Transhumanismus

Cancer cells are tricky foes.

Our body’s immune system is normally on the lookout for signs of tumor cells. If any are detected, it launches killer T cells—a type of immune cell—to seek and destroy the threat. But it’s a cat-and-mouse game: As tumors grow, they form a protective barrier to counteract immune attacks. Immune cells lose their targeting and killing efficacy inside the protective zone.

One workaround is to genetically engineer more powerful T cells. A relatively new and promising approach called CAR T therapy adds more “targeting beacons” onto T cells extracted from each patient to convert them into tailored cancer torpedoes.

So far, six CAR T therapies have been approved by the FDA for various blood cancers. But they have an Achilles heel. Once inside the body, their numbers slowly dwindle, and they gradually lose their cancer-battling abilities.

Some scientists are working to make CAR T cells more deadly. Others are turning T cells into Trojan horses to infiltrate tumors. One such therapy was approved in May 2024, marking the first cellular therapy for a solid tumor—melanoma, an aggressive skin cancer.

Even with these upgrades and alternatives, a tumor’s protective shield is still difficult to penetrate. This month, a team from Asgard Therapeutics and Lund University took a clever new approach to tackle tumors from within. The work was

Using a technology called cellular reprogramming, the team transformed tumor cells in mice into a type of immune cell called cDC1 cells. These cells are master regulators of the immune system. They’re rare inside tumors but when present can trigger powerful immune responses that eat away at the cancer’s protective shield and recruit T cells to the target.

Mice treated with the gene therapy remained cancer-free for at least 100 days and resisted cancer resurgence in a lab test.

“The data provides preclinical proof-of-concept for an off-the-shelf, yet tumor-specific, first-in-class cancer immunotherapy,” wrote Asgard Therapeutics in a press release.

Identity Change

At the heart of the therapy is a technology called cellular reprogramming. Here, scientists use a combination of proteins called transcription factors to turn genes on or off. This process can change a cell’s identity.

The most famous example of cellular reprogramming is the Nobel Prize-winning creation of pluripotent cells (iPSCs). These cells have revolutionized regenerative medicine and how we study diseases. Here, four transcription factors convert mature skin cells back into stem cells. This type of cell can develop into any other type of cell in the body. Additional factors can then gently coax the newly minted iPSCs to assume new identities—for example, brain organoids (“mini-brains”), egg and sperm precursor cells, or liver and bone cells.

Soon after its introduction, the groundbreaking technology showed promise for gene therapy.

In 2008, a study found that delivering three transcription factors directly into the pancreases of diabetic mice turned them into insulin-releasing cells that kept the critters’ blood sugar levels in check. Another study, also in mice, converted heart cells that cause dangerous scarring after a heart attack into healthy heart muscle cells, leading to improved heart function. Scientists have also reprogrammed “supporting” brain cells in mice into functional neurons after brain injury or to treat neurodegenerative diseases.

But these cellular identity swaps all began with relatively normal cells. Tumor cells don’t work the same way—and their abnormalities could torpedo the process.

Tumor Makeover

The new study builds on the team’s previous work reprogramming tumor cells in petri dishes. They aimed to convert these tumor cells into cDC1 cells because of their “manager” role coordinating immune responses.

First, they found three transcription factors that convert other cells into cDC1 cells. Next, they inserted genetic sequences of those factors into a virus stripped of its disease-causing properties. These viral carriers can deliver genes into cultured cells or the body.

As a proof of concept, the team grew melanoma cells in petri dishes, treated some with the gene therapy, and injected the engineered cells into healthy mice. Without the treatment, the melanoma cells rapidly expanded. Cells with the gene therapy, however, couldn’t grow as fast.

The average survival rate increased from 19 days without treatment to 43 days with it. Adding conventional immunotherapy drugs to the mix cleared all animals of the tumor cells.

The transformed cDC1 cells readily dismantled the tumor’s protective shield. After nine days, more immune cells swarmed the tumor, suggesting its protective barrier had begun to erode.

Classic immunotherapy drugs often exhaust T cells, limiting their expansion and ability to attack. Reprogramming lowered the chances of exhaustion in multiple types of T cells by as much as eight-fold.

Meanwhile, the treatment boosted the number of memory T cells—which, true to their name, retain a ledger of previous targets, including specific cancers. These cells guard the body against cancer resurgence. Once they detect previously defeated tumors, they alert other components of the immune system to strike before the cancer cells can regrow and spread.

Can It Work in the Human Body?

