Stanford’s Karl Deisseroth wins Nobel Prize for pioneering optogenetics
On Oct. 5th, Karl Deisseroth, a professor of bioengineering and psychiatry at Stanford, was named one of three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine for developing optogenetics — a technique that uses light to switch specific neurons on or off.
The method relies on opsins, light-activated proteins borrowed from microbes. Over two decades, Deisseroth’s team learned to install these proteins on the surfaces of neurons in living animals, control them with pulses of laser light delivered through implanted fiber-optic cables and use them to watch behavior change.
This process was extremely difficult, as moving a microbial protein into a mammalian neuron risked triggering immune attacks, and there was no guarantee the protein would behave the same way or even end up in the right place on the cell.
“I was turned down for funding by a lot of people who thought this couldn’t possibly work,” Deisseroth told Stanford Medicine, recalling the skepticism that early funders had about the project’s premise.
His team ultimately solved each obstacle by delivering the genes virally, restricting expression to targeted neuron types and re-engineering the proteins to reliably reach the cell surface.
Optogenetics is now a standard tool in thousands of neuroscience labs worldwide, letting researchers probe the neural circuits underlying sensation, decision-making and behavior with a level of precision that was previously impossible.
New urine test could tell bladder cancer patients which treatment will actually work
Researchers at Stanford Medicine and the VA Palo Alto Health Care System developed a urine test, called uRARE-seq, that diagnoses bladder cancer more accurately than current methods and can also predict whether a patient will respond better to immunotherapy or chemotherapy.
Unlike most liquid biopsies, which scan for cancer-linked DNA mutations, the test measures RNA fragments shed by tumor cells — an approach the researchers say captures what a tumor is actively doing, not just whether it’s present.
In a study of 683 urine samples, published Oct. 2 in “Nature Medicine”, the test correctly flagged 95% of localized bladder cancer cases and cleared 90% of cancer-free patients, outperforming both standard urine cytology and existing DNA-based urine tests.
“Analyzing RNA can tell us not only whether a cancer is present — but also what it’s doing,” co-senior author Maximilian Diehn, radiation oncology professor, told Stanford Medicine.
The test could be especially useful for guiding use of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), the typical post-surgery immunotherapy, which doesn’t work for every patient and is chronically in short supply.
“If we can guide those choices, we have the potential to help both patients and clinicians,” said co-senior author Joseph Liao, professor of urology, noting that doctors currently have few tools to inform that decision.
Study finds gas stoves in commercial kitchens pose significant health risk
A new study published in “Environmental Research Letters” is the first U.S. analysis to directly compare air quality and heat in gas versus electric commercial kitchens in real working conditions.
Researchers at the Doerr School of Sustainability monitored 21 gas kitchens, three propane kitchens and three all-electric kitchens across California, Pennsylvania and New York, tracking nitrogen dioxide, benzene, carbon monoxide and temperature. About 70% of the gas and propane kitchens exceeded the EPA’s one-hour outdoor air standard for nitrogen dioxide during working hours, and nearly 70% topped 90°F, with some kitchens spiking above 122°F. No electric kitchen exceeded either threshold.
“Our study shows that burning gas in a restaurant kitchen is as suspect as burning it in our homes,” co-author Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth System Science, told Physicians, Scientists and Engineers (PSE) Healthy Energy.
“The all-electric kitchens ran cooler and cleaner,” said lead author Yannai Kashtan, a former member of Jackson’s lab and now an air-quality scientist at PSE Energy, also adding that research on what kitchen workers breathe has been scarce.
The study also found that pilot lights left burning overnight kept pollution elevated even after ventilation shut off, which poses a risk for cleaning staff and employees who arrive early in the morning. This is another problem that the authors said had not been studied before.