Connect with us

The Conversation

Brain cancer in children is notoriously hard to treat – a new mRNA cancer vaccine triggers an attack from within

Published

on

theconversation.com – Christina von Roemeling, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, University of Florida – 2024-05-01 10:01:09

How cancer vaccines are delivered into the body influences their effectiveness.

Liuhsihsiang/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Christina von Roemeling, University of Florida and John Ligon, University of Florida

Brain cancers remain among the most challenging tumors to treat. They often don’t respond to traditional treatments because many chemotherapies are unable to penetrate the protective barrier around the brain. Other treatments like radiation and surgery can leave patients with lifelong debilitating side effects.

As a result, brain cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in children. Brain tumors in children frequently do not respond to treatments developed for adults, likely due to the fact that pediatric brain cancers are not as well-studied as adult brain cancers. There is an urgent need to develop new treatments specific to children.

We developed a new messenger-RNA, or mRNA, cancer vaccine, described in newly published research, that can deliver treatments more effectively in children who have brain cancer and teach their immune systems to fight back.

Close-up of child's hand with IV line placed held by adult's hand

Cancer treatments designed for adults may not necessarily work as well in children.

Virojt Changyencham/Moment via Getty Images

How do cancer vaccines work?

The immune system is a complex network of cells, tissues and organs whose primary function is to continuously surveil the body for threats posed by foreign invaders – pathogens that damage tissues and make you sick. It accomplishes this by recognizing antigens, or abnormal proteins or molecules, on pathogens. T cells that recognize these antigens seek out and destroy the pathogens.

Your immune system also protects you from domestic threats like cancer. Over time, your cells sustain DNA damage from either internal or external stressors, leading to mutations. The proteins and molecules produced from mutated DNA look quite different from the ones cells typically produce, so your immune system can recognize them as antigens. Cancer develops when cells accumulate mutations that enable them to continue to grow and divide while simultaneously going undetected by the immune system.

In 1991, scientists identified the first tumor antigen, helping lay the framework for modern-day immunotherapy. Since then, researchers have identified many new tumor antigens, facilitating the development of cancer vaccines. Broadly, cancer vaccines deliver tumor antigens into the body to teach the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells that display those antigens. Although all cancer vaccines conceptually work very similarly, they each significantly vary in the way they are developed and the number and combination of antigens they carry.

Cancer vaccines help the immune system differentiate between healthy cells and tumor cells.

One of the biggest differences among cancer vaccines is how they are created. Some vaccines use protein fragments, or peptides, of tumor antigens that are directly given to patients. Other vaccines use viruses reengineered to express cancer antigens. Even more complex are vaccines where a patient’s own immune cells are collected and trained to recognize cancer antigens in a laboratory before being delivered back to the patient.

Currently, there is a lot of excitement and focus among researchers on developing mRNA-based cancer vaccines. Whereas DNA is the blueprint of which proteins to make, mRNA is a copy of the blueprint that tells cells how to build these proteins. Thus, researchers can use mRNA to create blueprint copies of potential antigens.

mRNA cancer vaccines

The COVID-19 pandemic brought significant attention to the potential of using mRNA-based vaccines to stimulate the immune system and provide protection against the antigens they encode for. But researchers have been investigating the use of mRNA vaccines for treating various cancers since before the pandemic.

Our team of scientists in the Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program at University of Florida has spent the past 10 years developing and optimizing mRNA vaccines to treat brain cancer.

Cancer vaccines have faced significant challenges. One key hurdle is that these vaccines may not always trigger a strong enough immune response to eradicate the cancer completely. Moreover, tumors are not made up of one type of cancer cell, but rather a complex mix of cancer cells that each harbors its own unique cocktail of mutations.

Our cancer vaccine seeks to address these issues in a number of ways.

Diagram of lipid molecules formed a spherical shell around single-stranded mRNAs

Lipid nanoparticles can carry therapeutic mRNA into the body.

Buschmann et al. 2021/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

First, we designed our vaccines by using the RNA of a patients’ own cancer cells as a template for the mRNA inside our nanoparticles. We also packaged our cancer vaccine inside of nanoparticles made up of specialized lipids, or fat molecules. We maximized the amount of mRNA packaged within each nanoparticle by sandwiching them between lipid layers like the layers of an onion. In this way, we increase the likelihood that the mRNA molecules in our nanoparticles produce enough tumor antigens from that patient’s cancer to activate an immune response.

