First ever clinical trial underway of laboratory grown red blood cells being transfused into another person

Microscope image Example of a RESTORE laboratory grown young red blood cell
Image Credit: NHS Blood and Transplant

The manufactured blood cells were grown from stem cells from donors. The red cells were then transfused into volunteers in the RESTORE randomized controlled clinical trial.

This is the first time in the world that red blood cells that have been grown in a laboratory have been given to another person as part of a trial into blood transfusion.

If proved safe and effective, manufactured blood cells could in time revolutionize treatments for people with blood disorders such as sickle cell and rare blood types. It can be difficult to find enough well-matched donated blood for some people with these disorders.

Chief Investigator Professor Cedric Ghevaert, Professor in Transfusion Medicine and Consultant Haematologist at the University of Cambridge and NHS Blood and Transplant, said: “We hope our lab grown red blood cells will last longer than those that come from blood donors. If our trial, the first such in the world, is successful, it will mean that patients who currently require regular long-term blood transfusions will need fewer transfusions in future, helping transform their care.”

The RESTORE trial is a joint research initiative by NHS Blood and Transplant and the University of Bristol, working with the University of Cambridge, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, NIHR Cambridge Clinical Research Facility, and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It is part-funded by a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) grant.

Limiting antibiotics for cows may create a new dairy market

Photo Credit: David Mark

Consumers would be willing to buy milk from cows only treated with antibiotics when medically necessary – as long as the price isn’t much higher than conventional milk, according to researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine.

The findings suggest conventional farmers could tap a potentially large market for this type of milk if they can find the right price point – and that dairy consumers can help slow the rise of antimicrobial resistance.

“Most of the antibiotics produced throughout the world are used for animal agriculture. Therefore, reducing antibiotic use in animals, including dairy cattle, is necessary to tackle antibiotic resistance at a global scale,” said Dr. Renata Ivanek, professor in the Department of Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences. She is senior author on the study, which was published Nov. 4 in the Journal of Dairy Science.

In the paper, the researchers propose a new label for milk that indicates responsible antibiotic use (RAU), which would leverage consumer preferences to reduce the use of antibiotics on commercial dairy farms. The study showed that, although a consumer’s willingness to pay for the RAU-labeled milk was comparable to how much they would pay for the unlabeled milk, they strongly preferred the RAU-labeled milk over the unlabeled milk option. Therefore, the researchers hypothesize this new RAU label would entice farmers to minimize antibiotics more than they do for conventional, unlabeled milk.

Therapeutic HIV vaccine with Oxford technology achieves encouraging results

Artist illustration of the HIV virus.
Illustration Credit: Darwin Laganzon

A phase I/IIa clinical trial that the University of Oxford collaborated on has demonstrated that a T-cell therapeutic HIV vaccine was associated with better control of the virus rebound when antiretroviral therapy (ART) was temporarily withdrawn.

Researchers carrying out the AELIX-002 study, whose results have been published in Nature Medicine, reported that two fifths of participants without any genetic background associated with spontaneous HIV control were able to stay off ART for the six-month duration of the supervised ART pause.

The vaccine in the study – developed by AELIX Therapeutics – delivered the HIVACAT T-cell Immunogen (HTI) using a combination of DNA vector, modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) vector and simian adenovirus vector ChAdOx1. The latter two vaccines were constructed at Oxford.

Tomáš Hanke, Professor of Vaccine Immunology at the Jenner Institute, Nuffield Department of Medicine, who leads on HIV vaccine development, said:

‘This result provides further encouragement that active immunization against HIV may be possible, slowing HIV replication, providing a window of treatment holidays for people living with HIV and eventually leading to HIV cure. T cells/T-cell vaccines are likely to play an important part in the final package for HIV cure and, perhaps, other advanced therapies for difficult diseases.’

Endangered Devils Hole pupfish is one of the most inbred animals known

A curious, captive-raised Devils Hole pupfish at the Ash Meadows Fish Conservation Facility in Nevada. The facility maintains a refuge population of pupfish as a backup to the wild population, which fluctuates over decades and once dipped to a mere 35 individuals.
Resized Image using AI by SFLORG
Photo Credit: Olin Feuerbacher/USFWS

As its name implies, the Devil’s Hole pupfish lives in a truly hellish environment.

Confined to a single deep limestone cave in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, 263 of them live in water that hovers around 93 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, with food resources so scarce that they are always on the edge of starvation, and with oxygen levels so low that most other fish would die immediately. The pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis, lives in the smallest habitat of any known vertebrate.

New research now documents the extreme effect that these harsh and isolated conditions have had on this fish’s genetic diversity.

