calling on its own staff to contribute. The April report proposed an audit to identify where improvements could be made. It's not clear if improvements took place before the hack on June 3, or whether the vulnerabilities identified in the board of directors' reports -- which include dated IT systems and hardware devices -- had any bearing on the ransomware infection at Synnovis.

jd writes: There aren't many details yet, but a private company used by the National Health Service in London was hit by a ransomware attack today, leading to cancelled operations and cancelled tests. The provider has been hit multiple times this year and is obviously not bothering with making any improvements in cybersecurity. There really should be legal requirements when it comes to maintaining what is de-facto critical infrastructure.

From the article:

"Major NHS hospitals in London have been hit by a cyber-attack, which is seriously disrupting their services, including blood tests and transfusions. The ransomware attack is having a "major impact" on the care provided by Guy's and St Thomas' NHS trust, its chief executive has told staff in a letter. The attack is understood to affect other hospitals, including King's College hospital, and has left them unable to connect to the servers of the private firm that provides their pathology services.

Synnovis, an outsourced provider of lab services to NHS trusts across south-east London, was the target of the attack, believed to be a form of ransomware, a piece of software which locks up a computer system to extort a payment for restoring access. According to one healthcare worker, the labs were still functional, but communication with them was limited to paper only, imposing a huge bottleneck and forcing cancellation or reassignment of all but the most urgent bloodwork. Direct connections with Synnovis' servers were cut to limit the risk of the infection spreading. ...
This is the third attack in the last year to hit part of the Synlab group, a German medical services provider with subsidiaries across Europe. In June 2023, ransomware gang Clop hacked and stole data from the French branch of the company just days after it hit headlines for bringing down a payroll provider for companies including BA, Boots and the BBC. Clop published the stolen data later that summer."

Pam Belluck reports via the New York Times: Scientists are proposing a new way of understanding the genetics of Alzheimer's that would mean that up to a fifth of patients would be considered to have a genetically caused form of the disease. Currently, the vast majority of Alzheimer's cases do not have a clearly identified cause. The new designation, proposed in a study published Monday, could broaden the scope of efforts to develop treatments, including gene therapy, and affect the design of clinical trials. It could also mean that hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone could, if they chose, receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer's before developing any symptoms of cognitive decline, although there currently are no treatments for people at that stage. The new classification would make this type of Alzheimer's one of the most common genetic disorders in the world, medical experts said.

"This reconceptualization that we're proposing affects not a small minority of people," said Dr. Juan Fortea, an author of the study and the director of the Sant Pau Memory Unit in Barcelona, Spain. "Sometimes we say that we don't know the cause of Alzheimer's disease," but, he said, this would mean that about 15 to 20 percent of cases "can be tracked back to a cause, and the cause is in the genes." The idea involves a gene variant called APOE4. Scientists have long known that inheriting one copy of the variant increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's, and that people with two copies, inherited from each parent, have vastly increased risk.

The new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, analyzed data from over 500 people with two copies of APOE4, a significantly larger pool than in previous studies. The researchers found that almost all of those patients developed the biological pathology of Alzheimer's, and the authors say that two copies of APOE4 should now be considered a cause of Alzheimer's -- not simply a risk factor. The patients also developed Alzheimer's pathology relatively young, the study found. By age 55, over 95 percent had biological markers associated with the disease. By 65, almost all had abnormal levels of a protein called amyloid that forms plaques in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer's. And many started developing symptoms of cognitive decline at age 65, younger than most people without the APOE4 variant.

Testing a person's blood for a type of protein called phosphorylated tau, or p-tau, could be used to screen for Alzheimer's disease with "high accuracy," even before symptoms begin to show, a new study suggests. CNN: The study involved testing blood for a key biomarker of Alzheimer's called p-tau217, which increases at the same time as other damaging proteins -- beta amyloid and tau -- build up in the brains of people with the disease. Currently, to identify the buildup of beta amyloid and tau in the brain, patients undergo a brain scan or spinal tap, which often can be inaccessible and costly. But this simple blood test was found to be up to 96% accurate in identifying elevated levels of beta amyloid and up to 97% accurate in identifying tau, according to the study published Monday in the journal JAMA Neurology.

