Tag: Breakthrough

science

Breakthrough A.I. Makes Huge Leap Toward Solving 50-Year-Old Problem in Biology | Smart News

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Life on Earth relies on microscopic machines called proteins that are vital to everything from holding up the structure of each cell, to reading genetic code, to carrying oxygen through the bloodstream. With meticulous lab work, scientists have figured out the precise, 3-D shapes of about 170,000 proteins—but there are at least 200 million more to go, Robert F. Service reports for Science magazine.

Researchers have been trying to find efficient ways to estimate the shape of proteins since at least the 1970s, reports Will Douglas Heaven for MIT Tech Review. Now, the artificial intelligence company DeepMind, which is owned by the same company that owns Google, has developed a tool that can predict the 3-D shapes of most proteins with similar results to experiments in the lab, Cade Metz reports for the New York Times. While lab experiments can take years to tease out a protein structure, DeepMind’s

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science

DeepMind’s latest AI breakthrough can accurately predict the way proteins fold

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Alphabet-owned DeepMind may be best known for building the AI that beat a world-class Go player, but the company announced another, perhaps more vital breakthrough this morning. As part of its work for the 14th Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction, or CASP, DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 AI has shown it can guess how certain proteins will fold themselves with surprising accuracy. In some cases, the results were perceived to be “competitive” with actual, experimental data.



diagram: AlphaFold 2

AlphaFold 2

“We have been stuck on this one problem – how do proteins fold up – for nearly 50 years,” said Professor John Moult, CASP chair and co-founder, in a DeepMind blog post. “To see DeepMind produce a solution for this, having worked personally on this problem for so long and after so many stops and starts, wondering if we’d ever get there, is a very special moment.”

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Researchers and enthusiasts across

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science

DeepMind Breakthrough Helps to Solve How Diseases Invade Cells

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(Bloomberg) — Google’s artificial intelligence unit took a giant step to predict the structure of proteins, potentially decoding a problem that has been described as akin to mapping the genome.



a hand holding a cellphone: A Deepmind Health logo sits displayed on the screen of an Apple Inc. iPhone in this arranged photograph in London, U.K. on Monday, Nov. 26, 2018. Three years ago, artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies Ltd. embarked on a landmark effort to transform health care in the U.K. Now plans by owner Alphabet Inc. to wrap the partnership into its Google search engine business are tripping alarm bells about privacy.

© Bloomberg
A Deepmind Health logo sits displayed on the screen of an Apple Inc. iPhone in this arranged photograph in London, U.K. on Monday, Nov. 26, 2018. Three years ago, artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies Ltd. embarked on a landmark effort to transform health care in the U.K. Now plans by owner Alphabet Inc. to wrap the partnership into its Google search engine business are tripping alarm bells about privacy.

DeepMind Technologies Ltd.’s AlphaFold reached the threshold for “solving” the problem at the latest Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction competition. The event started in 1994 and is held every two years to accelerate research on the topic.

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Different folds in a protein determine how it will interact

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science daily

A breakthrough in the study of stellar nurseries — ScienceDaily

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The gas clouds in which stars are born and evolve are vast regions of the Universe that are extremely rich in matter, and hence in physical processes. All these processes are intertwined on different size and time scales, making it almost impossible to fully understand such stellar nurseries. However, the scientists in the ORION-B* programme have now shown that statistics and artificial intelligence can help to break down the barriers still standing in the way of astrophysicists.

With the aim of providing the most detailed analysis yet of the Orion molecular cloud, one of the star-forming regions nearest the Earth, the ORION-B team included in its ranks scientists specialising in massive data processing. This enabled them to develop novel methods based on statistical learning and machine learning to study observations of the cloud made at 240,000 frequencies of light**.

Based on artificial intelligence algorithms, these tools make it possible to

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science and technology

Breakthrough Properties’ Life Science Fund Raises $1B

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Breakthrough Properties, a joint venture formed in 2019 by Tishman Speyer and Bellco Capital, has completed the initial close of the Breakthrough Life Science Property Fund. The fund has raised $1 billion in capital and co-investments and is continuing to seek additional capital for a perpetual investment vehicle attached to the fund.

Breakthrough Properties will utilize the fund to develop and acquire lab facilities in top life science markets globally.

Today, the needs of life science companies are rapidly evolving, due in large part to new market dynamics created by the pandemic. “The life science industry has experienced unprecedented productivity, innovation and scientific discovery in recent years as biotechnology and technology have been converging. The events of 2020 have further fueled the need for scientific innovations,” said Arie Belldegrun, co-chairman of Breakthrough and chairman of Bellco, said in a statement about the firm’s investment strategy.

