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For over 48 years, Biotics Research Corporation has revolutionized the nutritional supplement industry by utilizing “The Best of Science and Nature”. Combining nature’s principles with scientific ingenuity, our products magnify the nutritional benefits to clinicians.

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Introducing

The vitamin d collection, by biotics research®.

Biotics Research has a collection of vitamin D products clinically tested* to be safe, effective and easy to administer. One of the first companies to develop an emulsification process, Biotics Research offers its four vitamin D products in an emulsified form shown to increase bioavailability by over 200%.

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Bio-DK Caps™

Bio-DK Caps™ supplies 125 mcg (5,000 IU) of vitamin D3, 550 mcg of vitamin K (as K1 phytonadione and K2 menaquinone-7) as a micro-emulsion for enhanced absorption and utilization, particularly important for those with malabsorption conditions. In addition to emulsified forms of vitamins D and K, Bio-DK Caps™ contains superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase.

Bio-DK-Mulsion™

Bio-DK-Mulsion™ supplies 125 mcg (5,000 IU) of vitamin D3 and 300 mcg of vitamin K (as K1 phytonadione and K2 menaquinone-7) in a micro-emulsion for enhanced absorption and utilization, which is particularly important for those with malabsorption conditions. Clinical data shows that the emulsified form increases bioavailability over 200%.

Bio-D-Mulsion®

Bio-D-Mulsion® supplies vitamin D3 (400 IU per drop) in an emulsified form to aid in uptake and assimilation, especially important for those with malabsorption issues.

Bio-D-Mulsion Forte®

Bio-D-Mulsion Forte® supplies 2,000 IU per drop of vitamin D3 as a micro-emulsion for enhanced absorption, particularly important in malabsorption conditions.

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The Impact and Benefits of Vitamin D

Many people hear “vitamin D” and think of exposure to the sun. This is an accurate correlation, as vitamin D is produced in your skin in response to sunlight. However, if you live in non-equatorial latitudes, the sun may not be strong enough to produce vitamin D for about half of the year. In fact, as many as one billion people worldwide are estimated to be vitamin D-deficient. Sustained levels of vitamin D deficiency can result in brittle bones, bone pain, as well as muscle pain and weakness.

So, how does vitamin D impact normal body functioning? What’s the impact on those who rely on superior strength and muscle function, like professional athletes? What can be done to support healthy levels of vitamin D?

Impact on strength and muscle function

Vitamin D contributes to a variety of overall health functioning, including muscular strength and recovery, physical reaction time, as well as balance and coordination. A study conducted by the University of Southern California concluded that adequate vitamin D levels were important for promoting muscle and strength. Another study on adolescent females found a positive relationship between vitamin D levels and jump velocity, height, power, and force.

Conversely, deficient levels of vitamin D have an adverse effect on the human body. Vitamin D receptor expression within muscle tissue has been found to decrease with age, directly related to deteriorating muscle strength, mass, and function. In a study of 96 elderly women with post-stroke hemiplegic, half of the women were given 1,000 IU of vitamin D and the other half were given a placebo. The results? Those women treated with vitamin D saw a 59% reduction in the number of falls they experienced. Those subjects also saw an increase in the relative number and size of type-2 muscle fibers and presented with improved muscle strength.

Impact on athletic performance

Muscle strength is of course critical for every individual, but consistent, superior strength is especially essential for professional athletes. What’s one way for athletes to achieve and sustain optimum athletic performance? You guessed it—sufficient levels of vitamin D.

Vitamin D acts to maintain calcium and phosphate homeostasis within the body. Athletes deficient in vitamin D are at increased risk for potential problems, such as stress fractures, respiratory infections, and muscle injuries. A 2009 article in the Journal of Medicine Science in Sports concluded that “vitamin D may improve athletic performance in vitamin D deficient athletes.” The article further suggested that peak athletic performance may occur when vitamin D levels are at 50 mg. Another review in Molecular Aspects of Medicine showed that vitamin D increases the size of fast twitch muscles and muscular strength.

Impact on chronic pain

Research suggests that vitamin D may also serve as an effective treatment for chronic musculoskeletal pain. In one study, subjects weighing less than 50kg (110 lbs) were given 5,000 IU per day, while those over 50 kg were supplemented with 10,000 IU. After three months, the 299 subjects characterized as deficient in vitamin D reported a disappearance of their back pain. In total, 341 of the 360 subjects were relieved of their chronic low-back pain with this regimen of vitamin supplementation.

