Georgia virus update

The state still has some work to do when it comes to virus deaths per 100,000 people (we’re #44 out of 50, to be specific), but we’re seeing a big decline in cases along with the rest of the country — down 43 percent over the last 14 days. Deaths usually lag cases by a few weeks.

One odd outlier is Chattahoochee County, where cases remain high and haven’t been leveling off. Whether there’s something going on there medically or just with reporting is hard to say.

I know why the caged cells secretes

Okay, this is pretty impressive. A team of diabetes specialists and biomedical engineers has developed a sci-fi way to pretty much cure mice of diabetes.

First they “take a person’s skin or fat cells, make them into stem cells and then grow those stem cells into insulin-secreting cells.”

“But,” I hear you say, “If someone has diabetes, the immune system will attack those cells.” Good point! That’s where the biomed engineers come in. They take those insulin producers and implant them in a cage made of nanoscale fibers. The ‘bars’ of the cage are large enough to let insulin out, but small enough to keep immune cells away.

So the cells live happy lives in their nanoscale cages, releasing insulin in response to blood sugar levels.

At this point, you are allowed to say, “Holy wow.”

The cells in the implants continued to secrete insulin and control blood sugar in the mice for up to 200 days. And those cells continued to function despite the fact that the mice were not treated with anything to suppress their immune systems.

Again with the smell

This time it’s cancer, and it can be sniffed out from blood samples with an electronic nose. (Yes, you have been reading a lot about dogs and machines using smell to detect diseases. It’s a thing.)

The “nose,” developed by oncology researchers at UPenn, has been trained with artificial intelligence to identify the various volatile organic compounds given off by certain kinds of cells — cancer, in this case.

Previous studies from the researchers demonstrated that VOCs released from tissue and plasma from ovarian cancer patients are distinct from those released from samples of patients with benign tumors.

Because every cell gives off certain VOCs, the technique could potentially be used to detect other diseases and conditions. Why, combined with devices like Duke’s analytical toilet (see May 26), employers and parents will know exactly what’s wrong with you!

Marijuana on the fishy brain

If you know someone pregnant with a zebrafish, tell her to avoid cannabis. Canadian researchers found that exposing gestating zebrafish to cannabinoids made them “suffer a significant drop in neural activity later in life.” And this was both THC and CBD.

[A]ctivity decreased by 60 to 70 per cent in the group bathed in THC and by more than 70 per cent in the group immersed in CBD. The decrease was even more pronounced in zebrafish that developed in a solution containing both compounds.

You might have noticed the use of the word “bathed.” That gives you an idea of how much drug we’re talking about: “The amount of drug used would be equivalent to someone consuming cannabis or the active compounds every day for two to three weeks at the very start of a pregnancy.”

We killed a clade!

Since 2012, the H3N2 flu has been changing, with different versions — clades, not variants — splitting from the main line. Problem: The further they drifted, the more likely we’d develop an ineffective vaccine.

But, thanks to Covid prevention measures, the flu hasn’t been able to spread. And not only has influenza been a non-factor this year…

… it appears that one of the H3N2 clades may have disappeared — gone extinct. The same phenomenon may also have occurred with one of the two lineages of influenza B viruses, known as B/Yamagata.

Take that you rotten flu variant.

New yeast-infection treatment

Scynexis’s ibrexafungerp (now “Brexafemme”) is the first new kind of antifungal in more than 20 years. It’s just been approved by the FDA to treat vaginal yeast infections — one tablet a day. Its only competitor is Pfizer’s Diflucan (fluconazole). That is all.