Tumors in mice aren’t exactly the same as those in people. In another test, the team grew little balls of cells from multiple types of immortalized cancer cell lines in petri dishes. Some of these so-called “spheroids” included cells and other factors from a tumor’s protective shield.

Reprogramming the cancer cells into cDC1 cells decreased the size of the cancerous balls, although the efficiency differed between cancer types. Adding common drugs for cancer—which notoriously lower some immune responses—didn’t affect reprogramming and subsequent immune cell activation.

So far, good. But could the therapy work directly inside the body—without having to extract tumor cells and reprogram them in the lab. In a final test, the team injected the treatment into melanoma tumors in mice over the course of two weeks.

Half of those treated remained cancer-free for 100 days, with an abundance of T cells infiltrating the tumor area. The treated mice also readily fought off an experimental model of cancer relapse, holding malignant cells at bay for at least another 60 days—compared to control mice who developed cancers within a month.

There’s a long road before the treatment reaches clinics. But the team is already testing safety profiles, drug metabolism, and scaling up manufacturing processes to get ready for clinical trials.

Turning tumor cells against themselves “offers the advantages of a precision cell therapy, while overcoming the challenges” of genetically engineering immune cells outside the body, as happens in currently approved CAR T therapies, wrote the authors. That said, work that directly engineers CAR T cells inside the body is also on the rise.

Still, results here pave the way for human trials. They lay “the foundation for a new class of immunotherapies based on the unique function” of different types of immune cells, made inside the body using reprogramming, the authors concluded.

Image Credit: T cells (red) attack cancer cells (white) / Rita Elena Serda, Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health

Nuclear fusion has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years with a host of startups and governments seriously pursuing the idea. UK scientists have now provided a sneak peek of a novel reactor design that could be providing power to the grid by 2040.

Despite a reputation for being a technology that’s always 20 years away, recent years have seen a flurry of investment as optimism grows that its time may finally have come. According to the Fusion Industry Association, last year’s $900 million in new funding brought the total to $7.1 billion.

That optimism doesn’t seem to have been dampened by major delays to ITER, the international collaboration that has long been considered fusion’s flagship project. Building on the knowledge gleaned from ITER and other publicly funded experiments, a host of startups is now betting they can deliver smaller fusion reactors at a fraction of the time and cost.

But it’s not only the private sector pushing to commercialize the technology. In 2019, the UK government provided £300 million in funding for the design of a novel 200-megawatt reactor known as Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP). And in a series of papers recently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, its designers have now given a glimpse of what they’ve come up with.

The most common design for a fusion reactor is known as a tokamak, which heats a cloud of ionized gas, known as plasma, until the atoms fuse together and generate huge amounts of energy in the process. The plasma is contained by incredibly strong magnetic fields generated by coils of magnets wrapped around a doughnut-shaped reactor vessel.

STEP follows similar principles but is tall and narrow, more like a cored apple, according to Science. While that might not seem like much of a difference, it means the distance between the center of the reactor vessel and the magnets wrapping around it is smaller than a classic tokamak.

This reduction in distance makes it possible to use smaller, less expensive magnets to contain the plasma and makes the entire design more compact, according to the Financial Times. The shape of a spherical tokamak also produces an inherently more stable plasma, which should improve performance. However, the design does have trade-offs.

Fusion reactors normally use two isotopes of hydrogen fuel called deuterium and tritium. Tritium is incredibly rare though, so reactors generate their own tritium by way of a reaction between the metal lithium and neutrons released by the fusion reaction. This lithium is stored in tritium breeding blankets wrapped around the chamber, which also act as radiation shields to protect the magnets.

The hole in the center of a tokamak normally houses large magnets and a breeding blanket. But with the narrower design of the spherical tokamak there is much less space, so the STEP reactor will have to do away with the blanket and significantly shrink the magnets, or even do away with some.

Fortunately, new high-temperature superconducting tape, which is also being used by many private startups, could help create more compact magnets. But the reactor will have to generate enough tritium using only the blankets on the outer wall of the chamber, which means the team had to come up with an optimized design using liquid lithium and a vanadium alloy.

The reactor’s designers have also opted for an ambitious architecture with joints in the magnets, which will make it possible to open the top of the vessel. This will significantly speed up maintenance jobs and therefore lower operational costs.

However, project leader Paul Methven, told Science that the recently published designs are still far from being set in stone. And while the project has already found itself a site—a retired coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire county—the project is currently in discussions with the UK government to secure four more years of funding to come up with a final blueprint.

So, whether or not this reactor ever sees the light of day remains to be seen. But it is encouraging to see government investing significant sums to push the technology forward.