Impact on the immune system

Vitamin D was once thought to influence just four organs. With an influx of research studies conducted over the past two decades, research has revealed that vitamin D influences 36 target organs. Research also suggests that vitamin D may play a role in promoting neurological function, supporting heart health, and boosting immunity during cold and flu season.

Incorporating vitamin D into your diet

As I mentioned above, sun exposure alone isn’t enough to ensure sufficient levels of vitamin D. Some foods contain vitamin D naturally—think salmon, sardines, egg yolk, and shrimp—while others often have vitamin D added (and thus are considered fortified)—such as milk, yogurt, and orange juice. Even consuming foods containing vitamin D won’t ensure sufficient levels of the vitamin.

Incorporating vitamin D supplements into your regular diet is the best route for ensuring your body is getting enough vitamin D. However, I recommend taking a combination supplement of vitamin D plus vitamin K2. Together the two vitamins support calcium absorption and bone health. How? Vitamin D promotes calcium absorption from the GI tract into the bloodstream. Once calcium is absorbed, vitamin K helps transport it from the bloodstream and into the bone—supporting optimum bone density and normal bone growth.

Whether you’re a professional athlete at the top of your game or a retired athlete now enjoying the spoils of her hey-day (and aiming to avoid weakened bones in the process), vitamin D deficiency can affect us all. Adverse effects on our physical strength and immune system make incorporating vitamin D into a regular diet critical. Talk to your functional medicine practitioner today about a plan that works for you. Your performance—and pain-free lifestyle—could depend on it.

Robert G. Silverman, DC, MS, CNS, CCN, CSCS, CKTP, CES, CIISN, DACBN, DCBCN, HKC, FAKTR 

Come See Dr. Silverman speak LIVE at one of these Biotics Research upcoming seminars:

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The Gut-Brain Axis in Health and Disease  - May 11-  DoubleTree San Francisco Airport North - Brisbane , CA

References:

Ward KA, Das G, Berry JL, et al.  Vitamin D status and muscle function in post-menarchal adolescent girls.  J Clin Endocrinol, Feb. 2009

Foo LH, Zhang Q, et al.  Relationship between vitamin D status, body composition and physical exercise of adolescent girls in Beijing.  Osteoporosis Int, March 2009; 20(3); p. 417-425

Soto Y, Iwamoto J, et al.  Low-dose vitamin D prevents muscular atrophy and reduces falls and hip fractures in women after stroke .  Cerebrovasc Ds, 2005. 20(3):187-192

Journal of Medicine Science in Sports, 2010. 20:182-190

American Journal of Sports Medicine, 2013, vol. 4(2)

University of Adelaide, School of Population Health

Faraj SA, Mutairi KA. Vitamin D deficiency and chronic low-back pain in Saudi Arabia. Spine 2003; 28:177-179

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/204651

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20219962

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Bio-Tech Pharmacal Vitamin D3 (D3-50 50k IU, 12 Count)

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• BONE & IMMUNE ​HEALTH. Bio-Tech Pharmacal D3-50 50,000 IU is a supplement formulated with vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) that may help support bone, cardiovascular, neuromuscular, and immune health.
• NATURAL SUPPORT. Vitamin D functions as a hormone, a chemical messenger with widespread effects in the human body.*
• MORE POTENT. Research shows that vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) is approximately 87% more potent than vitamin D2 for raising and maintaining vitamin D blood levels.
• ALLERGY FRIENDLY. D3-50 50,000 IU is free of dairy, egg, fish, gluten, peanuts, shellfish, soy, tree nuts, wheat, and artificial colors. This product is halal.
• RECOMMENDED USE. Do not exceed one capsule per week unless directed by a healthcare professional.

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BIO-TECH PHARMACAL D3-50 50,000 IU, 12 CAPSULES – ALL-NATURAL SUPPLEMENT – SUPPORTS BONE & IMMUNE HEALTH – NO DAIRY, FISH, GLUTEN, PEANUT, SHELLFISH, & SOY – NO ARTIFICIAL COLORS Bio-Tech Pharmacal D3-50 50,000 IU is a supplement formulated with vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) that may help support bone and immune health.* Vitamin D functions as a hormone, a chemical messenger with widespread effects in the human body.* Research shows that vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) is approximately 87% more potent than vitamin D2 for raising and maintaining vitamin D blood levels.* D3-50 50,000 IU is free of dairy, egg, fish, gluten, peanuts, shellfish, soy, tree nuts, wheat, and artificial colors. This product is halal. Do not exceed one capsule per week unless directed by a healthcare professional.

