Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sheb]

Natural Killer (NK) cells are already a thing, you want to avoid confusion.

[ChairmanPoo]

my umderstanding is that the one getting approved soonish is Novartis', which is patient specific...

Whoops! Did a quick reread, and edited the post accordingly. Still, I'm really interested to see how far we can push Engineered Immune Cells as a technology. I'd love to see widespread ways to teach people's immune systems to fight disease without needing individual vaccines, or more varieties of cells that are engineered to attack other hard-to-treat illnesses.

Well, concerning CAR T Cell therapy:

AFAIK  the ongoing research goes around improving the antitumor response by adding stimulating factors to the chimeric antigen receptor, and looking for new targets to engineer CAR-T cells around (eg: other haematological neoplasms, solid tumors). My erstwhile boss told me a while ago that one CAR-T Cell expert he had talked to had mentioned that another mid-to-long term goal would be transfecting more than one receptor type per cell, thus achieving multitarget CAR-Ts (worth noting that while my former boss is something of a transplantation guru, at least back then he did not work with CARTs himself. This might have changed in the last two years though).

Worth noting that CAR-T cell therapy is not without it's side effects. Most notably huge cytokine storms (even nastier than the ones in allo-HSCT) when the cells start killing the tumor, to the extent that in the US there's an experimental monoclonal antibody to try to deal with them. There's also some off-target toxicity and GvHD (I talked with an oncologist in London who was working in CAR-T-Cells in solid tumors, and she was specially concerned about this). And Juno Therapeutics had to stop their own anti-CD19 trial because they had a number of cases of people dying of some weird neurotoxic effect.  Also, AFAIK in the leukemia trials they try to consolidate the responses with HSCT anyway, to prevent relapses by CD-19-negative clones.

Nonetheless this is a type of therapy that is very promising, and I like the subject a lot 

There's a very interesting review of the subject that I just downloaded from here. I'm reading through it at the moment.


I'd really like to be able to get a foot in a project of this sort...

[Scoops Novel]

METALLIC HYDROGEN NIGGAS! Woot woot

That's a room temperature superconductor, in case ya didn't know.

There's still some doubt over it, or it may be legit with caveats such as decaying once the diamond screws are loosened.

TOO LATE FOR THE HYPE TRAIN

[forsaken1111]

I need a thermal superconducting pillowcase so I can dip one end in a bucket of icewater and have a forevercold pillow.

[wierd]

Even with it requiring the diamond anvils in place, (diamond is an interesting industrial material that is getting easier and easier to work with concerning vapor based deposition) it may be possible to form channels in CVD diamond chips, then "crush" hydrogen into them using a low temp  superfluid hydrogen and another diamond anvil. That would give you a room temp superconductor, right next to a high bandgap semiconductor.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

What's this about T-cells and narratives?

[Putnam]

METALLIC HYDROGEN NIGGAS! Woot woot

That's a room temperature superconductor, in case ya didn't know.

There's still some doubt over it, or it may be legit with caveats such as decaying once the diamond screws are loosened.

TOO LATE FOR THE HYPE TRAIN

you may wanna fix those links, the first one should link to this article

[Max™]

Both links went to the same place and neither mentioned metallic hydrogen, much less room temperature metallic hydrogen, but Putnam just covered that.

It's interesting, but before holy grailing it, remember two things: diamond anvils, and exciting rocket fuel.

[Sirus]

How exciting.

[Max™]

Indeed, I_sp of ~1750 or so is close to 4 times that of the propellant we used to chuck space shuttles into orbit.

[smjjames]

-amoeba bacteria symbiosis-

This is extremely likely how we came to have mitochondria and chloroplasts, and is one of the theories. Sure, they both barely resemble their bacterial ancestors, but both of them have DNA and grow and divide just like bacteria do. It's pretty much the ultimate symbiote situation, except one side has all but lost it's 'identity' as a bacteria.

[Reelya]

Yeah, it's pretty cool that they saw what is basically that in the lab. The amoebas are now dependent on the bacteria being there. Additionally, since they now inhabit a very specific type of amoeba these bacteria might in fact lose the ability to move into "normal" amoebas. I should probably link a source however because the claims are pretty big (1995 paper):

Spoiler: Amoeba symbiosis research (click to show/hide)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14732171

The large, free-living amoebae are inherently phagocytic. They capture, ingest and digest microbes within their phagolysosomes, including those that survive in other cells. One exception is an unidentified strain of Gram-negative, rod-shaped bacteria that spontaneously infected the D strain of Amoeba proteus and came to survive inside them. These bacteria established a stable symbiotic relationship with amoebae that has resulted in phenotypic modulation of the host and mutual dependence for survival.

