Nostr notes by Maryse de la Giroday (Unofficial)

A ‘dancing molecules’ paralysis treatment heals lab-grown ...

2026-11-03T21:37:35Z

A ‘dancing molecules’ paralysis treatment heals lab-grown human spinal cord organoids

My last regenerative medicine story featuring ‘dancing molecules’ from Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois, US) was posted on August 28, 2024. Since then, there has been a breakthrough according to a February 16, 2026 news item on ScienceDaily, Note: Links have been removed,
Scientists at Northwestern University have created the most sophisticated lab grown model yet for studying human spinal cord injury.
In the new research, the team worked with human spinal cord organoids — miniature organs derived from stem cells — to recreate different forms of spinal cord trauma and evaluate a promising regenerative treatment.
For the first time, researchers showed that these human spinal cord organoids can faithfully reproduce the major biological consequences of spinal cord injury. The model displayed cell death, inflammation, and glial scarring, which is a thick buildup of scar tissue that forms a physical and chemical barrier preventing nerve repair.
When the damaged organoids were treated with “dancing molecules” — a therapy that restored movement and repaired tissue in a previous animal study — the results were dramatic. The injured tissue produced substantial neurite outgrowth, meaning the long extensions that allow neurons to communicate began growing again. Scar like tissue was greatly reduced. The findings add support to the idea that this therapy, which recently received Orphan Drug Designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), could improve recovery for people with spinal cord injuries.
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A February 11, 2026 Northwesterun University news release (also on EurekAlert) by Amanda Morris, which originated the news item, delves further into the topic,
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“One of the most exciting aspects of organoids is that we can use them to test new therapies in human tissue,” said Northwestern’s Samuel I. Stupp, the study’s senior author and inventor of dancing molecules. “Short of a clinical trial, it’s the only way you can achieve this objective. We decided to develop two different injury models in a human spinal cord organoid and test our therapy to see if the results resembled what we previously saw in the animal model. After applying our therapy, the glial scar faded significantly to become barely detectable, and we saw neurites growing, resembling the axon regeneration we saw in animals. This is validation that our therapy has a good chance of working in humans.”
A pioneer in self-assembling materials and regenerative medicine, Stupp is the Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern, where he has appointments in the McCormick School of Engineering, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Feinberg School of Medicine. He also directs the Center for Regenerative Nanomedicine (CRN). Nozomu Takata, a research assistant professor of medicine at Feinberg and member of CRN, is the paper’s first author.
Tiny organoid, giant advance
Grown in the lab from induced pluripotent stem cells, organoids are miniature, simplified versions of human organs. Although they are only partial organs, organoids mimic the tissue structure, cellular complexity and function of the real thing. This sophisticated mimicry makes organoids ideal for modeling human diseases, testing therapeutics and understanding organ development. Compared to testing treatments in animals and humans, testing in organoids is faster and much less expensive.
While other researchers have developed human organoids to investigate physiological aspects of the spinal cord, Stupp’s model represents a giant leap forward to find treatments for devastating, paralyzing human injuries. Measuring several millimeters in diameter, the organoids were large and mature enough to develop the injury model.
Stupp’s team grew the spinal cord organoids from stem cells over the course of months, allowing them to develop complex features including neurons and astrocytes. The team also was the first to add microglia — immune cells in the central nervous system — to simulate inflammatory responses to traumatic spinal cord injury.
“It’s kind of a pseudo-organ,” Stupp said. “We were the first to introduce microglia into a human spinal cord organoid, so that was a huge accomplishment. It means that our organoid has all the chemicals that the resident immune system produces in response to an injury. That makes it a more realistic, accurate model of spinal cord injury.”
What are ‘dancing molecules’?
After developing a mature spinal cord organoid, Stupp and his team wanted to examine the effects of injuries and subsequent treatment. First introduced in 2021, the dancing molecules therapy harnesses molecular motion to reverse paralysis and repair tissues after traumatic spinal cord injuries. It is part of the Stupp laboratory’s platform of supramolecular therapeutic peptides (STPs), technologies that use large assemblies of 100,000 or more molecules to activate cell receptors using the body’s own natural signals to regenerate and repair. (The concept of supramolecular therapies also is used in current GLP-1 drugs for weight loss and diabetes, an area that Stupp’s lab investigated nearly 15 years ago.)
Injected as a liquid, the dancing molecules therapy immediately gels into a complex network of nanofibers that mimic the extracellular matrix of the spinal cord. By fine-tuning the collective motion, or “dancing,” of the molecules within the nanofibers, Stupp’s team found the therapy connects more effectively with constantly moving cellular receptors.
“Given that cells themselves and their receptors are in constant motion, you can imagine that molecules moving more rapidly would encounter these receptors more often,” Stupp said in 2021. “If the molecules are sluggish and not as ‘social,’ they may never come into contact with the cells.”
In animal studies, a one-time injection administered 24 hours after severe injury helped mice regain the ability to walk in just four weeks. Compared to injections with slower-moving molecules, formulations with enhanced molecular motion had greater therapeutic efficacy, indicating increased bioactivity and cellular signaling.
Testing a breakthrough therapy
To model spinal cord injury, Stupp’s team induced two types of common injuries. The researchers cut some of the organoids with a scalpel to simulate a laceration, like a surgical wound. For other organoids, the researchers applied a compressive contusion injury to simulate wounds that might occur in a serious car accident or from a steep fall.
Both injuries caused cells to die and a glial scar to form — just like in a real spinal cord injury.
“We could distinguish between the astrocytes that are a part of normal tissue and the astrocytes in the glial scar, which are large and very densely packed,” Stupp said. “We also detected the production of chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans, which are molecules in the nervous system that respond to injury and disease.”
After simulating injuries, Stupp’s team tested the effectiveness of the dancing molecules. When applied to the injured organoids, the liquid therapy gelled to form a scaffold. The therapy calmed inflammation, reduced glial scarring, caused neurites to extend and encouraged neurons to grow in neat, organized patterns.
A type of neurite, called an axon, is often severed during spinal cord injury, disconnecting the communication network among neurons. That disconnection results in paralysis and a loss of sensation below the injury site. Regenerating neurites could reestablish these connections to prevent or reverse these devastating outcomes.
The miracle of motion
Stupp attributes the treatment’s success to its supramolecular motion — or the ability of the molecules to move rapidly or even temporarily leap out of the nanofibers. Testing the therapy on healthy organoids only confirmed Stupp’s hunch.
“Before we even developed the injury model, we tested the therapy on a healthy organoid,” he said. “The dancing molecules spun out all these long neurites on the surface of the organoid but, when we used molecules that had less or no motion, we saw nothing. This difference was very vivid.”
Next, Stupp’s team plans to build even more advanced organoids to further refine their model. They also plan to develop a human spinal cord organoid that models older, chronic injuries, which typically have more stubborn scar tissue. With further work, Stupp said his group’s mini spinal cords also could be used in personalized medicine, by creating implantable tissue using a patient’s own stem cells to avoid immune rejection.
The study, “Injury and therapy in the human spinal cord organoid,” was supported by the Center for Regenerative Nanomedicine at Northwestern University and a gift from the John Potocsnak Family for spinal cord injury research.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Injury and therapy in a human spinal cord organoid by Nozomu Takata, Zhiwei Li, Anna Metlushko, Feng Chen, Nicholas A. Sather, Xinyi Lin, Matthew J. Schipma, Oscar A. Carballo-Molina, Cassandre Jamroz, Madison E. Strong, Cara S. Smith, Yang Yang, Ching M. Wai, Neha Joshi, Jack Kolberg-Edelbrock, Kyle J. Gray, Suitu Wang, Liam C. Palmer & Samuel I. Stupp. Nature Biomedical Engineering (2026) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-025-01606-2 Published: 11 February 2026 Version of record: 11 February 2026
This paper is behind a paywall.