"What was impressive with these results is that the blood test was just as accurate as advanced testing like cerebrospinal fluid tests and brain scans at showing Alzheimer's disease pathology in the brain," Nicholas Ashton, a professor of neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and one of the study's lead authors, said in an email. The study findings came as no surprise to Ashton, who added that the scientific community has known for several years that using blood tests to measure tau or other biomarkers has the potential to assess Alzheimer's disease risk. "Now we are close to these tests being prime-time and this study shows that," he said. Alzheimer's disease, a brain disorder that affects memory and thinking skills, is the most common type of dementia, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Microsoft is teaming up with digital pathology provider Paige to build the world's largest image-based artificial intelligence model for identifying cancer. From a report: The AI model is training on an unprecedented amount of data that includes billions of images, according to a release. It can identify both common cancers and rare cancers that are notoriously difficult to diagnose, and researchers hope it will eventually help doctors who are struggling to contend with staffing shortages and growing caseloads. Paige develops digital and AI-powered solutions for pathologists, which are doctors who carry out lab tests on bodily fluids and tissues to make a diagnosis. It's a specialty that often operates behind the scenes, and it's crucial for determining a patient's path forward.

"You don't have cancer until the pathologist says so. That's the critical step in the whole medical edifice," Thomas Fuchs, co-founder and chief scientist at Paige, told CNBC in an interview. But despite pathologists' essential role in medicine, Fuchs said their workflow has not changed much in the last 150 years. To diagnose cancer, for instance, pathologists usually examine a piece of tissue on a glass slide under a microscope. The method is tried and true, but if pathologists miss something, it can have dire consequences for patients.

A New York Times columnist considers alternate reasons for the upcoming House hearings with a whistleblower former intelligence official, David Grusch, who claims the US government possesses "intact and partially intact" alien vehicles: This whistle-blower's mere existence is evidence of a fascinating shift in public U.F.O. discourse. There may not be alien spacecraft, but there is clearly now a faction within the national security complex that wants Americans to think there might be alien spacecraft, to give these stories credence rather than dismissal.

The evidence for this shift includes the military's newfound willingness to disclose weird atmospheric encounters. It includes the establishment of the task force that Grusch was assigned to... It also includes other examples of credentialed figures, like the Stanford pathology professor Garry Nolan, who claim they're being handed evidence of extraterrestrial contact. And it includes the range of strange stories being fed to writers willing to operate in the weird-science zone...

I have no definite theory of why this push is happening. Maybe it's because there really is something Out There and we're being prepared for the big reveal... [M]aybe it's a cynical effort to use unexplained phenomena as an excuse to goose military funding. Or maybe it's a psy-op to discredit critics of the national security state...

"After decades in the shadow of the reigning model for Alzheimer's disease, alternative explanations are finally getting the attention they deserve," writes Quanta magazine — in a 10,000-word update on where we are now: Three decades ago, scientists thought they had cracked the medical mystery of what causes Alzheimer's disease with an idea known as the amyloid cascade hypothesis. It accused a protein called amyloid-beta of forming sticky, toxic plaques between neurons, killing them and triggering a series of events that made the brain waste away.... Decades of work and billions of dollars went into funding clinical trials of dozens of drug compounds that targeted amyloid plaques. Yet almost none of the trials showed meaningful benefits to patients with the disease....

