The study, published online in Clinical Infectious Diseases, underscores the extraordinary effect of these newer antivirals, which have been shown to cure hepatitis C in 98 percent of patients who take them. Patients are said to be cured when the virus is no longer detectable in their blood.

“The findings of our study show that curing hepatitis C not only gets rid of the virus, it also improves the overall health of patients,” said Stuart Gordon, M.D., Director of the Division of Hepatology at Henry Ford and the study’s lead author. “This is consistent with our earlier studies that showed effective treatment of hepatitis C also reduces the risk of patients developing other health conditions like diabetes, kidney disease, stroke and heart attacks.”

According to federal data, at least 2.4 million people are living with hepatitis C in the United States and most don’t know they have the virus. As a result, they are at risk for life threatening liver disease and cancer. Rates of new liver cancer cases have increased 38 percent from 2003 to 2012.

The Henry Ford-led study was conducted in collaboration with researchers from Geisinger Health System, Kaiser Permanente in Hawaii and Oregon and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They comprise the Chronic Hepatitis Cohort Study, which has been collecting and analyzing data drawn from the four health systems to assess the impact of hepatitis C and B on the U.S. population.

This observational study is believed to be the first to examine healthcare utilization involving hepatitis C patients with and without advanced liver disease and treated with the direct-acting antivirals, or DAAs.

Researchers analyzed data of 6,100 patients — half who were treated with DAAs and half who were not.

The antivirals are taken orally once a day for eight to 12 weeks. Side effects are mild, if any. The medications stop the hepatitis C virus from multiplying in the body and can prevent long-term complications like liver damage.

Key findings of the study:

• Patients treated with DAAs had lower rates of hospitalization and shorter stays for liver and non-liver related health issues compared to those who did not receive DAAs.
• Patients treated with DAAs had fewer visits to the Emergency Department for liver disease related issues compared to those who did not receive DAAs.

Researchers did not quantify the potential cost savings as part of the study.

Still, Dr. Gordon said the projected cost savings would be substantial. People being cured of hepatitis C leads to less incidence of chronic medical issues associated with the disease, he said.

“There are tangible downstream benefits from these antiviral treatments,” he said. “If you’re cured of the virus, your overall health will get better and you’re less likely to be hospitalized for some other health condition.”

A one-time universal screening for hepatitis C is recommended for all adults ages 18 and older including pregnant women during each pregnancy. Regular hepatitis C testing is recommended for people with ongoing risk factors such as drug use with needles, on dialysis and those born between 1945 and 1965.

Last year, Michigan lifted restrictions that prevented some people from getting access to antiviral treatment. “Given the remarkable effectiveness and benefits of these DAAs, everyone with hepatitis C should get treated and treated soon,” Dr. Gordon said.

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This discovery, described in a paper published Feb. 15 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents an important step in the effort to develop anti-viral drugs to fight off infections.

“This paper is about trying to understand the mechanism that makes these RNA escape degradation,” says senior author Mandy Muller, assistant professor of microbiology. “The next step is to figure out if we can manipulate this to our advantage.”

In the Muller Lab, student researchers work with Muller studying how Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) hides for years inside the human body before seeking to gain control over human gene expression to complete the viral infection. At that point, people with a weakened immune system may develop Kaposi sarcoma cancer lesions in the mouth, skin or other organs.

The researchers use genome-wide sequencing, post-transcriptional sequencing and molecular biology to examine how the human cell or the virus knows how to prevent degradation.

“Viruses are very smart, that’s what I love to say,” Muller says. “They have lots of strategies to stick around, and they don’t do a lot of damage for a very long time, because that’s one way to hide from the immune system.

“But then, at some point — many, many years later — they reactivate. The way they do this is by triggering a massive RNA degradation event where the virus will wipe out the mRNA from the cell. That means the human system can no longer express the proteins that it needs to express, and that means also that a lot of resources are suddenly available for the virus.”