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• Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 1.58 x 1.58 x 3.2 inches; 0.63 ounces
• Date First Available ‏ : ‎ February 22, 2011
• Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ Bio-Tech Pharmacal
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00I1DK0WQ
• #1,193 in Vitamin D Supplements

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• Vitamin D functions as a hormone, a chemical messenger with widespread effects in the human body.*
• It is important for optimal bone, cardiovascular, neuromuscular, and immune health.*
• Adequate calcium and vitamin D throughout life, as part of a well-balanced diet, may reduce the risk of osteoporosis.*
• Supplementation with vitamin D may be necessary to meet daily needs, since obtaining sufficient vitamin D from natural food sources and sun exposure alone can be difficult. Research shows that vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) is approximately 87% more potent than vitamin D2 for raising and maintaining vitamin D blood levels.*

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Mg-Zyme™ (Magnesium)

Biotics Research

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Magnesium (as magnesium aspartate, magnesium glycinate and magnesium gluconate). Capsule shell (gelatin and water), organic vegetable culture†, magnesium stearate (vegetable source) and stearic acid (vegetable source). 

†Specially grown, biologically active vegetable culture containing naturally associated phytochemicals including polyphenolic compounds with SOD and catalase, dehydrated at low temperature to preserve associated enzyme factors. 

This product is gluten, dairy and GMO free.

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• Published: 10 March 2021

Voices of biotech research

• Nasim Annabi 1 ,
• Matthew Baker 2 ,
• Alistair Boettiger 3 ,
• Debojyoti Chakraborty 4 ,
• Yvonne Chen 5 ,
• Kizzmekia S. Corbett 6 ,
• Bruno Correia 7 ,
• James Dahlman 8 , 9 ,
• Tulio de Oliveira 10 , 11 ,
• Ali Ertuerk 12 ,
• Mehmet Fatih Yanik 13 ,
• Elizabeth Henaff 14 ,
• Meritxell Huch 15 ,
• Iliyan D. Iliev 16 ,
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• Howard Junca 18 , 19 ,
• Albert Keung 20 ,
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• Randall J. Platt 30 , 31 ,
• Avery D. Posey Jr. 32 , 33 ,
• Huilin Shao 34 , 35 ,
• Mijo Simunovic 36 , 37 ,
• Nikolai Slavov 38 , 39 , 40 ,
• Takanori Takebe 41 ,
• Luk H. Vandenberghe 25 , 42 , 43 ,
• Rajeev K. Varshney 44 , 45 &
• Jianbin Wang 46  

Nature Biotechnology volume  39 ,  pages 281–286 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Nature Biotechnology asks a selection of faculty about the most exciting frontier in their field and the most needed technologies for advancing knowledge and applications.

What will be the most important areas of research in biotech over the coming years? Which technologies will be most important to advance knowledge and applications in these areas? Nature Biotechnology reached out to a set of faculty doing outstanding work in research areas representative of the journal’s remit and asked them to contribute their vision of where their fields are going.

Nasim Annabi: Bioengineering advances have increased foundational interdisciplinary research for creating state-of-the-art medical devices and drug delivery platforms; however, there are many challenges in the design and development of reliable technologies. The future trends in this field should focus on dynamic biomaterials, personalized medicine and additive manufacturing to improve both disease diagnostics and treatments. In addition, there is a need for the development of more effective in vitro platforms for developing drugs and testing medical devices to transform the healthcare system through preclinical research and its rapid scale-up and commercialization for effective and safe healthcare solutions.

Matthew Baker: I have an interest in directed evolution and evolutionary microbiology. The 2018 Nobel Prize, partially awarded to Frances Arnold, has bolstered widespread interest in utilizing evolution for approaches in synthetic biology. Major improvements have been made using evolutionary methods for ‘irrational design’ to test and engineer new proteins for new purposes. However, our understanding of emergent complexity — or how complexity increased greatly at certain key moments — remains limited. Experimental evolution is being applied to more complex systems and different species with better screens and higher throughput via automation. This should lead to a better understanding of what the broad ‘rules’ of molecular evolution are and, in turn, refine efforts in synthetic biology and directed evolution of proteins for applications in biotechnology.

Alistair Boettiger: Advances in sequence-resolved super-resolution imaging of the genome are changing how we think about chromatin structure and its roles in cell biology. It is now apparent that the genome doesn’t fold into a stable structure, the way many proteins do. It is a large and flexible molecule, in which no two cells adopt the same fold at any given point in time. Understanding how this flexibility facilitates genome processes like transcriptional regulation, replication and repair will be driven forward by deeper integration of microscopy and sequencing approaches, new multimodal ’omic imaging, and microscopy-informed computational modeling.

