Delivering macromolecules across biological barriers such as the blood–brain barrier limits their application in vivo. Previous work has demonstrated that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that naturally travels from the human gut to the central nervous system (CNS), can deliver proteins to host cells. Here we engineered T. gondii’s endogenous secretion systems, the rhoptries and dense granules, to deliver multiple large (>100 kDa) therapeutic proteins into neurons via translational fusions to toxofilin and GRA16. We demonstrate delivery in cultured cells, brain organoids and in vivo, and probe protein activity using imaging, pull-down assays, scRNA-seq and fluorescent reporters. We demonstrate robust delivery after intraperitoneal administration in mice and characterize 3D distribution throughout the brain. As proof of concept, we demonstrate GRA16-mediated brain delivery of the MeCP2 protein, a putative therapeutic target for Rett syndrome. By characterizing the potential and current limitations of the system, we aim to guide future improvements that will be required for broader application.
Tag: health care
REAL LIFE TRACTOR BEAMS? GAME-CHANGING NEW TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD TO NON-INVASIVE MEDICAL PROCEDURES
Tractor beams, a technology once relegated to science fiction, could soon become a practical reality with the help of recent advancements in metasurface research.
Under development by researchers with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS), the new technology represents “an important first step in the development of metasurface-enabled tractor beams,” which the TMOS team says will be capable of reeling in particles using rays of light.
The science fiction counterparts to this emergent real-life technology have been depicted in films that include Star Wars, where such previously imaginary devices are used to prevent objects such as spacecraft from moving or evading capture.
While real-life tractor beams are still far from matching the power of their fictional analogs, the TMOS researchers say their development of the game-changing new technology draws inspiration from such once-imaginary concepts.
“This work opens new possibilities for using light to exert forces on tiny objects,” said Ken Crozier, the Chief Investigator of the recent research.
MAKING TRACTOR BEAMS A REALITY
The team, led by researchers at the University of Melbourne, reports the creation of a solenoid beam that relies on a special silicon metasurface to generate it.
Solenoid beams have been developed in the past, although these earlier designs mostly rely on devices known as special light modulators, or SLMs. The size of these devices has imposed a limiting factor on their potential use, particularly in handheld applications.
In the team’s new research, outlined in a study that recently appeared in ACS Photonics, they describe the special metasurface developed for their tractor beam technology as an extremely thin (about 1/2000 of a millimeter) layer of nanopatterned silicon, which they believe may one day help to facilitate handheld devices that will allow surgeons to conduct non-invasive biopsies on patients, which would result in less damage to surrounding tissues than current methods.
At the heart of the technology is the understanding that forces exerted by beams of light have the effect of displacing particles, which are moved further from the light source with their passage. However, past research has shown that solenoid beams can draw particles toward their light source, similar to how the grooves in a drill allow the material it cuts into to be pulled upward.
The TMOS researchers say their beam has a few significant advantages over past designs, allowing it to be more flexible and capable of functioning without any need for an SLM. Additionally, its size makes it far more useful in practical, handheld designs while also requiring less power than existing varieties.
Thanks to State Control, Doctors Have Become Gods
My wife often poses the joke “Do you know the difference between doctors and God?” with the punchline being “God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.” The atrocious behavior of my neurosurgeon made me wonder: How does anyone get away with acting like this?
In part one of my deep brain stimulation to fix the tremors in my hands, two holes are drilled into my skull while my head was secured in place by a metal cage with a plexiglass box fitted over it. I was sedated to a level where I was awake but didn’t feel any pain when the drill bit went through my skull, although I could hear it—a sound indescribable yet at the same time unforgettable.
What I also heard was the surgeon continually yelling at the staff, “What I want you to do is just stand there and not move. There is not a thing you can do for me. I guess I must do everything myself. Just stand there and don’t move.” Soon after, I heard him say, “This equipment is so dated. I mean like it’s twenty years old. Why can’t we get any new equipment? My god, this is the end of days. Why do I have to work with this stuff?”