https://www.frogheart.ca/?p=64561

#spinalcord #humanspinal #cordorganoids #northwesternuniversity #dancing #medicine #engineering #february #drug #scar

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Neuromorphic (brainlike) chip helps robots and self-driving cars ...

2026-11-02T21:48:28Z

Neuromorphic (brainlike) chip helps robots and self-driving cars react faster to movement

h/t Saúl Morales Rodriguéz for his February 12, 2026 posting on Lifeboat leading me to this announcement of a sensor that reacts to movement faster than the human eye. From a February 11, 2026 article by Paul Arnold on Tech Xplore, Note 1: The article includes an embedded video, which is not included here Note 2: Links have been removed,
Robots and self-driving cars could soon benefit from a new kind of brain-inspired hardware that can allegedly detect movement and react faster than a human. A new study published in the journal Nature Communications details how an international team built their neuromorphic temporal-attention hardware system to speed up automated driving decisions.
The problem with current robotic vision and self-driving vehicles is a significant delay in processing what they see. While today’s top AI programs can recognize objects accurately, the calculations are so complex that they can take up to half a second to complete. That may not sound like a lot, but at highway speeds, even a one-second delay means a car travels 27 meters before it even begins to react. That is too long and too slow a reaction time. % buffered
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To solve this problem, the team worked on a hardware solution rather than tinkering with software, modeling it on how human vision works. …
The researchers built a chip that essentially does the same thing. It has a 4×4 array of specialized transistors that act as a filter. Instead of sending a whole video to the main computer, it identifies key changes in a scene. Because the computer only has to look at these regions rather than the entire image, the entire visual system runs faster.
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In laboratory tests, this new system processed motion data four times faster than current state-of-the-art algorithms. Consequently, the hardware reduced visual processing time to around 150 milliseconds, roughly in the range of human visual perception.
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The team also tested their technology on cars, drones, and a robotic arm. For the cars, the system improved perception and motion-related tasks by up to 213.5%, while it reduced visual processing time for drones, allowing for faster reaction and navigation decisions. And for the robotic arm, the system achieved up to a 740.9% improvement in grasping success rate for objects moving at high speeds.
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JungWoo Lim’s February 13, 2026 article about the research for DongA Science describes the research in a way that makes me think of electrical/electronics engineers,
A semiconductor chip, like a ‘robot eye,’ that can detect object movement four times faster than the human eye has been developed. By applying the principles of how the human brain processes visual information to a semiconductor chip, it has surpassed human visual capabilities.
A joint research team led by Professor Gao of China’s Beihang University and Professor Li Tao of the Beijing Institute of Technology developed a semiconductor chip that mimics the human visual process to quickly capture motion in videos. …
Here’s a link to and a citation for the study,
Ultrafast visual perception beyond human capabilities enabled by motion analysis using synaptic transistors by Shengbo Wang, Jingwen Zhao, Tongming Pu, Liangbing Zhao, Xiaoyu Guo, Yue Cheng, Cong Li, Weihao Ma, Chenyu Tang, Zhenyu Xu, Ningli Wang, Luigi G. Occhipinti, Arokia Nathan, Ravinder Dahiya, Huaqiang Wu, Li Tao & Shuo Gao. Nature Communications volume 17, Article number: 1215 (2026) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68659-y Published: 10 February 2026 Version of record: 10 February 2026
This paper is open access.