Also, instead of injecting nanoparticles into the skin, muscle or directly into the tumor, as is commonly done for many therapeutic cancer vaccines, our mRNA nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream. From there, they travel to organs throughout the body involved in the immune response to teach the body to fight against the cancer. By doing so, we’ve found that the immune system launches a near immediate and powerful response. Within six hours of receiving the vaccine, there is a significant increase in the amount of blood markers connected to immune activation.

Looking to the future

Our mRNA-based vaccines are currently undergoing early-phase clinical trials to treat real patients with brain cancer.

We administered our mRNA-based vaccine to four adult patients with glioblastoma who had relapsed after previous treatment. All patients survived several months longer than the expected average survival at this advanced stage of illness. We expect to treat children with a type of brain tumor called pediatric high-grade glioma by the end of the year.

Importantly, mRNA vaccines can be developed to treat any kind of cancer, including childhood brain tumors. Our Pediatric Cancer Immunotherapy Initiative focuses on developing new immune-based therapies for children afflicted with cancer. After developing an mRNA vaccine for glioma in chidren, we will expand to treat other kinds of pediatric brain cancers like medulloblastoma and potentially treat other kinds of cancers like skin cancer and bone cancer.

We are hopeful that mRNA-based vaccines may lead to more children being cured of their brain tumors.The Conversation

Christina von Roemeling, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, University of Florida and John Ligon, Assistant Professor of Hematology, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Can AI chatbots boost human creativity?

Published

on

theconversation.com – Jaeyeon Chung, Assistant Professor of Business, Rice University – 2024-11-13 07:26:00

AI chatbots can give helpful suggestions.

Carol Yepes/Moment via Getty Images

Jaeyeon Chung, Rice University

Think back to a time when you needed a quick answer, maybe for a recipe or a DIY project. A few years ago, most people’s first instinct was to “Google it.” Today, however, many people are more likely to reach for ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational AI, which is changing the way people look for information.

Rather than simply providing lists of websites, ChatGPT gives more direct, conversational responses. But can ChatGPT do more than just answer straightforward questions? Can it actually help people be more creative?

I study new technologies and consumer interaction with social media. My colleague Byung Lee and I set out to explore this question: Can ChatGPT genuinely assist people in creatively solving problems, and does it perform better at this than traditional search engines like Google?

Across a series of experiments in a study published in the journal Nature Human Behavour, we found that ChatGPT does boost creativity, especially in everyday, practical tasks. Here’s what we learned about how this technology is changing the way people solve problems, brainstorm ideas and think creatively.

ChatGPT and creative tasks

Imagine you’re searching for a creative gift idea for a teenage niece. Previously, you might have googled “creative gifts for teens” and then browsed articles until something clicked. Now, if you ask ChatGPT, it generates a direct response based on its analysis of patterns across the web. It might suggest a custom DIY project or a unique experience, crafting the idea in real time.

To explore whether ChatGPT surpasses Google in creative thinking tasks, we conducted five experiments where participants tackled various creative tasks. For example, we randomly assigned participants to either use ChatGPT for assistance, use Google search, or generate ideas on their own. Once the ideas were collected, external judges, unaware of the participants’ assigned conditions, rated each idea for creativity. We averaged the judges’ scores to provide an overall creativity rating.

One task involved brainstorming ways to repurpose everyday items, such as turning an old tennis racket and a garden hose into something new. Another asked participants to design an innovative dining table. The goal was to test whether ChatGPT could help people come up with more creative solutions compared with using a web search engine or just their own imagination.

two adults and two small children play with an arrangement of cardboard boxes in a brightly lit room with hard flooring

ChatGPT did well with the task of suggesting creative ideas for reusing household items.

Simon Ritzmann/DigitalVision via Getty Images

The results were clear: Judges rated ideas generated with ChatGPT’s assistance as more creative than those generated with Google searches or without any assistance. Interestingly, ideas generated with ChatGPT – even without any human modification – scored higher in creativity than those generated with Google.