All of this after checking into the hospital one day, being told the surgeon was called away to an emergency and rescheduled for the next day at noon, and then being called in a panic by his office that he was running ahead of schedule and if I could get there at 10 a.m. We rushed to get there at the appointed time only to wait and wait after arriving at the operating room. Getting on the elevator to the operating room, the surgeon said, “I’m going to go have a cup of coffee.” I think he had more than a cup.
In the of American medicine The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry, Paul Starr wrote, “The key source of physicians’ economic distress in 1900 remained the continuing oversupply of doctors, now made much worse by the increased productivity of physicians as a result . . . [of the] squeezing of lost time from the professional working day.”
2,400 Patients May Have Been Exposed to HIV and Hepatitis at Oregon Hospitals: Officials
Health care providers in the Portland, Oregon, area said Thursday that 2,400 patients should get blood tests because an anesthesiologist may have exposed them to HIV as well as hepatitis B and C in recent months.
In a statement, Providence Health said that it “recently learned that Providence’s comprehensive infection control practices may not have been followed by a physician during some procedures” at several hospitals, including Providence Portland Medical Center, Providence Willamette Falls Medical Center, and “other non-Providence hospitals.”
The individual who was allegedly responsible is a physician previously employed by the Oregon Anesthesiology Group, said Legacy in the statement. The unnamed person is no longer employed by Oregon Anesthesiology Group and the company is no longer contracted by Providence, it said.
Providence said in its statement that the physician “might have put patients at a low risk of exposure” to hepatitis B and C as well as HIV for 2,200 patients who were seen at Providence Willamette Falls Medical Center. Two patients seen at Providence Portland Medical Center were also exposed, it said.
As a result, the medical group said that the potentially affected patients will receive a letter with more information, but it encouraged those patients to get a blood test to determine whether they were infected with hepatitis or HIV “out of an abundance of caution,” and “at no cost,” according to the statement.
“If a patient tests positive,” the statement said, “Providence will reach out to discuss their test results and next steps.
Biden DOJ Goes After Doctor For Revealing Ideological Hospital
The Biden administration has once again gone after a whistleblower. This time the Department of Justice has used its powers to shut up a doctor who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital for secretly performing transgender surgeries and minors.
“Last year, Haim anonymously leaked evidence of the child sex-change procedures to conservative journalist Christopher Rufo. The documents revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital had continued running its transgender program, despite announcing that the program had been discontinued in accordance with Governor Greg Abbott’s 2022 directive equating such medical interventions with child abuse.
The Houston-based hospital was ultimately forced to stop its trans-medical practices after a state law took effect in September 2023, prohibiting drug and surgical “gender-affirming” interventions for minors,” wrote The National Review.
“‘After understanding how far this corruption went, I had no other option but to take the story public and fight back,’ Haim previously told National Review. ‘If I don’t do this now, I’m going to pass on this conflict to my children. That’s something I will not tolerate.’”
That was too much for Merrick Garland and Joe Biden, though.
The City Journal reports that the Department of Justice has now made good on its threats to go after the whistleblower.
American College of Pediatricians Blasts All Major Medical Associations for Pushing Radical Gender Transition Agenda on Children
In a bold defiance of mainstream medical tyranny, the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) has delivered a blistering condemnation of America’s leading medical institutions.
This coalition of healthcare professionals launched the “Doctors Protecting Children Declaration” on Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
This declaration, which is spearheaded by Dr. Jill Simons, Executive Director of the American College of Pediatricians, is an urgent plea to halt the radical gender transition protocols being imposed on vulnerable children.
The coalition, which includes a diverse group of physicians, nurses, behavioral health clinicians, and scientists, has raised the alarm about the severe physical and mental health risks associated with so-called “gender-affirming” care.
“We have serious concerns about the physical and mental health effects of the current protocols promoted for the care of children and adolescents in the United States who express discomfort with their biological sex,” said Dr. Simons during the press conference.
“This declaration was authored by the American College of Pediatricians, but really it was developed from the expertise of hundreds of doctors, researchers, and other health care workers and leaders who, for years, have been sounding the alarm on the harmful protocols that continue to be promoted by the medical organizations in the United States. Despite recent revelations from the leaked WPATH Files and the recent release of the final report from the Cass Review, these medical organizations have not changed course.”
