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B-cell releasing antibodies
Cancer

Engineered plasma cells produce effective bispecific antibodies against leukemia

July 4, 2024
By Mar de Miguel

Scientists at the University of Washington have engineered human plasma B cells modified to express long-lasting bispecific antibodies that could be used to treat leukemia without requiring continuous dosing.

“We are trying to engineer plasma cells to make as a stable source for biologic drugs. One thing that is really unique about plasma cells is that they can live for a really long time … up to 10 years or even 100 years depending on the type of plasma cell that that you make,” Richard James, senior author of the study, principal investigator at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and associate professor at the University of Washington, told BioWorld.


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Bridge recombinase mechanism 3D illustration
Drug design, drug delivery & technologies

New techniques open the way for large-scale programmable genome editing

June 26, 2024
By Mar de Miguel
New single-step genome editing techniques that enable the insertion, inversion or deletion of long DNA sequences at specified genome positions have been demonstrated in bacteria. The advance opens the door to the development of programmable methods for rearranging DNA, using recombinase enzymes guided by RNA. The two different approaches to using insertion sequences (IS) – some of the simplest and most compact mobile genetic elements – are described in two papers published in Nature and Nature Communications.
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Blood cells and destruction of cancer cell
Cancer

A pan-approach against blood cancer preserving hematopoiesis

May 29, 2024
By Mar de Miguel
A group of scientists from Basel University Hospital have designed an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) that eliminated blood cancer cells without attacking healthy hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), which they modified by base editing and transplanted to renew an altered blood system. They achieved this by focusing on the panhematopoietic marker CD45.
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Gene editing illustration
Drug Design, Drug Delivery & Technologies

Next-generation genome editing tools surpass CRISPR milestone

Dec. 28, 2023
By Anette Breindl and Mar de Miguel
Modifying a patient’s DNA is no longer just for science fiction novels. The CRISPR gene editing technique developed by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier only took 10 years to reach the market as Casgevy (exagamglogene autotemcel/exa-cel, Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.), treating congenital pathologies such as β-thalassemia and severe sickle cell disease (SCD). But science does not stop.
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3D illustration of a eukaryotic cell
Endocrine/Metabolic

Giving yeast cells aging indecision increases longevity

May 4, 2023
By Mar de Miguel
Cells of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a yeast used as a model for human mitosis, age in two ways. Both genomic instability and the decline of mitochondria cause cells to degenerate and die. The choice of one type or another depends on a network of genes that can be adjusted by bioengineering.
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Ocular

Gene editing restores vision in mice with retinitis pigmentosa

March 23, 2023
A modification of the CRISPR technique has made it possible to restore vision in mouse models with retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Scientists at the Institute of Visual Neuroscience and Stem Cell Engineering of Wuhan University of Science and Technology developed a new gene-editing tool called PE(SpRY) to edit in vivo a mutation of enzyme phosphodiesterase 6B (PDE6β) and return its function.
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Drug Design, Drug Delivery & Technologies

Synthetic cell junctions allow tissue reconstruction

Dec. 13, 2022
By Mar de Miguel
A combination of bioengineering techniques on normal cell binding proteins could be the method of the future for selective cell binding. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have created a synthetic glue based on the expression of membrane receptors to establish the desired connection between cells. The results may be applied in different fields of cell biology or biomedicine, such as regeneration and wound repair, including the nervous system, or cancer.
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A transplanted human organoid in a section of the rat brain.
Neurology/Psychiatric

Human brain organoids mature after transplantation into rats

Oct. 13, 2022
By Mar de Miguel
Human brain organoids transplanted into rats could be used as an in vivo model for the study of neuropsychiatric diseases. Researchers at Stanford University managed to mature human organoid neurons in the somatosensory cortex of the animal's brain and incorporate them into its neural circuitry.The integration improved the morphological and physiological properties of the transplanted neurons. Compared to those of organoids in a Petri dish, human cells preserved their own identity, and they modified the rat's learned behavior through stimulation and reward experiments.
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