Pamela Pooneh Heshmati MD,PhD,CCHt

Scientists from Rockefeller University and Mount Sinai have unveiled a groundbreaking discovery shedding light on addiction. Their findings reveal a newly identified brain pathway that offers crucial insights into the neural processing of rewards and addictive substances. By delving into the nucleus accumbens (NAc), a key region involved in reward processing, the researchers discovered how cocaine and morphine activate specific subsets of neurons, leading to distinct behavioral outcomes compared to natural rewards. Moreover, they identified a molecular pathway involving the Rheb gene and the mTOR pathway, which may explain how addictive substances skew natural urges, such as hunger and thirst, by altering neural communication and memory. This research not only deepens our understanding of addiction but also opens new avenues for developing targeted interventions to restore the brain's natural reward processing mechanisms. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/esC6rVna #AddictionResearch #AnimalResearch #LaboratoryAnimalSciences

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New research by Dr. Karina Eterovic, MSc, PhD, NYS CoQ highlights the importance of germline sequencing for accurate cancer diagnosis and treatment. This approach helps differentiate between tumor-derived mutations and clonal hematopoiesis (CH) mutations, leading to more precise treatment decisions. ➡️ Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/ezM6KXWx #cancer #cancercare #cancerdiagnostics #diagnostics #cancerresearch

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Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) have identified a unique histone tag on adult oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) that could lead to the development of new therapies to spur myelin repair. Their findings, reported today in the Journal of Cell Biology, could significantly shape the development of new therapies for a range of neurodegenerative disorders like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and schizophrenia. The histone tag, which is a lysine 8 acetylation on histone H4, is significantly different from the histone modifications found in neonatal OPCs and may allow researchers to clear a significant hurdle in current research, namely the inability to translate research findings from neonatal OPCs to adult therapies. According to the investigators, the adult OPC histone modification appears to regulate histone proliferation, which is a critical process that enables the generation of stem-like cells that can develop into mature oligodendrocytes. These oligodendrocytes have the ability to produce new myelin. Myelin is the protective sheath around nerve fibers which, when damaged, is known to cause a range of neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases. “The identification of this histone tag provides a clearer understanding of OPC proliferation in the adult brain, and it also holds promise for developing more effective therapies for conditions characterized by myelin damage, like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and several psychiatric disorders,” said the study’s principal investigator Patrizia Casaccia, MD, PhD, founding director of the CUNY ASRC Neuroscience Initiative and a professor of biology and biochemistry at the CUNY Graduate Center. “By focusing on adult OPCs, we can move closer to repairing myelin damage and improving patient outcomes.”

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Miranda Lynch at Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute and a team led by collaborator Gregory Babbitt at Rochester Institute of Technology have just published a paper in Biophysical Journal describing ATOMDANCE.     ATOMDANCE is a new user-interfaced suite of machine learning-based tools, designed for investigating comparative molecular dynamics. The software can be used to identify key sites involved in dynamic responses during functional binding interactions involving DNA, small-molecule drugs, and virus-host recognition, as well as understanding shifts in global and local site coordination occurring during allosteric activation of a pathogenic protease.   This is an important tool for the scientific community, helping to open up new pathways in drug studies for multiple diseases, focused on how molecules move.    Read the paper by visiting: https://lnkd.in/gcihHX77

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$20 million NIH grant will support a team led by Tufts University School of Medicine researchers to enroll one of the U.S.’s largest prospective studies of Lyme disease patients. https://lnkd.in/gwC9HftY

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Our protocol includes behavioral preparation, like mock MRI sessions, to help them adjust. Using machine learning to analyze these images will deepen our understanding of the brain's role in these behaviors and could identify NDD-specific biomarkers linked to behaviors of concern and fatigue, guiding future therapeutic research.

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Researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) have unveiled an innovative AI model that predicts responses to immunotherapy. This model, called LORIS, integrates various clinical factors like age, cancer type, prior treatments, blood albumin levels, and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio. By incorporating DNA sequencing data and tumor mutational burden, the AI accurately identifies patients likely to respond positively to immune checkpoint inhibitors. This breakthrough offers insights into both short and long-term survival outcomes across different cancer types. #Immunotherapy #AIModel

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AI meets Rheumatology: ChatGPT and patient response optimization Large language models like ChatGPT, trained on vast text data, are revolutionizing healthcare by understanding and generating human-like language.

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Wishing all the best to our students who are leaving the island this term and embarking on their clinical rotations! You got this! 💪 What advice do you have for students entering clinical studies? Leave some words of wisdom in the comments! #ClinicalRotations #ClinicalStudies #MedicalSchool #SGU

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A persistent challenge in psychiatry is the lack of objective measures for evaluating and tracking mental health over time. https://jhuapl.link/kb9 By harnessing recent technological breakthroughs in physiological monitoring and machine learning, researchers at Johns Hopkins APL in collaboration with psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins Medicine, have made significant strides toward creating objective digital measures for assessing and tracking mental health. Tagged TEAPOT by its APL developers, the project encompasses a telehealth suite for performing “digital phenotyping” for psychiatric health to provide physicians with clinically relevant data during virtual visits. While traditional phenotyping entails deriving a person’s physical appearance from their DNA, digital phenotyping taps physiological data to estimate symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders, such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. #JHUAPL | #JHU | Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health | #psychiatry | #DigitalPhenotyping | #telehealth | #MentalHealth | #neurodiversity

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💡Explore Neuroscience’s Special Issue on Ischemic #stroke: from fibrinology to functional recovery & learn about the latest advances in the field! Browse issue 550 of IBRO’s journal: https://ow.ly/uTkH50ThpJy #Neuroscience #neurosciencejournal #publishing

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Learn about receptors on corneal afferent sensory neurons and their role in tear production. https://bit.ly/4f0uo7T

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Learn about receptors on corneal afferent sensory neurons and their role in tear production. https://bit.ly/4f0uo7T

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snRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics used to identify interneurons diversity in the human dorsal striatum: the proposed taxonomy is composed of eight main classes and fourteen subclasses. https://lnkd.in/grSQvFq5 #interneurons #striatum #neuroscience #neuralpathways #neuralnetworks #neuralcircuits #parkinson

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Work from Dr. A. Sophie Brumm and Dr. Kathy Niakan's team at The Francis Crick Institute demonstrates that NODAL signaling is active in the human blastocyst, but is not required to initiate or maintain the #pluripotent epiblast. Article: bit.ly/3ZcQiht Discussion: bit.ly/4g70Sxm

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🔔 Wednesday reading recommendations & Latest online!-Vol. 16 No.1 📌 A Two-Genome Portrayal of Mitochondrial Disorders: A Review with Clinical Presentations ✒ By Jude M. Abadie 🖇 https://lnkd.in/gsfydtZS 🔑 Keywords: mitochondrial disorders；maternal inheritance mitochondrial genome 😎Welcome to your reading! #MitochondrialDisorders #MaternalInheritance #MitochondrialGenome #Genetics #Heredity

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