Researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC are developing a new “plug-and-play” platform that could greatly simplify and speed up the creation of new radiotracers, compounds used in positron emission tomography (PET) scans to visualize diseases such as cancer inside the body and track their progression. The project, supported by a four-year, $2.6 million grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the National Institutes of Health, aims to expand the uses of PET imaging, potentially improving patient care while making the technology more affordable and accessible. Scientists can identify promising new biological markers faster than ever, but turning those discoveries into PET tracers remains a challenge. Attaching a radioactive substance to these molecules is a time-consuming and technically demanding process that requires specialized equipment and facilities. To address this bottleneck, the research team is creating a platform that can be used to make a wide range of radiotracers. The platform combines a universal radioactive building block—which can be attached to different biological molecules—with a compact device, about the size of a coffee cup, that rapidly combines the two components to produce new radiotracers. The platform brings together two advanced chemistry approaches: click chemistry and droplet radiochemistry. Click chemistry, a Nobel Prize-winning technique, allows scientists to quickly join molecules together, like buckling a seatbelt. Droplet radiochemistry carries out chemical reactions in extremely small droplets, using tiny amounts of material. Preliminary research suggests the approach can produce new radiotracers that could help detect and study several different types of cancer. One tracer is designed to target fibroblast activation protein, which is found at high levels in many tumors. The team is also testing tracers designed specifically to detect liver and prostate cancer.

Healthy cells can transfer mitochondria to unhealthy neighbors, offering a possible treatment for a group of rare genetic diseases, a Stanford Medicine-led study shows.

Paper co-led by UCLA Health outlines how biological tests could help match psychiatric patients to medications with less trial and error.

**Note this is an early release from the Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes [EASD]. Please credit the meeting when using this research**

New research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Milan, Italy (Sept 28th – Oct 2nd) shows, with the use of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices people with type 1 diabetes can complete a marathon safely and achieve finishing times similar to runners without diabetes. The study is conducted by Michał Kulecki, Dr Andrzej Gawrecki, and colleagues at Poznan University of Medical Sciences and Raszeja City Hospital, Poznan, Poland.

They account for nearly 83% of all cells in the human body, yet red blood cells are often portrayed as little more than bags of hemoglobin ferrying oxygen from the lungs to the heart and beyond. But new research from the University of Colorado Anschutz reveals that they are vastly more complex with far reaching consequences for health, exercise and fitness.

A team of researchers led by Professor Haruhisa Inoue (Department of Clinical Application, CiRA, Kyoto University) and Professor Yuishin Izumi (Tokushima University) demonstrated that adenine base editing can correct a disease-causing genetic mutation and alleviate neurodegeneration in hereditary motor and sensory neuropathy with proximal dominant involvement (HMSN-P), providing proof of concept for a precision gene therapy for inherited motor neuron diseases.