A stream of recent findings has made it clear that other mechanisms may be at least as important as the amyloid cascade as causes of Alzheimer's disease.... The emerging new models of the disease are more complex than the amyloid explanation, and because they are still taking shape, it's not clear yet how some of them may eventually translate into therapies. But because they focus on fundamental mechanisms affecting the health of cells, what's being learned about them might someday pay off in new treatments for a wide variety of medical problems, possibly including some key effects of aging.... While these alternate ideas were once hushed and thrown under the rug, now the field has broadened its attention.
The article explores the theory — derived from research on genetically-engineered mice — that neurons bulging with toxic accumulations of proteins and molecules could be mistaken for classic amyloid plaques outside cells. (But in fact "the extracellular amyloid plaques weren't killing the cells — because the cells were already dead.") Scientists are now also investigating lysosomes, cholesterol metabolism, and even the immune system.

To say that the amyloid hypothesis is dead would be overstating it, said Donald Weaver, a co-director of the Krembil Brain Institute in Toronto, but "I would say that the amyloid hypothesis is insufficient...."

By 2017, 146 drug candidates for treating Alzheimer's disease had been deemed unsuccessful. Only four drugs had been approved, and they treated the symptoms of the disease, not its underlying pathology. The results were so disappointing that in 2018, Pfizer pulled out of Alzheimer's research. A 2021 review that compared the results of 14 of the major trials confirmed that reducing extracellular amyloid did not greatly improve cognition....

The hypothesis took another hit last July when a bombshell article in Science revealed that data in the influential 2006 Nature paper linking amyloid plaques to cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's disease may have been fabricated. The connection claimed by the paper had convinced many researchers to keep pursuing amyloid theories at the time.

One of Earth's toughest microbes could survive on Mars, lying dormant beneath the surface, for 280 million years, new research has shown. The findings increase the probability that microbial life could still exist on the Red Planet. Space.com reports: Deinococcus radiodurans, nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium," is one of the world's toughest microbes, capable of surviving in radiation strong enough to kill any other known life-form. Experiments have now shown that if Conan the Bacterium or a similar microbe existed on Mars, it could survive 33 feet (10 meters) beneath the surface, frozen and dried out, for 280 million years. In a study led by Michael Daly, who is a professor of pathology at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland and a member of the National Academies' Committee on Planetary Protection, scientists tested half a dozen microbes and fungi -- all "extremophiles" able to live in environments where other organisms die -- to see how long they could survive in an environment that simulated the mid-latitudes of Mars. During the experiments, organisms faced temperatures as low as minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 63 degrees Celsius) and exposure to ultraviolet light, gamma rays and high-energy protons mimicking the constant bombardment of Mars by solar ultraviolet light and cosmic radiation sleeting down from space.

After the bacteria and fungi had been exposed to various radiation levels in the experiment, Daly's team measured how much manganese antioxidants had accumulated in the cells of the microbes. Manganese antioxidants form as a result of radiation exposure, and the more that form, the more radiation the microbes can resist. Conan the Bacterium was the clear winner. The researchers found that Conan the Bacterium could absorb as much as 28,000 times more radiation than what a human can survive. This measurement allowed Daly's team to estimate how long the microbe could survive at different depths on Mars. Previous experiments, in which Conan the Bacterium had been suspended in liquid water and subjected to radiation like that found on Mars, had indicated that the microbe could survive below the surface of Mars for 1.2 million years.

However, the new tests, in which the microbe was frozen and dried out to mimic the cold and dry conditions on Mars, suggested that Conan the Bacterium would be able to survive 280 million years on Mars if buried at a depth of 33 feet. This lifespan is reduced to 1.5 million years if buried just 4 inches (10 centimeters) below the surface, and just a few hours on the surface, which is bathed in ultraviolet light. [...] The research also determined why Conan the Bacterium is so resistant to radiation. The scientists found that chromosomes and plasmids, which carry genetic information, in the microbe's cells are linked together, which keeps these structures aligned and prevents irradiated cells from breaking down until they can be repaired. "Although Deinococcus radiodurans buried in the Martian subsurface could not survive dormant for the estimated 2 to 2.5 billion years since flowing water disappeared on Mars, such Martian environments are regularly altered and melted by meteorite impacts," he said in a statement. "We suggest that periodic melting could allow intermittent repopulation and dispersal."