Debojyoti Chakraborty: Detecting and correcting diseases requires precise molecular tools. The promise shown by ongoing gene editing trials for hemoglobinopathies has truly put CRISPR on track for therapeutic interventions. With the development of novel editors, cleavage-free genome engineering and robust delivery options, the coming years would see active clinical evaluation of in vivo genome editing — a challenging frontier. At the same time, the evolution of more sensitive and inexpensive CRISPR diagnostics platforms suited to a wide range of diseases would bring the benefits of early detection of disorders. This may be invaluable in developing countries.

Yvonne Chen: Cell-based immunotherapy has broken new grounds in treating previously intractable diseases. Efforts in biomolecular engineering and synthetic biology continue to enhance our ability to engineer synthetic proteins that predictably impact cell behavior, moving the field away from a trial-and-error basis and toward true rational design. The development and integration of multilayered genetic circuitry offer the possibility of greater versatility and control over engineered cells. To reach their maximum potential, such designs must also be grounded in the realities of clinical implementation and engineered with an eye toward system robustness in the face of significant variabilities in human physiology.

Kizzmekia S. Corbett: As the COVID-19 pandemic has beckoned for rapid development of safe and effective vaccines, vaccinology is being transformed before our eyes. Now, the looming question for the field is not “Will novel viruses arise?” but “How can we be better prepared when they do?” The use of mRNA platforms awakens a new era of vaccine development that will rely on a critical intersection of basic science, precise antigen design, novel platform discovery and concerted global efforts towards pandemic preparedness.

Bruno Correia: We continue to witness incredible advances in the broad field of molecular design. The ever-larger (and growing) data reservoirs, empowered both by unprecedented advances in computational analysis and by our ability to extract functional principles, are having a transformative impact. In the area of protein design, I foresee an increasing capacity to engineer extra mechanistic layers into amino acid sequences, allowing us to create ‘smarter drugs’ with multiple controllable activities. Another exciting dimension is where protein design interfaces with cell-based therapies, which will open up many new important avenues for next-generation therapies.

James Dahlman: Millions of patients have been treated via lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-mediated mRNA delivery; however, this emerging drug modality is limited to intramuscular administration or systemic liver targeting. To realize the clinical potential of RNA drugs, we must design LNPs that target new tissues after systemic administration, which likely means analyzing thousands of chemically distinct LNPs directly in vivo. DNA-barcoded nanoparticles make this increasingly plausible, enabling study of more than 100 LNPs in a single animal. The key lesson from DNA-barcoded nanoparticles, which should be applied to drug delivery in the future, is that bioengineering technologies used to perturb and characterize cells (for example, single-cell RNA-seq and multi-omics) can be repurposed to study targeted, systemic delivery in exciting new ways.

Tulio de Oliveira: In the field of genomic surveillance, one of the most exciting developments is genotype-to-phenotype characterization in real time. For example, within weeks of the discovery of novel SARS-CoV-2 variants, researchers were able to determine how the genetic variation affected vaccine response.

Ali Ertuerk: Moving from generalized and flawed treatments to personalized medicine requires merging unbiased and scalable technologies. Advances in single-cell multi-omics and organoid models have facilitated the assessment of patient heterogeneity. By combining these technologies with unbiased imaging of intact biological specimens using tissue clearing and end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-based analysis, we can achieve a much-needed million-fold scaling of human organ mapping and investigation of diseases at the single-cell level. Although DNA nanotechnology can help target desired cells in vivo for drug delivery or gene editing, the cellular maps can serve as templates to generate new human organs using three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting for millions in need. This multidisciplinary approach will fast-track personalized treatments of complicated diseases and enable healthy living beyond 100 years.

Mehmet Fatih Yanik: In the near future, implantable brain–machine interfaces based on biocompatible materials will be substantially less invasive while covering more brain areas and allowing neuronal-resolution measurements of rapidly varying brain networks. Technologies like focused ultrasound will be miniaturized and make it possible to focally deliver receptor-specific drugs non-invasively to specific circuits deep within the brain without causing off-target effects. Closed-loop implementation of such measurement and manipulation capabilities using AI algorithms to simultaneously analyze both brain networks and behavior are likely to enable unique opportunities for the treatment of brain disorders. These advances will present interesting regulatory, legal and ethical challenges.