How and why some RNA are able to escape the viral degradation are questions Muller’s team — including lead author and graduate student Daniel Macveigh-Fierro and co-authors and undergraduates Angelina Cicerchia, Ashley Cadorette and Vasudha Sharma — has been investigating.

“We show that RNA that escape have a chemical tag on them — a post-transcriptional modification — that makes them different from the others,” Muller explains. “By having this tag, M⁶A, they can recruit proteins that protect them from degradation.”

Muller has been studying KSHV since she was an undergraduate in her native France, and her mission continues.

“We know you need this protein to protect the RNA from degradation, but we still don’t know how that physically stops the degradation, so that’s what we’re going to look at now,” she says.

Ultimately, understanding the mechanisms and pathways involved in KSHV infection may lead to the development of RNA therapeutics to treat viral diseases.

“By identifying the determinants of what makes an mRNA either resistant or susceptible to viral-induced decay, we could use those findings to our advantage to better design anti-viral drugs and reshape the outcome of infection,” Muller says.

The research was supported by a $1.9 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) to Muller in 2020 from the NIH’s National Institute for General Medical Sciences.

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“The common assumption is that the older we get, the more slowly we react to external stimuli. If that were so, mental speed would be fastest at the age of about twenty and would then decline with increasing age,” says Dr von Krause, a researcher in the Quantitative Research Methods department headed by Prof. Dr Andreas Voß at Heidelberg University’s Institute of Psychology. In order to verify this theory, the researchers reevaluated data from a large-scale American study on implicit biases. In the online experiment with over a million participants, subjects had to press a button to sort pictures of people into the categories “white” or “black” and words into the categories “good” or “bad.” According to Dr von Krause, the content focus was of minor importance in the Heidelberg study. Instead, the researchers used the large batch of data as an example of a response-time task to measure the duration of cognitive decisions.

When evaluating the data, Dr von Krause and his colleagues noted that, on average, the response times of the test subjects rose with increasing age. However, with the aid of a mathematical model, they were able to show that this phenomenon was not due to changes in mental speed. “Instead, we think that older test subjects are mainly slower because they reply more cautiously and concentrate more on avoiding mistakes,” Mischa von Krause explains. At the same time, motor execution speed slows down during the course of adult life: older participants in the experiment needed longer to press the appropriate key after they had found the right answer.

Another finding of the study was that average information processing speed only progressively declined with participants over the age of 60. “It looks as though, in the course of our life, we don’t need to fear any substantial losses of mental speed — particularly not in the course of a typical working life,” says Mischa von Krause. “Generally speaking, we should also note that the test subjects in all age groups included individuals with high and low mental speeds. Our results relate to the average trend.”

The German Research Foundation (DFG) funded the research work in the context of the research training group for doctoral students “Statistical Modelling in Psychology” (GRK 2277). The results were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

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The low-cost jelly-like materials, developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, can sense strain, temperature and humidity. And unlike earlier self-healing robots, they can also partially repair themselves at room temperature.

The results are reported in the journal NPG Asia Materials.

Soft sensing technologies could transform robotics, tactile interfaces and wearable devices, among other applications. However, most soft sensing technologies aren’t durable and consume high amounts of energy.

“Incorporating soft sensors into robotics allows us to get a lot more information from them, like how strain on our muscles allows our brains to get information about the state of our bodies,” said David Hardman from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the paper’s first author.

As part of the EU-funded SHERO project, Hardman and his colleagues have been working to develop soft sensing, self-healing materials for robotic hands and arms. These materials can detect when they are damaged, take the necessary steps to temporarily heal themselves and then resume work — all without the need for human interaction.

“We’ve been working with self-healing materials for several years, but now we’re looking into faster and cheaper ways to make self-healing robots,” said co-author Dr Thomas George-Thuruthel, also from the Department of Engineering.

Earlier versions of the self-healing robots needed to be heated in order to heal, but the Cambridge researchers are now developing materials that can heal at room temperature, which would make them more useful for real-world applications.

