Tag: Deadly

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Avid’s Acutus Dark Iron turntable platter alone weighs 10kg – so I know it’s deadly serious

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Money no object

We love to give practical buying advice on the latest gadgets here at TechRadar. But sometimes what we love even more is to indulge in the most ridiculous, high-end, cutting-edge, luxurious tech on the planet. That’s what we bring you in these Money no Object columns – you can read the whole series here.

The hunt for the best turntable never truly ends – but I’m pretty sure I’ve just found a very strong contender. British founded-owned-and-run analogue hi-fi manufacturer, Avid (see the splendid Avid Volvere for reference), has launched Acutus Dark Iron, its first new turntable in six years and the first to feature a new integrated motor design.

The Acutus Dark Iron is handmade in Cambridgeshire, England, and the company tells us that its striking new darker ‘Sparkling Iron’ finish comes as a result of customer feedback – with the added benefit that it significantly reduces the cost compared to the company’s more labor-intensive chrome-finish models (although make no mistake, it still costs a pretty penny). 

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Life Style

CAR T cells can shrink deadly brain tumours — though for how long is unclear

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Coloured FLAIR (fluid-attenuated inversion recovery) magnetic resonance imaging scan (MRI) of an axia section through a human brain showing a glioblastoma affecting the frontal lobe.

A glioblastoma (green and blue, artificially coloured) grows in the frontal lobe of a person’s brain.Credit: Pr Michel Brauner, ISM/Science Photo Library

Two preliminary studies suggest that next-generation engineered immune cells show promise against one of the most feared forms of cancer.

A pair of papers published on 13 March, one in Nature Medicine1 and the other in New England Journal of Medicine2, describe the design and deployment of immune cells called chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR T) cells against glioblastoma, an aggressive and difficult-to-treat form of brain cancer. The average length of survival for people with this tumour is eight months.

Both teams found early hints of progress using CAR T cells that target two proteins made by glioblastoma cells, thereby marking those cells for destruction. CAR T cells are currently approved only for treating blood cancers such as leukaemia and are typically engineered to home in on only one target. But the new results add to mounting evidence that CAR T cells could be modified to treat a wider range of cancers.

“It lends credence to the potential power of CAR-T cells to make a difference in solid tumours, especially the brain,” says Bryan Choi, a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and a lead author of the New England Journal of Medicine study. “It adds to the excitement that we might be able to move the needle.”

A highly lethal tumour

Glioblastomas offer a formidable challenge. Fast-growing glioblastomas can mix with healthy brain cells, forming diffuse tumours that are difficult to remove surgically. Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy are typically the only treatment options and tend to produce short-lived, partial responses.

In CAR-T therapy, a person’s own T cells are removed from the body and kitted out with proteins that help the cells home in on tumours. The souped-up cells are then reinfused into the body.

In the past few years, researchers have been developing CAR T cells that target specific molecules made by some glioblastomas. The two new papers take this a step farther by designing CAR T cells that target not one type of molecule but two.

In one approach, Choi and his colleagues designed CAR T cells to latch onto a mutated form of a protein called EGFR that is produced by some glioblastomas. The CAR T cells also secreted antibodies that bind to both T cells and the unmutated form of EGFR, which is not typically made by brain cells but is often made by glioblastoma cells. The result is a CAR-T therapy that unleashes the immune system against cells that express either the mutated or the unmutated form of EGFR.

Choi and his team administered these cells to three adults with glioblastoma. Tumours appeared to shrink in all three, but later recurred. One man who received the treatment, however, had a response that lasted for more than six months.

Seven months and counting

The other team, led by Stephen Bagley, a neurooncologist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, used CAR T cells that target both EGFR and another protein found in glioblastomas called interleukin-13 receptor alpha 2. Tumours appeared to shrink in all six of the people they treated. One participant’s glioblastoma began to grow again within a month, but one participant has not shown signs of tumour progression for seven months so far, says Bagley. Of the remaining four participants, one left the trial, and tumours have not rebounded in the remaining three, but they are within six months of treatment.

The results are promising, but the goal is to generate longer-lasting responses, says Bagley. It was exciting, he says, to watch tumours shrink in the first day after CAR-T therapy. “We hadn’t seen that before,” he says. “We were thrilled.”