https://www.frogheart.ca/?p=64583

#faster #reactfaster #movement #february #cars #moralesrodriguez #saulmorales #chip #techxplore #neuromorphic

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Ingenium (Canada’s museums of science & innovation; Ottawa) ...

2026-10-30T03:26:37Z

Ingenium (Canada’s museums of science & innovation; Ottawa) and Hallowe’en

A November 2026 newsletter from Ingenium, Canada’s museums of science and innovation (comprising the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, and the Canada Science and Technology Museum) arrived via email on October 29, 2026 (available for a limited time here). I’m highlighting the Hallowe’en events, a space event, and their Remembrance Week,
Discover spooky surprises, hands-on fun and plenty of reasons to wear
your costume | Découvrez des surprises lugubres, du plaisir
touche-à-tout et tout plein de raisons de porter votre costume.
Le français suit.
Celebrate Halloween at our museums
We are ready for Halloween! Put on your costume and join us at two of our museums.
Halloween at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum
The Canada Agriculture and Food Museum hosts Amazing Autumn Weekends on October 31 and November 1 [2026]. Visit between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Every activity is included with museum admission.
Spooky Barn: Enter our haunted barn for thrills and chills. It may be too scary for some visitors, so parents and guardians should use their judgment
Halloween Games Room: Want fun that is less scary? Play festive games in a room made for all ages
Pumpkin Corner: Learn how pumpkins grow from seed to harvest. Then pick one to take home while supplies last
Storytime and craft: Hear How to Catch a Monster, then make your own rock monster
Demonstration Kitchen: Taste fall flavours and learn how to bake monster cookies.
Baling demonstration: Watch how we turn straw into bales at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.
Learn more
Halloween at the Canada Science and Technology Museum
Put on your costume and celebrate Halloween at the Canada Science and Technology Museum on October 31 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. We have plenty of hands-on fun for your family.
Make gooey slime with Halloween mix-ins
Test your senses with touch-and-feel mystery boxes
Try eerie sound effects in our quiet cube
Hunt for trick-or-treating mini robots
Uncover the spooky stories behind our museum artifacts
Then catch our frightfully fun science show. Expect explosive surprises!
Learn more
Two museums, one spooky season. Buy tickets today and pick your favourite way to celebrate.
Buy tickets
Watch Joshua Kutryk perform spacewalks live!
Watch Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk step outside the International Space Station, live from the Canada Aviation and Space Museum! Two spacewalks will stream on the big screen on October 29 and November 5. Joshua and NASA astronaut Anil Menon will install new solar arrays to boost the station’s power capacity, with help from Canadarm2. During the November 5 spacewalk, you can also hear the spacewalk communications, including Canadian astronaut Jenni Gibbons, who will support the operation from Mission Control. Stop by the Demo Stage anytime from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to watch. The event is included with museum admission.
Learn more
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Remember, reflect, and give thanks during Remembrance Week
Honour those who have served Canada during Remembrance Week at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, from November 5 to 11 [2026]. This year, we celebrate 100 years of the Royal Canadian Legion with a self-guided journey through its history. Along the way, you can add a message of thanks to our collaborative mural and craft a keepsake dossier of Remembrance Day poems. On November 8, mark Indigenous Veterans’ Day at a medicine bag workshop led by Makatew Workshops. Spots are limited, so register early.
Learn more
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You can find the November 2026 newsletter here.

https://www.frogheart.ca/?p=68548

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