In a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, University of California, Berkeley, biologists report the first complete genome sequences of eight pupfish species from the American Southwest — 30 individuals in all, including eight Devils Hole pupfish. Astoundingly, the Devils Hole pupfish is so inbred that 58% of the genomes of these eight individuals are identical, on average.

“High levels of inbreeding are associated with a higher risk of extinction, and the inbreeding in the Devils Hole pupfish is equal to or more severe than levels reported so far in other isolated natural populations, such as the Isle Royale wolves in Michigan, mountain gorillas in Africa and Indian tigers,” said lead researcher Christopher Martin, UC Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology and curator of ichthyology in the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. “Although we were not able to directly measure fitness, the increased inbreeding in these pupfish likely results in a substantial reduction in fitness.”

Waikīkī Beach studies reveal why shoreline is chronically eroding

Waikīkī Beach is at the center of Hawaiʻi’s tourism hub, with a valuation of $2.2 billion, according to a 2016 study. Two published studies from researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Climate Resilience Collaborative (CRC) provide new understanding of how and why the iconic beach is chronically eroding—enabling coastal managers and policymakers to more effectively manage the coastline.

During a two-year study from 2018 to 2020 published in the journal Marine Geology that included weekly surveys, a research team led by CRC Geospatial Analyst Anna Mikkelsen, found that the beach is primarily dominated by longshore transport, meaning that sand is moved from one end of the beach to another. This is contrary to standard beach models that predict cross-shore transport where sand is moved from nearshore to an offshore section of the beach.

“Another surprising finding was that we did not find any clear seasonal signal,” said Mikkelsen. “Instead of seeing high volumes of sand in summer, and low volumes in winter, we saw consistently increasing beach volume the first 12 months of the study and then erosion of the beach the following 10 months.”

The researchers discovered that the primary environmental drivers controlling the amount of sand present and the width of the beach include wave energy from south swell and trade-wind generated waves, and the water level.

Researchers identify protein linked to heart failure in chemo patients: Finding could save millions of lives

Dr. Lorrie Kirshenbaum from the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences
Source: University of Manitoba

A team led by Dr. Lorrie Kirshenbaum from the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences and St. Boniface Hospital Research has identified a protein called TRAF2 that stops functioning in cancer patients taking the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, which can result in heart failure.

“The finding could lead to new drugs that save cancer patients,” said Kirshenbaum, lead investigator and UM Canada Research Chair in molecular cardiology and director of the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, St. Boniface Hospital Albrechtsen Research Centre.

While doxorubicin is used to treat many types of cancer, particularly breast and ovarian cancer, some patients who receive the drug develop heart problems that lead to heart failure.

Using a variety of state-of-the-art approaches, the researchers discovered that doxorubicin impairs the activity of TRAF2 in the heart which leads to heart failure. The team also showed that interventions that restored the TRAF2 activity suppressed the unwanted side effects and heart failure induced by doxorubicin treatment.

“This is a significant finding that we are very excited about,” said Kirshenbaum, professor of physiology & pathophysiology and pharmacology & therapeutics, Max Rady College of Medicine, University of Manitoba. “We discovered that TRAF2 was consistently down-regulated in cancer patients with heart failure who had received doxorubicin treatment. Our pre-clinical study showed that by restoring TRAF2, we could prevent injury to the heart muscle and heart failure induced by doxorubicin.”

Substance use disorders linked to poor health outcomes in wide range of physical health conditions

Photo Credit: Concord90

In a study published today in The Lancet Psychiatry, researchers looked at the risk of mortality and loss of life-years among people who developed 28 different physical health conditions, comparing those who had previously been hospitalized with substance use disorder against those who had not.

They found that patients with the most health conditions were more likely than their counterparts to die during the study period if they had been hospitalized with substance use disorder prior to the development of these conditions. For most subsequent health conditions, people with substance use disorders also had shorter life-expectancies than did individuals without substance use disorders.

One in twenty people worldwide aged 15 years or older lives with alcohol use disorder, while around one in 100 people have psychoactive drug use disorders. Although substance use disorders have considerable direct effects on health, they are also linked to a number of physical and mental health conditions. Consequently, the presence of these contributes to higher risk of mortality and shorter lifespan in people with substance use disorders.

To explore this link further, researchers analyzed patient records from Czech nationwide registers of all-cause hospitalizations and deaths during the period from 1994-2017. They used a novel design, estimating the risk of death and life-years lost after the onset of multiple specific physical health conditions in individuals with a history of hospitalization for substance use disorders, when compared with matched counterparts without substance use disorder but with the same physical health condition.

