There are plenty of great scientific research stories out this week. Here’s a look at just a few of them.
There are plenty of great scientific research stories out this week. Here’s a look at just a few of them.
New Tech to Allow for Oral Insulin Delivery
Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paul School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) published research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing an oral delivery method for insulin. Insulin doesn’t generally handle oral delivery well. It doesn’t last long in stomach acid and is poorly absorbed out of the intestine. The Harvard researchers developed an ionic liquid made up of choline and geranic acid that is placed inside a capsule with an acid-resistant enteric coating. “Once ingested, insulin must navigate a challenging obstacle course before it can be effectively absorbed into the bloodstream,” said senior author Samir Mitragotri, Hiller Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at SEAS, in a statement. “Our approach is like a Swiss Army knife, where one pill has tools for addressing each of the obstacles that are encountered.”
Oral insulin would more closely mimic the way a healthy pancreas delivers insulin to the liver. It would also improve patient compliance, particularly in patients who have issues with needles and injections.
Can Poliovirus be Used to Treat Brain Tumors?
Researchers at Duke Cancer Institute developed a modified poliovirus, which they used to treat patients with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. The data was presented at the 22nd International Conference on Brain Tumor Research and Therapy in Norway and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers treated 61 patients in a Phase I clinical trial. They all had grade IV malignant glioma. The trial evaluated seven doses of the recombinant nonpathogenic polio-rhinovirus chimera (PVSRIPO), which recognizes the poliovirus receptor CD1555, which is expressed broadly in neoplastic cells of solid tumors. At the time of publication, the survival rate at 24 months and 36 months was 21 percent, with patients remaining alive more than 70 months, more than 69 months, and more than 57 months after receiving the modified virus.
The technology has been licensed by Istari Oncology, which recently began a Phase II trial, with one group receiving the modified virus and chemotherapy and the other group receiving just the poliovirus alone.
AI Company Develops Neural Computer for De Novo Molecular Design
Insilico Medicine, a Rockville, Maryland-based artificial intelligence (AI) company, published research in The Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling detailing their development of a deep neural network architecture. The architecture was named Reinforced Adversarial Neural Computer (RANC), and it was designed for the de novo design of novel small-molecule organic structures that used the generative adversarial network (GAN) and reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Which means what?
Essentially they’ve developed a new type of AI that can be used to construct models of small-molecule drugs.
“Our engine generates more unique and diverse structures as well as clusters with the lengths close to the reference samples, keeping the distributions of key molecular descriptors as in the training sets,” said Evgeny Putin, the deep learning lead at Insilico, in a statement. “As a result, many of the generated structures meet the crucial criteria used in medicinal chemistry of today and are able to pass medical chemistry filters. I hope this approach will become a starting point to making perfect molecules for specific targets and multiple targets that will have a much higher chance of becoming great drugs.”
Finding Out How an Antiviral Gene Works
Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, part of Montefiore, described the mechanism of an antiviral gene called RSAD2 in the journal Nature. “Nature has given us a template for creating a powerful and safe antiviral compound,” said Steven Almo, study leader and professor and chair of biochemistry, professor of physiology & biophysics, in a statement. What they found was the gene coded for an enzyme called ddhCTP, which disrupts the replication of the Zika virus. The researchers will start investigating the enzyme’s activity in other viruses.
“Drugs based on this compound may have a favorable safety profile,” Almo added. “We’ve been living with ddhCTP for many millions of years and long ago developed mechanisms to prevent it from interfering with the replication of our own cells.” They believe it can inhibit all flaviviruses, which includes Zika, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis and hepatitis C.
Researchers Map How Malaria Parasite Invades Human Red Blood Cells
Using the Nobel Prize-winning technology cryo-EM (cyro-electron microscopy) researchers at Melbourne (Australia)’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, in collaboration with researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes in the U.S., have mapped the first contact between Plasmodium vivax malaria parasites and young red blood cells. The work was published in Nature. Earlier this year, the group published data in the journal Science describing how P. vivax uses the human transferrin receptor to gain access to the red blood cells. Now, the team has been able to visualize the activity at an atomic level.
“We’ve now mapped, down to the atomic level, exactly how the parasite interacts with the human transferrin receptor,” said Wai-Hong Tham, associate professor at the Walter and Eliza Institute, in a statement. “This is critical for taking our original finding to the next stage—developing potential new antimalarial drugs and vaccines. Cryo-EM is really opening doors for researchers to visualize structures that were previously too large and complex to ‘solve’ before.”