“We started with a stretchy, gelatine-based material which is cheap, biodegradable and biocompatible and carried out different tests on how to incorporate sensors into the material by adding in lots of conductive components,” said Hardman.

The researchers found that printing sensors containing sodium chloride — salt — instead of carbon ink resulted in a material with the properties they were looking for. Since salt is soluble in the water-filled hydrogel, it provides a uniform channel for ionic conduction — the movement of ions.

When measuring the electrical resistance of the printed materials, the researchers found that changes in strain resulted in a highly linear response, which they could use to calculate the deformations of the material. Adding salt also enabled sensing of stretches of more than three times the sensor’s original length, so that the material can be incorporated into flexible and stretchable robotic devices.

The self-healing materials are cheap and easy to make, either by 3D printing or casting. They are preferable to many existing alternatives since they show long-term strength and stability without drying out, and they are made entirely from widely available, food-safe, materials.

“It’s a really good sensor considering how cheap and easy it is to make,” said George-Thuruthel. “We could make a whole robot out of gelatine and print the sensors wherever we need them.”

The self-healing hydrogels bond well with a range of different materials, meaning they can easily be incorporated with other types of robotics. For example, much of the research in the Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, where the researchers are based, is focused on the development of artificial hands. Although this material is a proof-of-concept, if developed further, it could be incorporated into artificial skins and custom-made wearable and biodegradable sensors.

This work was supported by the Self-HEaling soft RObotics (SHERO) project, funded under the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme of the European Commission.

Take-home exposures — toxic contaminants that are unintentionally brought from the workplace into the home, exposing children and other family members — are a documented public health hazard, but the majority of research and interventions have focused on take-home exposure to lead. Much less is known about take-home exposures to other harmful metals.

Now, a new study led by a Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researcher provides evidence that construction workers, in particular, are at high risk of inadvertently tracking a host of other toxic metals into their homes. The study identifies and measures the highest number of metals — 30 — in construction workers’ homes, to date.

Published in the journal Environmental Research, the findings reveal that, in addition to lead, construction workers had higher levels of arsenic, chromium, copper, manganese, nickel, and tin dust in their homes, compared to workers in janitorial and auto repair occupations. The study also found that overlapping sociodemographic, work, and home-related factors can affect metal concentrations in the dust of workers’ homes.

This new data underscores the need for more proactive and preventative measures that reduce these harmful exposures at construction sites.

“Given the lack of policies and trainings in place to stop this contamination in high-exposure workplaces such as construction sites, it is inevitable that these toxic metals will migrate to the homes, families, and communities of exposed workers,” says study lead and corresponding author Dr. Diana Ceballos, an assistant professor of environmental health and director of the Exposure Biology Research Laboratory at BUSPH. “Many professions are exposed to toxic metals at work, but construction workers have a more difficult job implementing safe practices when leaving the worksite because of the type of transient outdoor environments where they work, and the lack of training on these topics.”

To better understand the sources and predictors of take-home exposure of metals dust, Ceballos and colleagues from BUSPH and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health recruited 27 Greater Boston workers to participate in this pilot study from 2018-2019, focusing primarily on construction workers, but also including janitorial and auto repair workers. To assess the metal concentrations in workers’ homes, the researchers visited the homes and collected dust vacuum samples, issued questionnaires to the workers about work and home-related practices that could affect exposure, and made other home observations.

The researchers found that higher concentrations of cadmium, chromium, copper, manganese, and nickel were associated with a range of sociodemographic and work- and home-related factors, including lower education, working in construction, not having a work locker to store clothes, mixing work and personal items, not having a place to launder clothes, not washing hands after work, and not changing clothes after work.

Further compounding the issue, Ceballos says, is that many construction workers live in disadvantages communities or substandard housing that may already contain toxic metals.

“Given the complexity of these issues, we need interventions on all fronts — not only policies, but also resources and education for these families,” she says.