Bioscience News - GEG Tech top picks

This eye-on-a-chip, complete with a blinking eyelid, is helping scientists and drug developers to improve their understanding and treatment of DED, among other potential uses. The research, published in Nature Medicine, outlines the accuracy of the eye-on-a-chip as an organ stand-in and demonstrates its utility as a drug testing platform.

Prostate cancer contains nerve cells that are linked to disease progression, but their source was unknown. A mouse study reveals that cells from the brain invade prostate tumours and give rise to this nerve-cell population.

Neural processes (yellow) and pre- and post-synaptic proteins (teal and magenta) in a mouse brain. Gao et al/Science 2019

 A kill code is embedded in every cell in the body whose function may be to cause the self-destruction of cells that become cancerous, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. As soon as the cell’s inner bodyguards sense it is mutating into cancer, they punch in the kill code to extinguish the mutating cell.  

A patient with complete lower limb paralysis can independently step again following a combination of electronic spinal cord stimulation and rehabilitation therapy, reports a study from Mayo Clinic and UCLA (Nature Medicine 10.1038/s41591-018-0175-7).

Recent example:, an article in the Journal of Integrative Oncology stated that a clinical study had shown the extract of propolis, a secretion that bees use to glue hives together, was more effective than chemotherapy in treating colorectal cancer. The study was fake and the authors were affiliated with a research center that doesn’t exist,

Researchers at Caltech have developed an artificial neural network made out of DNA that can solve a classic machine learning problem: correctly identifying handwritten numbers. The work is a significant step in demonstrating the capacity to program artificial intelligence into synthetic biomolecular circuits.

Bacteria are environmentally resilient and can be engineered to sense various biomolecules. Mimee et al. combined biosensor bacteria with a miniaturized wireless readout capsule to produce a minimally invasive device capable of in vivo biosensing in harsh, difficult-to-access environments (see the Perspective by Gibson and Burgell). The device successfully measured gastrointestinal bleeding in pigs.

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has published a paper in Science that details a new technique allowing anyone to 3D bioprint tissue scaffolds out of collagen, the major structural protein in the human body. This first-of-its-kind method brings the field of tissue engineering one step closer to being able to 3D print a full-sized, adult human heart.

Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have shown, in mice, that one type of stem cell that makes adult neurons is the source of this lifetime stock of new cells in the hippocampus.