April 20th Research Roundup: Some of the Top Research Stories of the Week

Plenty of exciting news in the research world. Here’s a look at some of the top stories.

1. Researchers with the Sareen Laboratory at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center have created hypothalamic-like neurons from human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). The spin here is they came from the blood and skin cells of super-obese patients and from people with normal body weight. And what they found was the brain cells from the super-obese individuals had more problems with hormone regulation than in the normal body weight cells. The research was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

“We developed a great platform that could potentially be used to evaluate the effects of experimental therapeutics on patient-specific hypothalamic neurons from obese patients with different, genetic backgrounds, body mass index, and environmental exposures,” stated Dhruv Sareen, a stem cell biologist at Cedars-Sinai.

2. Theravance Biopharma, based in Dublin, Ireland, published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine regarding its IMPACT study of Trelegy Ellipta in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Trelegy Ellipta is a triple combination cocktail of fluticasone furoate, umeclidinium and vilanterol in a single inhaler. The results of the study are that the triple-combo was superior to members of two different classes of dual-combo therapies.

3. Researchers at ETH Zurich in Basel, Switzerland have developed a biomedical tattoo that becomes visible when calcium levels increase in the blood. Researcher Martin Fussenegger and his colleagues designed an implantable sensor that recognizes hypercalcemia, an early marker of numerous disorders, including kidney failure and several types of cancer. The engineered cells that contained a calcium-sensing receptor produce the dark pigment melanin when they detect higher-than-average calcium concentrations, which shows up on the skin as a dark patch. The technology demonstrated on mice.

4. Eric Betzig, group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, and a team of international researchers have developed a new microscope that can see inside living cells. It uses a thin plane of laser light to light up the cells within a subject. Then they added “adaptive optics” to cancel out visual distortions, harnessing technology used in astronomy. The videos shown are stunningly beautiful, although extremely data intensive. Betzig told STAT that once the labor-intensive part is completed, researchers he’s worked with are stunned, but many are left “crying a month later when they don’t know how to deal with 10 terabytes of data.”

5. Scientists from Brigham and Women's Hospital are engineering stem cells to grow mini-organs in the laboratory to study the effects of DISC1 mutations in cerebral organoids. The results are published in Translational Psychiatry.

“Mini-brains can help us model brain development,” said Tracy Young-Pearse, head of the Young-Pearse Lab at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at BWH, to Science Daily. “Compared to traditional methods that have allowed us to investigate human cells in culture in two-dimensions, these cultures let us investigate the three-dimensional structure and function of the cells as they are developing, giving us more information than we would get with a traditional cell culture.”

6. Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center published study results in the journal Nature Genetics linking Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) to seven major diseases. The virus, mostly known for causing mononucleosis, also increases the risks of systemic lupus erythematosis (SLE), multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), celiac diseases, and type 1 diabetes.

John Harley, director of the Center for Autoimmune Genomics and Etiology (CAGE) at Cincinnati Children’s, told Science Daily, “Now, using genomic methods that were not available 10 years ago, it appears that components made by the virus interact with human DNA in the places where the genetic risk of disease is increased. And not just for lupus, but at all these other diseases, too.”