Image Credit: STEP

SYNESTHETES

Tired: Listening to music.
Wired: Feeling the music.

A mind-bending new suit straps onto your torso, ankles and wrists, then uses actuators to translate audio into vivid vibration. The result: a new way for everyone to experience music, according to its creators. That’s especially exciting for people who have trouble hearing.

THE FEELIES

The Music: Not Impossible suit was created by design firm Not Impossible Labs and electronics manufacturing company Avnet. The suit can create sensations to go with pre-recorded music, or a “Vibrotactile DJ” can adjust the sensations in real time during a live music event.”

Billboard writer Andy Hermann tried the suit out, and it sounds like a trip.

“Sure enough, a pulse timed to a kickdrum throbs into my ankles and up through my legs,” he wrote. “Gradually, [the DJ] brings in other elements: the tap of a woodblock in my wrists, a bass line massaging my lower back, a harp tickling a melody across my chest.”

MORE ACCESSIBLE

To show the suit off, Not Impossible and Avnet organized a performance this past weekend by the band Greta Van Fleet at the Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas. The company allowed attendees to don the suits. Mandy Harvey, a deaf musician who stole the show on America’s Got Talent last year, talked about what the performance meant to her in a video Avnet posted to Facebook.

“It was an unbelievable experience to have an entire audience group who are all experiencing the same thing at the same time,” she said. “For being a deaf person, showing up at a concert, that never happens. You’re always excluded.”

READ MORE: Not Impossible Labs, Zappos Hope to Make Concerts More Accessible for the Deaf — and Cooler for Everyone [Billboard]

More on accessible design: New Tech Allows Deaf People To Sense Sounds

The post Make Music A Full Body Experience With A “Vibro-Tactile” Suit appeared first on Futurism.

IN THE FEELS

Today’s prosthetics can give people with missing limbs the ability to do almost anything — run marathons, climb mountains, you name it. But when it comes to letting those people feel what they could with a natural limb, the devices, however mechanically sophisticated, invariably fall short.

Now researchers have created a “synthetic skin” with a sense of touch that not only matches the sensitivity of natural skin, but in some cases even exceeds it. Now the only challenge is getting that information back into the wearer’s nervous system.

UNDER PRESSURE

When something presses against your skin, your nerves receive and transmit that pressure to the brain in the form of electrical signals.

To mimic that biological process, the researchers suspended a flexible polymer, dusted with magnetic particles, over a magnetic sensor. The effect is like a drum: Applying even the tiniest amount of pressure to the membrane causes the magnetic particles to move closer to the sensors, and they transmit this movement electronically.

The research, which could open the door to super-sensitive prosthetics, was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

SPIDEY SENSE TINGLING

Tests shows that the skin can sense extremely subtle pressure, such as a blowing breeze, dripping water, or crawling ants. In some cases, the synthetic skin responded to pressures so gentle that natural human skin wouldn’t be able to detect them.

While the sensing ability of this synthetic skin is remarkable, the team’s research doesn’t address how to transmit the signals to the human brain. Other scientists are working on that, though, so eventually this synthetic skin could give prosthetic wearers the ability to feel forces even their biological-limbed friends can’t detect.

READ MORE: A Skin-Inspired Tactile Sensor for Smart Prosthetics [Science Robotics]

More on synthetic skin: Electronic Skin Lets Amputees Feel Pain Through Their Prosthetics

The post “Synthetic Skin” Could Give Prosthesis Users a Superhuman Sense of Touch appeared first on Futurism.

BRAIN BOOST

There’s a gadget that some say can help alleviate depression and enhance creativity. All you have to do is place a pair of electrodes on your scalp and the device will deliver electrical current to your brain. It’s readily available on Amazon or you can even make your own.

But in a new paper published this week in the Creativity Research Journal, psychologists at Georgetown University warned that the practice is spreading before we have a good understanding of its health effects, especially since consumers are already buying and building unregulated devices to shock them. They also cautioned that the technique, which scientists call transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), could have adverse effects on the brains of young people.

“There are multiple potential concerns with DIY-ers self-administering electric current to their brains, but this use of tES may be inevitable,” said co-author Adam Green in a press release. “And, certainly, anytime there is risk of harm with a technology, the scariest risks are those associated with kids and the developing brain”

SHOCK JOCK

Yes, there’s evidence that tES can help patients with depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, and other serious conditions, the Georgetown researchers acknowledge.

But that’s only when it’s administered by a trained health care provider. When administering tES at home, people might ignore safety directions, they wrote, or their home-brewed devices could deliver unsafe amounts of current. And because it’s not yet clear what effects of tES might be on the still-developing brains of young people, the psychologists advise teachers and parents to resist the temptation to use the devices to encourage creativity among children.