Characterizing the ‘Noisy Life of a Musician’: Risks and Benefits for Brain Aging

Skoe's study will gather information about participants' noise environments, both while playing music and doing other daily activities.
Credit: Pixabay

As a child growing up in Germany, Erika Skoe taught herself to play German songs on the piano before she was comfortable speaking the language. Skoe, now an associate professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences at UConn and self-described lapsed musician has made a career studying hearing and brain function in people young to old, with a special focus on language and music.

Previous research has shown that regular exposure to noise may accelerate brain aging. But other work shows older musicians’ brain and cognitive function resembles that of somebody much younger. To Skoe, these independent lines of research seemed at odds: if noise exposure is harmful to the brain, why are older musicians neurologically sharper than non-musicians, given that musicians are at higher risk of experiencing dangerous noise levels?

In a new $1.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, titled “The Noisy Life of the Musician: Implications for Healthy Brain Aging,” Skoe will lead an effort to reconcile the health benefits and hazards of being a musician and their interplay as people age. This study was funded through the NIH Sound Health initiative, a program supporting research on health applications of music.

New View on the Brain: It’s All in the Connections

Source: Radboud University Nijmegen

It’s not the individual brain regions but rather their connections that matter: neuroscientists propose a new model of how the brain works. This new view enables us to understand better why and how our brains vary between individuals. The researchers published it in a special issue of Science on November 4th.

Our right hemisphere is for creativity, and the left is for rational thinking. It’s an urban myth that stems from a classical view of how our brain works, namely that we have several brain regions that all have a specific function. Even though this ‘modular’ view of the brain is superseded, it can still be found in many textbooks.

However, we should look at brain function differently, according to neuroscientists Stephanie Forkel at Radboud University and Michel Thiebaut de Schotten at the University of Bordeaux. Brain functions are not localized in individual brain regions but rather emerge from the exchange between these regions.

Platypus Populations Impacted by Large River Dams Are More Vulnerable to Threats

Photo Credit: David Clode

The platypus is possibly the most irreplaceable mammal existing today. They have a unique combination of characteristics, including egg-laying despite being mammals, venomous spurs in males, electroreception for locating prey, biofluorescent fur, multiple sex chromosomes, and the longest evolutionary history in mammals.

Platypuses are a threatened species in some Australian states and their conservation is of concern more broadly, due to known decline in their populations.

A new study published in Communications Biology examined the genetic makeup of platypuses in free-flowing and nearby rivers with large dams in New South Wales. These included the free-flowing Ovens River, along with the dammed Mitta Mitta River, and the free-flowing Tenterfield Creek, along with the nearby Severn River regulated by a large dam.

The study found that large dams are significant barriers to platypus movements. This was reflected in greater genetic differentiation between platypuses above and below large dams compared to rivers without dams. Importantly, this genetic differentiation increased over time since the dam was built, reflecting the long-term impacts of the dam.

Tonga volcano had highest plume ever recorded, new study confirms

The Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption as seen by Japan's Himawari-8 satellite on 15 January 2022. Top image: Eruption at 4:20 UTC (about 15 minutes into the eruption); Middle image: Eruption at 4:50 UTC (45 minutes into the eruption); Bottom image: Eruption at 5:40 UTC (1 hour 35 minutes into the eruption).
Resized Image using AI by SFLORG
Image credit: Simon Proud / STFC RAL Space / NCEO / JMA.

A new analysis led by Oxford University researchers has shown the devastating Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption in January 2022 created the tallest volcanic plume ever recorded. The research has been published in the journal Science.

At 57km high (35 miles), the ash cloud generated by the eruption is also the first to have been observed in the mesosphere, a layer of the atmosphere more commonly associated with shooting stars. The previous record-holder, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, caused a plume was recorded as 40km high, although accurate satellite images, such as those taken over Tonga, were not available at the time.

The Tonga eruption took place under the sea, around 65km from the country’s main island, causing tsunamis felt as far away as Russia, the United States, and Chile. The waves claimed six lives, including two people in Peru, 10,000km away.

‘It’s the first time we’ve ever recorded a volcanic plume reaching the mesosphere. Krakatau in the 1800s might have done as well, but we didn’t see that in enough detail to confirm,’ said Dr Simon Proud, a National Centre for Earth Observation senior scientist at the University of Oxford and the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s RAL Space facility.