One notable finding was ChatGPT’s ability to generate incrementally creative ideas: those that improve or build on what already exists. While truly radical ideas might still be challenging for AI, ChatGPT excelled at suggesting practical yet innovative approaches. In the toy-design experiment, for example, participants using ChatGPT came up with imaginative designs, such as turning a leftover fan and a paper bag into a wind-powered craft.

Limits of AI creativity

ChatGPT’s strength lies in its ability to combine unrelated concepts into a cohesive response. Unlike Google, which requires users to sift through links and piece together information, ChatGPT offers an integrated answer that helps users articulate and refine ideas in a polished format. This makes ChatGPT promising as a creativity tool, especially for tasks that connect disparate ideas or generate new concepts.

It’s important to note, however, that ChatGPT doesn’t generate truly novel ideas. It recognizes and combines linguistic patterns from its training data, subsequently generating outputs with the most probable sequences based on its training. If you’re looking for a way to make an existing idea better or adapt it in a new way, ChatGPT can be a helpful resource. For something groundbreaking, though, human ingenuity and imagination are still essential.

Additionally, while ChatGPT can generate creative suggestions, these aren’t always practical or scalable without expert input. Steps such as screening, feasibility checks, fact-checking and market validation require human expertise. Given that ChatGPT’s responses may reflect biases in its training data, people should exercise caution in sensitive contexts such as those involving race or gender.

We also tested whether ChatGPT could assist with tasks often seen as requiring empathy, such as repurposing items cherished by a loved one. Surprisingly, ChatGPT enhanced creativity even in these scenarios, generating ideas that users found relevant and thoughtful. This result challenges the belief that AI cannot assist with emotionally driven tasks.

Future of AI and creativity

As ChatGPT and similar AI tools become more accessible, they open up new possibilities for creative tasks. Whether in the workplace or at home, AI could assist in brainstorming, problem-solving and enhancing creative projects. However, our research also points to the need for caution: While ChatGPT can augment human creativity, it doesn’t replace the unique human capacity for truly radical, out-of-the-box thinking.

This shift from Googling to asking ChatGPT represents more than just a new way to access information. It marks a transformation in how people collaborate with technology to think, create and innovate.The Conversation

Jaeyeon Chung, Assistant Professor of Business, Rice University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More

The post Can AI chatbots boost human creativity? appeared first on theconversation.com

Continue Reading

The Conversation

Brain-training games remain unproven, but research shows what sorts of activities do benefit cognitive functioning

Published

on

theconversation.com – Ian McDonough, Associate Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York – 2024-11-13 07:25:00

Brain-training games sell themselves as a way to maintain cognitive function, but the evidence isn’t there yet.

Eva-Katalin/E+ via Getty Images

Ian McDonough, Binghamton University, State University of New York and Michael Dulas, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Some 2.3 million of U.S. adults over 65 – more than 4% – have a diagnosis of dementia. But even without a diagnosis, a certain amount of cognitive decline is normal as age sets in.

And whether it’s due to fear of cognitive decline or noticing lapses in cognition when we are stressed, many of us have had moments when we thought we could use an extra cognitive boost.

The good news is research has shown that people can make changes throughout adulthood that can help prevent or delay cognitive decline and even reduce their risk of dementia. These include quitting smoking and properly managing blood pressure.

In addition to these lifestyle changes, many people are turning to brain-training games, which claim to optimize your brain’s efficiency and capacity at any age. The makers of brain-training apps and games claim their products can do everything from staving off cognitive decline to improving your IQ.

But so far these claims have been met with mixed evidence.

We are cognitive neuroscientists who focus on brain health across the adult lifespan. We study how the brain informs cognition and the ways we can use brain imaging to understand cognitive and brain-training interventions. We aim to understand how our brains change naturally over time as well as what we can do about it.

Ongoing research shows what actually happens to the brain when it is engaged in new learning, offering a window into how people can sustain their brain health and how brain-training games can play a role. We believe these studies offer some strategies to train your brain the right way.

Brain training fact vs. fiction

Brain training is a set of tasks, often computerized, based on well-known tests to measure a type of cognition, but in a gamified manner.

Most brain-training games were designed to help participants master one or more specific skills. One example is a game that shows you a letter and number combination, where sometimes you must quickly identify whether the letter is even or odd, while other times you must switch to deciding whether the letter is a consonant or vowel. The game may increase in difficulty by requiring you to accomplish the task within a set time limit.