Elizabeth Henaff: The individual microbiome manifests the continuum between organism and environment. The next frontier of biotechnology is putting biological metrics, such as metagenomics, in the hands of the designers who create our built environments: architects and city planners. How can the discipline of design, an inherently human-centered practice, learn from the field of metagenomics? These metrics help us contextualize human health and well-being within the multispecies ecosystems we inhabit. Design for humans will become design for the more-than-human. The key will be to focus on relational and radical inclusion, with biotechnological interfaces designed for collaborative survival across scales and species.

Meritxell Huch: One of the most exciting developments in human cell biology has been the establishment of ‘organoids’ — human 3D cultures that faithfully recapitulate some of the function of the corresponding tissue. Derived either from pluripotent stem cells, by a stepwise differentiation process, or from differentiated (either adult or fetal) tissue, these self-organizing structures provide a unique system wherein to identify basic principles of human organ development, tissue regeneration and disease. Their ability to recapitulate organogenesis is revolutionizing the way we study human development. Similarly, the remarkable expansion potential of human organoid cultures derived from adult or fetal cells is opening up opportunities for biomedical research applications, ranging from cellular sources for cell therapy or transplantation to drug screening platforms for personalized medicine. Many challenges remain, ranging from increasing cellular complexity to improving scalability or cellular maturation. Once surmounted, we will enter a new era where studying basic principles of organ development, maintenance, regeneration and disease in human tissues will become a reality.

Iliyan D. Iliev: For many years, fungal research has been an important driving force in biotechnology and medicine. Recent discoveries place fungi as an integral part of the microbiome, key modulators of immunity and health, and rich sources of biologically active metabolites. Aided by advances in ’omics technologies, data integration and experimental platforms and a revolution in genome editing, we are now poised to decipher fungal activities and host–fungal interactions at an unprecedented level in individual patients. New therapeutic developments modulating such interactions or targeting the fungal arm of the microbiome will be the next challenge.

Thomas Jacobs: One of the most exciting developments I see is the ability to make precise, large-scale perturbations to eukaryotic genomes. From combinatorial genetic screens to synthesis and reorganization on a large scale, we are getting closer to having the ability to precisely modify entire genomes of organisms at will. This will allow us to test hypotheses on genome structure, organization and gene regulatory networks in the wet lab, with applications in agriculture and biomedicine. To accomplish this, we will need to develop both methods for more accurate DNA synthesis that are orders of magnitude cheaper, and simple bioinformatic tools so the average student or postdoc can easily design, analyze and interpret these increasingly combinatorial experimental systems.

Howard Junca: Biomarkers, bioactivities and bioprocesses can contribute to achieving sustainability in the Anthropocene: a thrilling and challenging time for environmental biotechnology and microbiome research. ‘One Health’ approaches to critical trends — rewilding Earth’s ecosystems and functional restoration, xenobiotic containment and bioremediation, changes in production and consumption of goods, and responses to emerging diseases — all can greatly benefit by integrating microbiome engineering and transplantation. Disruptive computational power and approaches for biodata mining and AI pattern recognition will boost detection, cultivability, prediction and design of novel natural and synthetic components, metabolic network interdependencies and their combinatorial effects inside microbiomes and in holobiont associations.

Albert Keung: Synthetic biology has accomplished many wonderful things by integrating our rapidly expanding understanding of biological parts and their functions into sophisticated systems. One intriguing question is how we might address problems that require substantial scaling. Although traditional engineering disciplines have developed frameworks to guide scaling, biological systems — often within what one would find in just a microliter of fluid — can present orders of magnitude higher levels of distinct and diverse intermolecular interactions than the largest chemical process industrial plant. Engineering regulatory systems within cells or storing exabytes of digital information in a billion, billion distinct DNA strands are just a few examples of extreme scaling that will demand new design and engineering frameworks.

Ilana Kolodkin-Gal: In ancient Greece, Socrates and Plato founded Western scientific philosophy by integrating logic, poetry, math and natural sciences. The current renaissance of microbial biotechnology similarly erases the artificial boundaries between genetics, chemistry, data science, ecology and even social sciences to utilize natural bacterial abilities. Microbial enzymes and exopolymers are used in biomedical and food industries while bacterial communal properties are explored to generate living concrete, novel drugs and higher crop productivity. Modern microbial biotechnology can overcome reactionary responses to the vital synthesis of traditional disciplines. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the coevolution of academy and industry is not a compromise, but rather an essential step for advancing scientific excellence.