Well that's just one paper, from googling around it seems that the original paper was in the 1970s and the same people kept researching them up until about 2004, by which point they could report on how the bacteria were switching specific gene expressions in the host on and off deliberately. But obviously what's happening vs knowing specifically how it's happening are two different matters. Obviously in 30 years of symbiosis there's a lot more that would have been going on, but with only one lab doing the research you can only glean so much information.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15537083
After that, the guy researching this retired (he'd been at it since the 1960s).

BTW two independent teams at Harvard and University of Maryland have simultaneously reported the creation of "time crystals" (structures which repeat in both time and space, i.e. the undulate) using very different materials to make them, based on a theory that was recently published:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/01/28/2027253/scientist-investigate-a-brand-new-form-of-matter-time-crystals
Obviously this needs to be replicated further, but two completely different teams doing it at the same time, from stuff that is completely different and getting the same result which matches the theory, that in itself ticks the right boxes.

[redwallzyl]

Yeah, it's pretty cool that they saw what is basically that in the lab. The amoebas are now dependent on the bacteria being there. Additionally, since they now inhabit a very specific type of amoeba these bacteria might in fact lose the ability to move into "normal" amoebas. I should probably link a source however because the claims are pretty big (1995 paper):

Spoiler: Amoeba symbiosis research (click to show/hide)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14732171

The large, free-living amoebae are inherently phagocytic. They capture, ingest and digest microbes within their phagolysosomes, including those that survive in other cells. One exception is an unidentified strain of Gram-negative, rod-shaped bacteria that spontaneously infected the D strain of Amoeba proteus and came to survive inside them. These bacteria established a stable symbiotic relationship with amoebae that has resulted in phenotypic modulation of the host and mutual dependence for survival.

Well that's just one paper, from googling around it seems that the original paper was in the 1970s and the same people kept researching them up until about 2004, by which point they could report on how the bacteria were switching specific gene expressions in the host on and off deliberately. But obviously what's happening vs knowing specifically how it's happening are two different matters. Obviously in 30 years of symbiosis there's a lot more that would have been going on, but with only one lab doing the research you can only glean so much information.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15537083
After that, the guy researching this retired (he'd been at it since the 1960s).

BTW two independent teams at Harvard and University of Maryland have simultaneously reported the creation of "time crystals" (structures which repeat in both time and space, i.e. the undulate) using very different materials to make them, based on a theory that was recently published:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/01/28/2027253/scientist-investigate-a-brand-new-form-of-matter-time-crystals
Obviously this needs to be replicated further, but two completely different teams doing it at the same time, from stuff that is completely different and getting the same result which marches the theory, that in itself ticks the right boxes.

perpetual motion crystals?

[Max™]

That's what you'd think but it's a different thing.

They used a good example in the article there: tap a chunk of jello with your finger at a steady rate and you expect it to wobble in time with the taps, Discrete Time Crystals (DTC) exhibit a different period than the input alone should produce, so it exhibits behavior which isn't reversable in time like most things actually are. Dropping an egg and having it shatter is normal, and having a splattered egg reform and fly into the air is not normal.

At the subatomic scale though, you get things which happen one way and know that sooner or later you'll observe it happening the other way, your accelerator makes a particle split into a neutrino and muon, at some point you'll observe a muon and neutrino come together and produce that particle.

In a DTC you're getting behaviors which only take place one way in time, the crystal atoms are pulsed and begin to resonate, and then start to exhibit a different resonant period from the pulses used to initiate it, which isn't something you can reverse to generate a chain of atoms that stop resonating in that way and settle into a regular periodic cycle without using a completely different method, if it is even possible at all.

If you did set up something to produce the later form of a DTC and had it evolve to the prior form, it wouldn't work when reversed like everything else does in physics, hence it is a broken symmetry.

A crystal like in a gem doesn't have an arrangement you would expect, evenly spaced and randomly distributed elements, instead it has the property that certain directions and arrangements are favored, so it exhibits a broken rotational or translational symmetry from certain directions but not others. Rotating a series of events through time and not having them operate the same way is new.

[tonnot98]

another source for the metal hydrogen if anyone's interested:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/80-years-late-scientists-finally-turn-hydrogen-into-a-metal/

"Diamond failure," they note, "is the principal limitation for achieving the required pressures to observe SMH," where SMH means "solid metallic hydrogen" rather than "shaking my head."