Such games are designed to require a high level of attention, fast processing speed and a flexible mind to alternate between the rules, known as executive functioning.

But it turns out that the specific skills learned in these games often do not translate to more general, real-world applications. Whether brain games meet their end goal of lasting cognitive improvement across a number of areas is still highly debated among psychologists. To make such claims requires rigorous evidence that playing a specific game improves cognitive or brain performance.

In 2016, in fact, the Federal Trade Commission issued a US$50 million penalty to one of the most popular brain-training games at the time, Lumosity, for misleading consumers into thinking that they could achieve higher levels of mental performance at work or at school and prevent or delay cognitive decline by using its product.

If improving on a brain game helps the player get better only at that or highly similar games, maybe game developers need a different approach.

Improving our brain function is possible, even if many of the claims made by developers of brain-training games are unsupported by scientific evidence.

Put some challenge into it

In a study dubbed the Synapse Project, in which one of us, Ian McDonough, helped assess the final outcomes, one group of participants were tasked with engaging in a new activity with which they had little experience. They were assigned to either digital photography or quilting. Though these activities were not games, they were meant to be engaging, challenging and done in a social environment.

Another group was assigned activities that involved little active learning, such as engaging in themed activities related to travel or cooking, or more solitary activities such as solving crossword puzzles, listening to music or watching classic movies. These groups met for 15 hours a week over 14 weeks. All participants were tested at the beginning and end of the study on various cognitive abilities.

Those assigned to the new, challenging activities showed significant gains in their memory, processing speed and reasoning abilities relative to those assigned to the less challenging activities. None of the participants were directly trained on these cognitive tests, which means that the challenging activities enhanced skills that transferred to new situations, such as remembering a list of words or solving abstract problems.

Brain scans of participants showed that over the course of the study, those engaged in the more challenging activities increased their neural efficiency. In other words, their brains didn’t have to work as hard to solve problems or recall information.

The study also showed that the more time participants spent on their projects, the bigger their brain gains and the better their memory was at the end of the 14 weeks.

One difference between the types of activities engaged in the Synapse Project and traditional brain training is whether activities are done in a group or alone. Although other studies have found a benefit to social interaction, the Synapse Project found no difference between the social and solitary activities in the low-challenge group. So, challenge rather than the social components seems to be the driver of maintaining cognitive and brain health.

What you can do to maintain a healthy brain

You might be thinking it’s time to take up digital photography or quilting. But in the end, it’s not about those specific tasks. What matters most is that you challenge yourself, which often comes naturally when doing something new.

The new learning that often is accompanied by a sense of effort – and sometimes frustration – requires accessing the resources in the frontal lobe, which manages thinking and judgment, and the parietal lobe, which processes attention and combines different sensory inputs. These regions constantly talk to each other to keep the mind adaptable in all kinds of situations and prevent the brain from going into “habit mode.”

Where does this leave us? Well, on the one hand, games touted as “training your brain” may not be the best solution compared with other routes to improving cognition.

Ironically, you might already be training your brain by playing effortful games that are not marketed as “brain training.” For example, games such as Tetris or real-time strategy games such as Rise of Nations have shown improvements in players’ cognition. Research has even shown that playing Super Mario 64 can result in increases in brain volume in regions such as the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain.

While little evidence suggests that any brain-training game or program globally improves cognition, some may improve specific aspects of it. As with other activities, challenge is key.

If you’re a word person, try a numbers-based game. If you love math, consider a word game or puzzle. Choosing a task that makes you feel uncomfortable gives you the best shot at maintaining and even improving your cognition. Once you start feeling a sense of ease and familiarity, that’s a sign that it’s time to switch tasks, change the game or at least add some challenge by advancing to a new level of difficulty that feels just beyond your reach.The Conversation

Ian McDonough, Associate Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York and Michael Dulas, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More

The post Brain-training games remain unproven, but research shows what sorts of activities do benefit cognitive functioning appeared first on theconversation.com

Continue Reading

The Conversation

In hundreds of communities across the US, finding a dentist is like pulling teeth − but in 14 states, dental therapists are filling the gap

Published

on

theconversation.com – Donald Chi, Professor of Oral Health Sciences, University of Washington – 2024-11-12 07:57:00

Experts recommend getting a dental checkup twice a year.
Julia Burmistrova/Moment via Getty Images

Donald Chi, University of Washington

For more than 50 million Americans, finding a dentist is a difficult – in some cases, impossible – proposition. Many rural communities don’t have a dentist. People of color and those with disabilities often lack access, and only about one-third of dentists accept Medicaid.