Dr. Simons specifically named each of the major medical associations, criticizing them for promoting the gender transition agenda among vulnerable children.
Supreme Court Rules That US Government Must Cover Native American Health Care
The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 on June 6 that the federal government will have to cover Indian tribes’ costs incurred in operating tribal health care programs.
The majority opinion in Becerra v. San Carlos Apache Tribe and Becerra v. Northern Arapaho Tribe was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by all three liberal justices and one conservative.
U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra was the petitioner in both cases. He appealed unfavorable rulings by lower courts.
The respondent, the San Carlos Apache Indian Tribe, is based in Arizona. The other respondent, the Northern Arapaho Tribe, is based in Wyoming.
The ruling means the U.S. government will have to pay for overhead costs related to health care that the tribes provide under a federal law intended to give Native Americans greater control.
“Aside from being inconsistent with the statute’s text, [the government’s] failure to cover contract support costs for healthcare funded by program income inflicts a penalty on tribes for opting in favor of greater self-determination,” the majority opinion states.
“On Hospital and Nursing Home Death Protocols”
For our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, I interviewed several people who’d lost a family member after he or she was admitted to hospital with severe COVID-19 symptoms.
The typical scenario they described was that the family member had started off with mild flu-like symptoms that worsened around day 7 or 8 ,with steadily increasing difficulty in breathing. At the time, many were completely unaware of even the possibility of early treatment because their primary doctors mentioned nothing about it. And so, with panic setting in or with a blood oxygen level below 90, the decision was made to admit the family member to hospital.
Though the witnesses I interviewed were from all over the country, their experiences with hospitals were all the same—namely, no treatment was offered to their sick family members apart from supplemental oxygen, Remdesivir, and then intubation and ventilation, ultimately resulting in death.
Several witnesses heard about treatment modalities such as methylprednisolone, ivermectin, and anti-coagulants only after their family members were languishing in hospital. To their astonishment, hospital doctors steadfastly refused to administer these drugs to their dying family members, and hospital administrators even fought court orders to do so.
After hearing several of these stories, I began to suspect what initially seemed unthinkable, but increasingly struck me as that only plausible explanation for the conduct of these hospitalists—namely, that they had, for some dreadful reason, agreed to play along with a systematic euthanasia program.
My suspicion grew when I interviewed witnesses who told me of smuggling ivermectin into hospital rooms and clandestinely giving it to their family members, some of whom then quickly improved. One woman told me a terrifying story of receiving a call from an angry doctor who was dumbfounded by her husband’s recovery, as it was apparently incongruous with the usual inexorable demise he had observed in other patients.
“The doctor suspected I’d given my husband something and he angrily demanded to know what it was,” the woman related. “He said he wanted to know if it was a prescription drug and which pharmacy had prescribed it. It was like he wanted to get the pharmacist into trouble.”
I was reminded of these stories this afternoon when I read a post by fellow Substack author, Katharine Watt, in which she argues that nihilistic hospital protocols were not only the result of stupidity, groupthink, and perverse financial incentives provided for by the PREP and CARES Acts.
“I Was Offered Assisted Dying Over Cancer Treatment”: Broken Canadian Healthcare System Is Killing Patients
Two years ago, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Allison Ducluzeau started to feel pain in her stomach. At first, she assumed she had eaten too much turkey, but the pain persisted. A couple of weeks later, she saw her family doctor who requested CT scans, although none were sorted. Soon after, as the agony worsened, her partner insisted she went to the emergency unit at their local hospital on Vancouver Island. Finally, doctors confirmed the couple’s worst fears: she was almost certainly suffering from advanced abdominal cancer.
Allison, then 56, later learned that she had stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis, an aggressive condition. By the time she saw a specialist early last year, he warned that she might only live a few months longer: chemotherapy tended to be ineffective for her cancer, buying a bit more time at best, and she was inoperable. Instead, she was told to go home, sort out her papers, and decide if she wanted medical assistance in dying.