Venture capital investment is playing

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science daily

Breakthrough in studying the enzyme that ultimately produces fish odor syndrome — ScienceDaily

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Fish odour syndrome (trimethylaminuria) is a debilitating disease, in which the liver cannot break down the smelly chemical trimethylamine which is produced by enzymes from bacteria residing in the gut leaving people with a fish like odour. Researchers from the University of Warwick are paving the way to prevent the syndrome after a breakthrough in studying the enzyme in the gut which produces trimethylamine.

Currently there is no cure for fish odour syndrome, a condition which causes an unpleasant fishy smell that can affect breath, sweat, pee and vaginal fluids.

The cause of fish odour syndrome is when an enzyme pathway in the gut called CntA/B, produces TMA, this happens when the enzyme breaks down a TMA precursor called L-Carnitine which is found in dairy, fish and meat. If an individual lacks a functional liver enzyme called FMO3, they cannot degrade TMA into a non-smelly chemical form, TMAO (trimethylamine oxide).

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technology current events

Greenwich LifeSciences Announces Second Publication and Second Poster Presentation of Phase III Clinical Trial of Potential Breakthrough Technology for Recurring Breast Cancer

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STAFFORD, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Greenwich LifeSciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: GLSI) (the “Company”), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of GP2, an immunotherapy to prevent breast cancer recurrences in patients who have previously undergone surgery, today announced the publication of a second abstract at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), jointly authored by Professor Mothaffar F. Rimawi, the Global Principal Investigator of the GP2 Phase III clinical trial, and the Executive Medical Director and Co-Leader of the Breast Cancer Program at the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine, and Professor C. Kent Osborne, Tina and Dudley Sharp Chair in Oncology and the founding Director of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine. The abstract will be displayed as the Company’s second poster on Wednesday, December 9, 2020 in a virtual format with an introductory audio track.

The abstract highlights

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modern technology

New Army research breakthrough could lead to more powerful lasers

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A new way to create diamond-structured crystals, discovered by Army researchers, creates a method for scientists to build more powerful lasers, which are found in key targeting and missile defense systems.

The standard way of making the necessary crystal structures for lasers uses either string-like or “close-packed cubic colloidal crystals.”

Those forms didn’t provide the necessary foundation for use with certain wavelengths of light.

The new diamond lattice structure that’s been created could play a major role in more efficient, smaller, lightweight laser systems, light-based quantum computing, atomic clocks and gyroscopes — all key to precision navigation and timing, the backbone of complex modern targeting systems.

The “photonic technique” was conducted by researchers at multiple universities, funded through Army research into laser technology.

“There’s been a great desire among engineers to make a diamond structure,” said David Pine, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at New York University, one of

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new technology

Breakthrough technology boosts breast cancer diagnosis

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Breakthrough technology boosts breast cancer diagnosis
The technology in use. Credit: 4D Path

New technology which helps doctors more accurately diagnose breast cancer has been recognised by the US Food & Drugs Administration (FDA) for its exceptional potential clinical value.

The 4-D Q-plasia OncoReader Breast uses digitised pathology slides of breast cancer tissue to diagnose disease with improved accuracy, effectively acting as an intelligent aid for clinical histopathologists. The FDA status means the software is now on a fast track to full market approval in the US and will boost progress to regulatory approval and clinical adoption in the UK and globally.

Developed through a three-year partnership between the University and 4-D Path, a Boston company producing computer-aided cancer diagnostic products, the device has received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation.

The sought-after status is an acknowledgement by the FDA that a test, drug or device is a breakthrough in innovation and stands to improve the current standard

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science daily

Breakthrough may increase life expectancy in brain and ovarian cancers — ScienceDaily

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Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have demonstrated that the CRISPR/Cas9 system is very effective in treating metastatic cancers, a significant step on the way to finding a cure for cancer. The researchers developed a novel lipid nanoparticle-based delivery system that specifically targets cancer cells and destroys them by genetic manipulation. The system, called CRISPR-LNPs, carries a genetic messenger (messenger RNA), which encodes for the CRISPR enzyme Cas9 that acts as molecular scissors that cut the cells’ DNA.

The revolutionary work was conducted in the laboratory of Prof. Dan Peer, VP for R&D and Head of the Laboratory of Precision Nanomedicine at the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at TAU. The research was conducted by Dr. Daniel Rosenblum together with Ph.D. student Anna Gutkin and colleagues at Prof. Peer’s laboratory, in collaboration with Dr. Dinorah Friedmann-Morvinski from the School of Neurobiology, Biochemistry & Biophysics at TAU; Dr. Zvi

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