That’s why dental therapists – professionals who don’t have a full dentistry degree but are trained to provide basic dental care – are becoming increasingly popular. Dental therapists are now authorized to practice in 14 states, and they focus primarily on underserved populations.

Dr. Donald Chi, a pediatric dentist and professor of oral health sciences at the University of Washington, explains the kind of training that dental therapists receive, the critical need for them throughout the U.S., and how they have affected the communities they serve.

Dr. Donald Chi discusses the role of dental therapists.

The Conversation has collaborated with SciLine to bring you highlights from the discussion, which have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Who lacks adequate dental care in the U.S.?

Donald Chi: Low-income people often have difficulty finding and accessing dental care. That population includes racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities or special health care needs, and people in rural areas who live a long distance from a dental office.

What are some of the effects of poor oral health?

Chi: Oral health touches every part of our lives as human beings. To eat, to socialize, to hold a job and to learn, you need your teeth, and you need them to be healthy.

Painful cavities can get in the way of sleeping, chewing your food and your employment. Imagine if you had missing teeth in the front of your mouth because you had them removed because of large cavities. There are numerous studies that show that people missing their front teeth can’t find or hold down jobs. Both the pain and aesthetic aspects of poor oral health can really create problems.

What are dental therapists, what training do they receive, and what services do they provide?

Chi: Dental therapists are a lot like physician assistants. They’re not full-fledged dentists, but they’ve received enough training to provide a limited set of dental procedures. Dental therapists typically get anywhere from two to four years of training after high school, and they’re trained to provide preventive care.

Dental therapists can administer cleanings and fluoride treatment as well as sealants, that is, coatings that protect your teeth from bacteria. And they can do some relatively simple procedures – for instance, small fillings and simple tooth extractions. But dentists are still needed for more complex treatments: bigger fillings, complicated tooth extractions, root canals, crowns and dentures.

Dental therapists are not substitutes for dentists. Dental therapists have a limited scope of practice, but that scope is critical.

In a community with lots of unmet dental care needs, dental therapists can put out small fires. Dentists can then focus on putting out the big fires. It’s a team-based effort – dental therapists work with dentists to make sure that all of a community’s needs are met.

In 2006, Alaska became the first state to authorize dental therapists. What did your research reveal about how Alaska’s plan worked?

Chi: What we found is that Medicaid recipients, both children and adults, were less likely to have teeth removed after the authorization of dental therapists. This meant that more people were keeping their teeth longer, and they were more likely to get preventive care, like fluoride treatment and cleanings.

What other lessons have you learned from other states with dental therapists?

Chi: The rest of the 13 states that have authorized dental therapists have dental therapy programs that have been running for fewer than 20 years, which is about how long Alaska’s program has run.

But we’ve seen data out of Minnesota showing that Medicaid enrollees were more likely to get dental care after dental therapy was introduced. And we see similar types of outcomes in other areas served by dental therapists. To see this almost immediate impact has just been remarkable.

Besides visiting the dentist, what other ways can people promote good oral health?

Chi: Healthy eating is a great way to promote oral hygiene, maintain tooth enamel and reduce the likelihood of gum disease.

I realize healthy eating can be hard because of the limited availability and the relatively high costs of healthy food. But minimizing the amount of sugar in your diet and staying away from juice and sugary beverages are both good ways to protect your teeth.

Brushing twice a day with a toothpaste that contains fluoride and drinking fluoridated water will also maintain good oral health.

Watch the full interview to hear more.

SciLine is a free service based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.The Conversation

Donald Chi, Professor of Oral Health Sciences, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More

The post In hundreds of communities across the US, finding a dentist is like pulling teeth − but in 14 states, dental therapists are filling the gap appeared first on theconversation.com

Continue Reading

Trending