Smita Krishnaswamy: Biomedical data are being generated at an extremely high throughput and in many dimensions. Initial phases of analysis involved tasks such as denoising, batch correction and basic dimensionality reduction. However, there is a big gap between data analysis and insight generation. I believe that the next phase will involve integrated analysis of multitudes of related datasets collected under many conditions and across modalities instead of an isolated focus on individual datasets. This will allow us to model the underlying systems as stochastic, complex and dynamic entities. From such models, we could infer mechanistics and even simulate potential therapies or alterations of the system.

Madeline Lancaster: Exciting discoveries in human neurobiology will come from the intersection of highly diverse methods, from genetics and transcriptomics to imaging and electrophysiology. These approaches will enable detailed characterization of cell types and neuronal connectivity. In this context, brain organoids will provide a tractable system for further information across time and even across species. But such neural tissues are of particular interest for their use in functional studies, allowing one to test resultant hypotheses through genetic or other perturbations. These varied approaches will begin to provide a mechanistic understanding of human brain development and function.

Evan Macosko: The use of DNA to barcode and quantify biomolecules powered the recent ‘single cell revolution’. In combination with new developments in microscopy and molecular biology, DNA will increasingly be the readout of choice for biochemical and cell biological assays in situ. Protein–protein interactions, cell signaling dynamics and metabolic state will all be encodable in DNA, enabling multiplexed, high-throughput measurements. In the brain, application of these technologies to the study of neural connectivity, electrical activity and functional plasticity will be transformative. I hope such assays finally provide the level of detail needed to understand the many brain diseases whose mechanisms remain mysterious.

Mario Alberto Martínez-Núñez: The development of omics technologies and their coupling to synthetic biology will allow in the near future not only the exploration or modeling of microbiomes for the search for environmental or biotechnological solutions, but also their control. The union and development of these fields will allow us to go from ex situ experiments to in situ implementations, such as the design, construction and control of communication between the elements of the microbiomes, allowing us to regulate not only cell behavior, but also production of molecules of interest in situ.

Kyoko Miura: Research on long-lived species, such as naked mole-rats, blind mole-rats, bats, whales, elephants and long-lived trees, presents unique opportunities for identifying novel strategies to prevent aging and age-related diseases, including cancer. We believe that the development of genome editing, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and multi-omics technologies in the naked mole-rat, the longest-lived rodent, could pave the way to a fundamental cure for aging and cancer in humans. Combining studies in this new animal model with the rapidly progressing human iPS cell and organoid technologies could ultimately allow treatment of a variety of diseases and injuries.

Jenny Molloy: During COVID-19, the impact of biotechnology on our daily lives and incredible recent advances in bioengineering, biomanufacturing and bioinformatics have never been more visible. However, not everyone can access biotechnology’s benefits — partly because the tools and agency to shape the field are very unevenly distributed. This has to change. Nurturing talent and ideas from all parts of the world is essential for a thriving and equitable global bioeconomy. We have the means: enabling technologies are being democratized, digital tools for sharing know-how are flourishing and open sharing of data and materials is accelerating. We will see a more diverse biotech community emerging that benefits even more of the planet.

Andrés Ochoa Cruz: Discovery has always been part of the human spirit. Coronavirus has opened the discussion of and interest in understanding science all over the globe. Involving people in scientific understanding is one of the pillars of the citizen-science movement. I am excited about technologies and tools that are helping us to understand biology more deeply: synthetic biology that merges engineering, biology and mathematics; machine learning that helps us to make sense of the large amount of data that we produce in genomics; and finally, self-quantification and health data analysis that can encourage greater public engagement with science and help people understand their own biology.

Randall J. Platt: Fueled by advancements in biological engineering, DNA sequencing and DNA data storage, it is now possible to encode biological events in DNA and subsequently reconstruct cellular histories — providing an entry point into understanding the relationship between cellular lineages, transcriptomes, interactions and environments. The development of new molecular tools enabling the scalable encoding and integration of multimodal features within single cells and across multicellular systems will usher biology into a radically new era where biological systems can tell you their complex biographies spanning time, space, development, perturbation, health and disease.

Avery D. Posey, Jr.: Cellular immunotherapy demonstrated ground-breaking advances for the treatment of blood cancers and budding activity against solid malignancies over the past decade. In the next decade, important objectives for improving the efficacy of cell therapy will be to identify optimal cell types and sources, expand tumor targeting to exploit differential post-translational modifications, revisit immune signaling pathways to identify opportunities to enhance potency and resist exhaustion, and alleviate immunosuppressive microenvironments through combination therapies, including novel synthetic molecules. Multi-omics technologies will improve our understanding of the factors driving responses to cell therapies and the relationship between innate, adaptive and engineered immunity within tumors.