The findings were detailed in the journal Astrobiology.

Scientists from the University of Michigan have "fabricated a nanoparticle to deliver an inhibitor to brain tumor in mouse models, where the drug successfully turned on the immune system to eliminate the cancer," reports ScienceDaily. "The process also triggered immune memory so that a reintroduced tumor was eliminated -- a sign that this potential new approach could not only treat brain tumors but prevent or delay recurrences." From the report: The small molecule inhibitor AMD3100 was developed to block the action of CXCR12, a cytokine released by the glioma cells that builds up a shield around the immune system, preventing it from firing up against the invading tumor. Researchers showed in mouse models of glioma that AMD3100 prevented CXCR12 from binding with immune-suppressive myeloid cells. By disarming these cells, the immune system remains intact and can attack the tumor cells. But AMD3100 was having trouble getting to the tumor. The drug did not travel well through the bloodstream, and it did not pass the blood brain barrier, a key issue with getting drugs into the brain.

The Castro-Lowenstein lab collaborated with Joerg Lahann, Ph.D., Wolfgang Pauli Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the U-M College of Engineering, to create protein-based nanoparticles to encapsulate the inhibitor, in the hopes of helping it pass through the bloodstream. Castro also connected with Anuska V. Andjelkovic, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology and research professor of neurosurgery at Michigan Medicine, whose research focuses on the blood brain barrier. They noted that glioma tumors create abnormal blood vessels, interfering with normal blood flow.

The researchers injected AMD3100-loaded nanoparticles into mice with gliomas. The nanoparticles contained a peptide on the surface that binds to a protein found mostly on the brain tumor cells. As the nanoparticles traveled through the bloodstream toward the tumor, they released AMD3100, which restored the integrity of the blood vessels. The nanoparticles could then reach their target, where they released the drug, thus blocking the entry of the immune-suppressive myeloid cells into the tumor mass. This allowed the immune cells to kill the tumor and delay its progression. [...] Among the mice whose tumors were eliminated, the researchers then reintroduced the tumor, simulating a recurrence. Without any additional therapy, 60% of mice remained cancer-free. The research has been published in the journal ACS Nano.

Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom -- a field called venomics -- have burgeoned in recent years, leading to important drug discoveries. From a report: In a small room in a building at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the invertebrate keeper, Emma Califf, lifts up a rock in a plastic box. "This is one of our desert hairies," she said, exposing a three-inch-long scorpion, its tail arced over its back. "The largest scorpion in North America." This captive hairy, along with a swarm of inch-long bark scorpions in another box, and two dozen rattlesnakes of varying species and sub- species across the hall, are kept here for the coin of the realm: their venom. Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom -- a field called venomics -- have burgeoned in recent years, and the growing catalog of compounds has led to a number of drug discoveries. As the components of these natural toxins continue to be assayed by evolving technologies, the number of promising molecules is also growing.

"A century ago we thought venom had three or four components, and now we know just one type of venom can have thousands," said Leslie V. Boyer, a professor emeritus of pathology at the University of Arizona. "Things are accelerating because a small number of very good laboratories have been pumping out information that everyone else can now use to make discoveries." She added, "There's a pharmacopoeia out there waiting to be explored." It is a striking case of modern-day scientific alchemy: The most highly evolved of natural poisons on the planet are creating a number of effective medicines with the potential for many more.

One of the most promising venom-derived drugs to date comes from the deadly Fraser Island funnel web spider of Australia, which halts cell death after a heart attack. Blood flow to the heart is reduced after a heart attack, which makes the cell environment more acidic and leads to cell death. The drug, a protein called Hi1A, is scheduled for clinical trials next year. In the lab, it was tested on the cells of beating human hearts. It was found to block their ability to sense acid, "so the death message is blocked, cell death is reduced, and we see improved heart cell survival," said Nathan Palpant, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia who helped make the discovery.