The takeaway: tES is likely here to stay, and it may provide real benefits. But for everyone’s sake, consumer-oriented tES devices should be regulated to protect users.

READ MORE: Use of electrical brain stimulation to foster creativity has sweeping implications [Eurekalert]

More on transcranial electrical stimulation: DARPA’s New Brain Device Increases Learning Speed by 40%

The post People Are Zapping Their Brains to Boost Creativity. Experts Have Concerns. appeared first on Futurism.

MIND CONTROL

The military is making it easier than ever for soldiers to distance themselves from the consequences of war. When drone warfare emerged, pilots could, for the first time, sit in an office in the U.S. and drop bombs in the Middle East.

Now, one pilot can do it all, just using their mind — no hands required.

Earlier this month, DARPA, the military’s research division, unveiled a project that it had been working on since 2015: technology that grants one person the ability to pilot multiple planes and drones with their mind.

“As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control … not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said, according to Defense One.

THE SINGULARITY

Sanchez may have unveiled this research effort at a “Trajectory of Neurotechnology” session at DARPA’s 60th anniversary event, but his team has been making steady progress for years. Back in 2016, a volunteer equipped with a brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to pilot an aircraft in a flight simulator while keeping two other planes in formation — all using just his thoughts, a spokesperson from DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office told Futurism.

In 2017, Copeland was able to steer a plane through another simulation, this time receiving haptic feedback — if the plane needed to be steered in a certain direction, Copeland’s neural implant would create a tingling sensation in his hands.

NOT QUITE MAGNETO

There’s a catch. The DARPA spokesperson told Futurism that because this BCI makes use of electrodes implanted in and on the brain’s sensory and motor cortices, experimentation has been limited to volunteers with varying degrees of paralysis. That is: the people steering these simulated planes already had brain electrodes, or at least already had reason to undergo surgery.

To try and figure out how to make this technology more accessible and not require surgical placement of a metal probe into people’s brains, DARPA recently launched the NExt-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. The plan is to make a device with similar capabilities, but it’ll look more like an EEG cap that the pilot can take off once a mission is done.

“The envisioned N3 system would be a tool that the user could wield for the duration of a task or mission, then put aside,” said Al Emondi, head of N3, according to the spokesperson. “I don’t like comparisons to a joystick or keyboard because they don’t reflect the full potential of N3 technology, but they’re useful for conveying the basic notion of an interface with computers.”

READ MORE: It’s Now Possible To Telepathically Communicate with a Drone Swarm [Defense One]

More on DARPA research: DARPA Is Funding Research Into AI That Can Explain What It’s “Thinking”

The post Military Pilots Can Control Three Jets at Once via a Neural Implant appeared first on Futurism.

ONE IN A MILLION TEN

Today, about 10 people on Earth have bladders they weren’t born with. No, they didn’t receive bladder transplants — doctors grew these folks new bladders using the recipients’ own cells.

On Tuesday, the BBC published a report on the still-nascent procedure of transplanting lab-grown bladders. In it, the publication talks to Luke Massella, who underwent the procedure more than a decade ago. Massella was born with spina bifida, which carries with it a risk of damage to the bladder and urinary tract. Now, he lives a normal life, he told the BBC.

“I was kind of facing the possibility I might have to do dialysis [blood purification via machine] for the rest of my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to play sports, and have the normal kid life with my brother.”

All that changed after Anthony Atala, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, decided he was going to grow a new bladder for Massella.

ONE NEW BLADDER, COMING UP!

To do that, Atala first removed a small piece of Massella’s own bladder. He then removed cells from this portion of bladder and multiplied them in a petri dish. Once he had enough cells, he coated a scaffold with the cells and placed the whole thing in a temperature controlled, high oxygen environment. After a few weeks, the lab-created bladder was ready for transplantation into Massella.

“So it was pretty much like getting a bladder transplant, but from my own cells, so you don’t have to deal with rejection,” said Massella.

The number of people with lab-grown bladders might still be low enough to count on your fingers, but researchers are making huge advances in growing everything from organs to skin in the lab. Eventually, we might reach a point when we can replace any body part we need to with a perfect biological match that we built ourselves.

READ MORE: “A New Bladder Made From My Cells Gave Me My Life Back” [BBC]

More on growing organs: The FDA Wants to Expedite Approval of Regenerative Organ Therapies

The post Lab-Grown Bladders Can Save People From a Lifetime of Dialysis appeared first on Futurism.