Unsurprisingly, Allison was devastated. “I could barely breathe — I went in there hoping to come out with a treatment plan but was just told to get my will in order.” That night was the worst of her life as she broke the shattering news to her son and daughter at her home in Victoria. “I told them I might only live for another two months,” she recalled. “If I’d not had my children, I might have accepted MAID [medical assistance in dying] — but when I saw the effect on them, having just been through the deaths of my own parents, it made me dig really deep.”
So, determined to find help, she researched her condition, spoke to doctors as far away as Taiwan, flew to California for scans and eventually travelled to Baltimore for treatment. She had discovered that patients could be given debulking surgery to reduce their cancer, followed by targeted use of heated chemotherapy — yet back in Canada, she could not get even an initial telephone chat with a surgeon who performed such operations for two months. Aided by her tight circle of friends and relatives, she raised almost half the $200,000 cost for the operation by crowdfunding. By the time she managed to see an oncologist in her home province of British Columbia, she was already on the road to recovery.
Today, Allison is in remission. She lifts weights daily, and goes running and cycling. She recently married her partner on a beach in Hawaii in front of her children. But she remains infuriated that Canadian doctors offered to kill rather than treat her. “The way it was presented was shocking,” she told me. “I was disgusted to be offered MAID twice. Once I was even on the phone, when I was on my own having just come back from Baltimore. It left me sobbing.”
As the debate over assisted dying heats up in Britain, with Keir Starmer promising a free vote on the matter if he wins the general election, and with politicians in Jersey approving plans for its use only last week, we should take notice of Allison’s case. For she does not share the ethical or religious concerns held by many opponents of euthanasia. Nor does she oppose Canada’s 2016 MAID reform; she agreed with her father five years later that it was an “appropriate” option for his intensifying pain after many years of prostate cancer.
But she has deep worries about assisted dying being offered by doctors in a health system that is floundering — especially with inadequate and overwhelmed oncology services when cancer patients comprise almost two-thirds of the soaring numbers of citizens opting for MAID. “We do not have a good standard of care here, especially for cancer — and that is why it is so dangerous to have MAID, especially when it can be used to take a bit of pressure off physicians and the government.” She knows of three other cancer patients whose families fear they died needlessly — including the person whose home she bought after downsizing to pay her medical bills in the US.
Allison’s very existence challenges those who argue that Britain — with its flailing health and social care systems, shamefully long waiting lists and historically poor cancer survival rates — should rush headlong into legalisation of assisted death. So, what would she tell those advocating for the reform? “I would tell Britain to only accept assisted dying when the health service is fixed — otherwise it is a very dangerous step to take. We deserve decent and timely care rather than offers of faster death.”
“I would tell Britain to only accept assisted dying when the health service is fixed.”
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act Screws Seniors with the Biggest Medicare Premium Increase Ever
One of the classic strategies in the Obama/Biden playbook is policy that sounds good in the short-term, but whose long-term consequences won’t be felt until after an election. That way if Democrats win, they’re insulated from voters holding them accountable; but if they lose, they can blame Republicans when things go south.
This was undoubtedly one of the plays the Biden administration had in mind for the gallingly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But this disastrous legislation hasn’t just sabotaged Americans’ wallets, it’s sabotaged their health as well.
Snuck into the IRA was a poorly drafted provision that attempted to lower out-of-pocket expenses on prescription drugs. The IRA lowers the out-of-pocket maximum for seniors from about $3,300 to $2,000 by shifting the responsibility for the $1,300 difference to insurance companies. To no one’s surprise, the insurance companies pass that cost to consumers in the form of higher premiums and restricted access to prescription drugs.
This year, premiums for Medicare Part D are up more than 20 percent for the more than 50 million Americans enrolled. In 2025, they could increase again by more than 50 percent! We hope people are paying close enough attention during open enrollment in October to compare this price spike as President Biden campaigns on how he “fought Big Pharma to lower drug costs!”
The brilliant design of the Medicare Part D program 20 years ago was harnessing competition. Deploying the free-market principle that competition leads to lower prices, Part D allowed private insurance plans to compete for Medicare dollars to keep costs low and save seniors money.
Hellbound and Down 
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