A new weapon against antibiotic-resistant bacteria

This inoculated MacConkey agar culture plate cultivated colonial growth of Gram-negative, small rod-shaped and facultatively anaerobic Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria. K. pneumoniae bacteria are commonly found in the human gastrointestinal tract, and are often the cause of hospital acquired, or nosocomial infections involving the urinary and pulmonary systems.
Credit: CDC

The unreasonable use of antibiotics has pushed bacteria to develop resistance mechanisms to this type of treatment. This phenomenon, known as antibiotic resistance, is now considered by the WHO as one of the greatest threats to health. The lack of treatment against multi-resistant bacteria could bring us back to a time when millions of people died of pneumonia or salmonella. The bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae, which is very common in hospitals and particularly virulent, is one of the pathogens against which our weapons are becoming blunt. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has discovered that edoxudine, an anti-herpes molecule discovered in the 60s, weakens the protective surface of Klebsiella bacteria and makes them easier to eliminate for immune cells. These results can be read in the journal PLOS One.

Klebsiella pneumoniae causes many respiratory, intestinal and urinary tract infections. Due to its resistance to most common antibiotics and its high virulence, some of its strains can be fatal for 40% to 50% of infected people. There is an urgent need to develop new therapeutic molecules to counter it. “Since the 1930s, medicine has relied on antibiotics to get rid of pathogenic bacteria,” explains Pierre Cosson, professor in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, who led this research. “But other approaches are possible, among which trying to weaken the bacteria’s defense system so that they can no longer escape the immune system. This avenue seems all the more promising as the virulence of Klebsiella pneumoniae stems largely from its ability to evade attacks from immune cells.”

Polarized X-Rays Reveal Shape, Orientation of Extremely Hot Matter Around Black Hole

An artist’s impression of the Cygnus X-1 system, with the black hole appearing in the center and its companion star on the left. New measurements from Cygnus X-1, reported Nov. 3 in the journal Science, represent the first observations of a mass-accreting black hole from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, an international collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency.
Illustration Credit: John Paice

Researchers’ recent observations of a stellar-mass black hole called Cygnus X-1 reveal new details about the configuration of extremely hot matter in the region immediately surrounding the black hole.

Matter is heated to millions of degrees as it is pulled toward a black hole. This hot matter glows in X-rays. Researchers are using measurements of the polarization of these X-rays to test and refine models that describe how black holes swallow matter, becoming some of the most luminous sources of light — including X-rays — in the universe.

The new measurements from Cygnus X-1, reported Nov. 3 in the journal Science, represent the first observations of a mass-accreting black hole from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, an international collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). Cygnus X-1 is one of the brightest X-ray sources in our galaxy, consisting of a 21 solar mass black hole in orbit with a 41 solar mass companion star.

Carnivore Gut Microbes Offer Insight into Health of Wild Ecosystems

wild American marten
Photo Credit: Cunigunde 

A new study finds the microbial ecosystem in the guts of wild marten (Martes americana) that live in relatively pristine natural habitat is distinct from the gut microbiome of wild marten that live in areas that are more heavily impacted by human activity. The finding highlights an emerging tool that will allow researchers and wildlife managers to assess the health of wild ecosystems.

“Specifically, we found that wild marten in relatively undisturbed environments have more carnivorous diets than martens in human-affected areas,” says Erin McKenney, co-lead author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University. Marten are small mammals, related to weasels, ferrets and mink.

“In conjunction with our other work on carnivore microbiomes, this finding tells us the microbial ecosystems in carnivore guts can vary significantly, reflecting a carnivore’s environment,” McKenney says. “Among other things, this means we can tell how much humans are impacting an area by assessing the gut microbiomes of carnivores that live in that area – which can be done by testing wild animal feces. In practical terms, this work reveals a valuable tool for assessing the health of wild ecosystems.”

“Our goal here was to determine how, if at all, human disturbance of a landscape affects the gut microbiome of American marten that live in that landscape,” says Diana Lafferty, co-lead author of the paper and an assistant professor of biology at Northern Michigan University. “And the answers here were pretty clear.”

How magnetism could help explain Earth’s formation

Artist's impression of massive impact with proto-Earth.
Image Credit NASA/JPL.

A peculiar property of the Earth’s magnetic field could help us to work out how our planet was created 4.5 billion years ago, according to a new scientific assessment.

There are several theories about how the Earth and the Moon were formed, most involving a giant impact. They vary from a model where the impacting object strikes the newly formed Earth a glancing blow and then escapes, through to one where the collision is so energetic that both the impactor and the Earth are vaporized.

Our theoretical understanding of the Earth’s magnetic field today can actually tell us something about the very formation of the Earth-Moon system.

Now scientists at the University of Leeds and the University of Chicago have analyzed the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids and concluded that the Earth must have been magnetized either before the impact or as a result of it.

They claim this could help to narrow down the theories of the Earth-Moon formation and inform future research into what really happened.