Huilin Shao: I am most excited about the development of new nanotechnologies — biological, physical and integrative — to empower molecular diagnostics. Improved precision in their design and engineering will bring forth enabling tools for basic discovery and clinical translation. These can redefine biomarkers, revealing insights from the currently unmeasurable, and influence patient care, through earlier and safer diagnostics and real-time treatment monitoring.

Mijo Simunovic: Organoids have created unique opportunities for modeling mammalian development in the lab, leaping into a new era of synthetic organogenesis. Although pathways to generating individual organs are strikingly similar across many species, the human embryo is a world apart from a mouse or an elephant. Our next challenge is to leverage tissue engineering and genome editing to faithfully mimic the complex signaling gradients and the mechanical microenvironments of developing human organs. These efforts will not only enable a rationally designed program to reproducibly generate human tissues from pluripotent stem cells, but also open doors to answering perhaps one of the oldest questions in biology: what makes us human?

Nikolai Slavov: Single-cell multi-omics technologies are rapidly expanding. An exciting frontier is the comprehensive quantification of protein activities, interactions and conformations with single-cell resolution across time and space. Such analyses will be powered by emerging single-cell mass spectrometric technologies. These technologies will build quantitative biochemical and biophysical models of cellular systems and discover new drug targets. The success of such analyses will require (i) careful selection and sampling of relevant in vivo systems, including patient samples, and (ii) integration of multi-omics methods that analyze both cells and their environments. Areas poised to benefit from these developments include immuno-oncology, autoimmunity, neuroscience and developmental biology.

Takanori Takebe: Personalization — ‘ My Medicine’ — will shape the future of medical practice and push humanity towards a better life. The advent of organoid research has offered a platform to study human health and disease, but going forward the technological convergence of evolving toolboxes, such as gene editing, transcriptomics, imaging and bioengineering, will act synergistically to enable personalized prediction of disease onset, prevention of disease, improved efficacy and safety of medical interventions and, ultimately, personalized regenerative therapy as human organoid research progresses.

Luk H. Vandenberghe: The era of genetic medicine has started. The past years have shown that gene therapy can have a durable and transformative impact on disease and patients’ lives. What is in front of us is exciting on many levels. For one, with the innovation in omics, the knowledge base of the targets we can pursue increases daily. Second, the creativity explosion on how we can molecularly intervene at those disease targets by editing, silencing or augmenting approaches is bringing a precision to the design table that often is critical to make a meaningful gene drug. Third, gene delivery, the focus of much of our work, often remains the Achilles heel to success in the clinic. Here too we see novel modalities, such as non-viral gene delivery (even mRNA for vaccines) and refinement of existing ones such as adeno-associated virus (AAV) to improve pharmacological control of this new class of drugs.

Rajeev K. Varshney: The advent of contemporary genome sequencing tools and platforms have enabled researchers to sequence most of the crops and plant species, including so-called orphan crops in developing countries. This has led to a better understanding of the genome architecture and the molecular basis of traits of interest for developing improved crop varieties addressing climate change, food, health, and nutrition security. We anticipate generation of massive amounts of sequence data not only at the single-cell level in plants, but also at the population level from the field. It will be exciting to see how of artificial intelligence and machine learning are applied to these datasets to enhance accuracy of genomic prediction for accelerated crop improvement programs.

Jianbin Wang: Single-cell transcriptomics has propelled the identification of cell types in various organs and systems. Now basic and clinical fields are looking beyond cell type and expecting a more comprehensive understanding of cellular status in primary tissue. This requires not only gene expression profiles, but more importantly cell signaling cascades from receptor activation to transcription factor binding, which should be integrated with histology and pathology information at single-cell resolution. Technology breakthroughs for precise measurement of various biomolecules are necessary to achieve this goal.

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Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Nasim Annabi

School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Matthew Baker

Department of Developmental Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Alistair Boettiger

CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi, India

Debojyoti Chakraborty

Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Yvonne Chen

Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory, Vaccine Research Center, National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, MD, USA

Kizzmekia S. Corbett

The Laboratory of Protein Design and Immunoengineering, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland

Bruno Correia

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

James Dahlman

Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, USA

KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP), University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

Tulio de Oliveira

Department of Global Health, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Institute of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, Munich Center for Neuroscience, Neuherberg, Germany

Ali Ertuerk

Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, ETH, Zürich, Switzerland

Mehmet Fatih Yanik

Integrated Design and Media, Center for Urban Science and Progress, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Elizabeth Henaff

Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany

Meritxell Huch

Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY, USA

Iliyan D. Iliev

VIB University of Ghent Center for Plant Systems Biology, Ghent, Belgium

Thomas Jacobs

Microbiomas Foundation, Chia, Colombia

Howard Junca

Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Braunschweig, Germany

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

Albert Keung

Department of Molecular Genetics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

Ilana Kolodkin-Gal

Department of Genetics, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Smita Krishnaswamy

Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering & Applied Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Cambridge, UK

Madeline Lancaster

The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

Evan Macosko & Luk H. Vandenberghe

Facultad de Ciencias, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Coyoacán, Mexico

Mario Alberto Martínez-Núñez

Priority Organization for Innovation and Excellence, Kumamoto University, Kumamoto, Japan

Kyoko Miura

Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Jenny Molloy

Sao Paulo University (USP), Butanta, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Andrés Ochoa Cruz

Laboratory of Biological Engineering, ETH Zurich, Basel, Switzerland

Randall J. Platt

The Department of Chemistry, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Avery D. Posey Jr.

Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Institute for Health Innovation & Technology, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Huilin Shao

Department of Surgery, Institute for Health Innovation & Technology, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Department of Chemical Engineering, Columbia Stem Cell Initiative, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Mijo Simunovic

Department of Genetics and Development, Columbia Stem Cell Initiative, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Department of Bioengineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Nikolai Slavov

Barnett Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Single Cell Proteomics Center, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati, OH, USA

Takanori Takebe

Grousbeck Gene Therapy Center, Mass Eye and Ear, Boston, MA, USA

Luk H. Vandenberghe

Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Center of Excellence in Genomics & Systems Biology, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Patancheru, India

Rajeev K. Varshney

State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre, and Centre for Crop Research Innovation, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Australia

School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Jianbin Wang

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Annabi, N., Baker, M., Boettiger, A. et al. Voices of biotech research. Nat Biotechnol 39 , 281–286 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-00847-1

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-00847-1

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Nutrient research reveals pathway for treating brain disorders

A University of Queensland researcher has found molecular doorways that could be used to help deliver drugs into the brain to treat neurological disorders.

Dr Rosemary Cater from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience led a team which discovered that an essential nutrient called choline is transported into the brain by a protein called FLVCR2.

"Choline is a vitamin-like nutrient that is essential for many important functions in the body, particularly for brain development," Dr Cater said.

"We need to consume 400-500 mg of choline per day to support cell regeneration, gene expression regulation, and for sending signals between neurons."

Dr Cater said that until now, little was known about how dietary choline travels past the layer of specialised cells that separates the blood from the brain.

"This blood-brain barrier prevents molecules in the blood that are toxic to the brain from entering," she said.

"The brain still needs to absorb nutrients from the blood, so the barrier contains specialised cellular machines -- called transporters -- that allow specific nutrients such as glucose, omega-3 fatty acids and choline to enter.

"While this barrier is an important line of defence, it presents a challenge for designing drugs to treat neurological disorders."

Dr Cater was able to show that choline sits in a cavity of FLVCR2 as it travels across the blood-brain barrier and is kept in place by a cage of protein residues.

"We used high-powered cryo-electron microscopes to see exactly how choline binds to FLVCR2," she said.

"This is critical information for understanding how to design drugs that mimic choline so that they can be transported by FLVCR2 to reach their site of action within the brain.

"These findings will inform the future design of drugs for diseases such as Alzheimer's and stroke."

The research also highlights the importance of eating choline-rich foods -- such as eggs, vegetables, meat, nuts and beans.

The research is published in Nature and funded by the National Institutes of Health.

• Brain Tumor
• Nervous System
• Birth Defects
• Psychology Research
• Brain Injury
• Brain-Computer Interfaces
• Disorders and Syndromes
• Intelligence
• Brain damage
• Alzheimer's disease
• Traumatic brain injury
• West Nile virus
• Cerebral contusion
• Peripheral nervous system
• Brain tumor

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Queensland . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Rosemary J. Cater, Dibyanti Mukherjee, Eva Gil-Iturbe, Satchal K. Erramilli, Ting Chen, Katie Koo, Nicolás Santander, Andrew Reckers, Brian Kloss, Tomasz Gawda, Brendon C. Choy, Zhening Zhang, Aditya Katewa, Amara Larpthaveesarp, Eric J. Huang, Scott W. J. Mooney, Oliver B. Clarke, Sook Wah Yee, Kathleen M. Giacomini, Anthony A. Kossiakoff, Matthias Quick, Thomas Arnold, Filippo Mancia. Structural and molecular basis of choline uptake into the brain by FLVCR2 . Nature , 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07326-y

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