But the excitement faded as participants relapsed after treatment: “It’s very humbling to go on that roller coaster ride,” he says. “One week you feel like you’ve made a real difference in their lives, and the next week the tumour is back again.”

Versatile T cells

The field will eagerly await additional results, says Sneha Ramakrishna, a paediatric oncologist at Stanford Medicine in California. The size of glioblastomas is notoriously difficult to measure because of their diffuse shape, and apparent changes in tumour size could be affected by inflammation following surgery to administer the CAR T cells directly into the brain.

But the images are impressive, and measures of tumour RNA in Choi’s study suggest that the tumours might have indeed shrunk, says Ramakrishna. And constructing CAR T cells with multiple targets could ultimately yield long lasting therapies, she says, by making it more difficult for cancer cells to develop ways to resist the therapy.

“I’m looking forward to seeing what they do over time,” she says. “I hope that as we get more experience, we can learn how to make the right CAR for our patients.”

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News

A Mississippi Jury Finds Cops Justified in 2017 Deadly Shooting After Going to Incorrect Residence.

A jury in Mississippi has decided not to pursue a civil lawsuit against two police officers who fatally shot a man while carrying out an execution of a warrant at the wrong location. The action was brought by the deceased’s family.

Ismael Lopez’s death in 2017 at the hands of Zachary Durden and Samuel Maze, both of whom were employed by the Southaven Police Department, was ruled by a federal jury in Oxford on Thursday to not represent a violation of Lopez’s constitutional rights as a result of the incident. Following a hearing that lasted for four days, the judge found in favor of Claudia Linares, Lopez’s wife, who had claimed that she was entitled to $20 million in damages.

As the defense attorney Murray Wells described to WREG-TV, the jury deliberated and came to the conclusion that the amount of force used by Officers Durden and Maze was not excessive after hearing all of the evidence.

Lopez was a Mexican citizen who was living in the United States illegally. He was also subject to deportation orders and criminal charges for unlawfully holding guns. Previously, the city of Southaven argued that the individual did not have any civil rights that needed to be infringed upon.

This assertion was debunked by a judgement from a court in the year 2020, which said that the Constitution protects “all persons.”

After determining in June that neither the city of Southaven nor the former police chief of Southaven, Steve Pirtle, were liable for the officers’ actions in accordance with federal law, Senior United States District Judge Michael P. Mills dismissed the case that was brought against both of them.

On July 24, 2017, according to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, investigators allegedly went to Lopez and Linares’ trailer and knocked on the door while they were asleep inside. When the police officers attempted to serve a warrant for domestic violence on a neighbor on the other side of the street, they got the addresses confused.

Officers did not produce identification when they were questioned by state investigators, although they did confess that they had knocked on the door. According to the officers, Lopez was standing outside at the time when the door opened and his dog ran out. After that, the suspect reportedly pointed a weapon through the gap. First Maze shot the dog, and then Durden opened fire on Lopez, all of which occurred in short succession.

A third officer who arrived on the scene told investigators that he heard Durden urge Lopez many times to put the pistol down before he fired his firearm on the suspect.

There is no video of the incident that has been verified.

The 41-year-old man was fatally wounded more than two meters away from the front door when he was shot in the back of the head. He passed dead as a result of his injuries. He was reportedly trying to evade the authorities’ attempts to apprehend him.

The lawyers for Lopez disputed that their client had pointed the gun at the police, but sadly, Lopez was unable to make it to the hospital before he died suddenly. The firearm was located around five and a half feet away from the deceased individual’s body, and neither his fingerprints nor his DNA were on the weapon. The fact that they saw Maze shoot the dog led them to believe that Durden was the one who was guilty for Lopez’s death.

When state investigators arrived at the home, they found Lopez’s body in the middle of the living room with his hands tied behind his back. He had been strangled. On the couch was a weapon that had not been loaded.

Following their investigation, the members of the state grand jury decided not to bring any charges against anybody involved in the shooting.

Darren Musselwhite, the mayor of Southaven, has issued a statement in which he expresses his regret at Lopez’s passing and his contentment with the results of the inquiry.

According to Musselwhite, this judgment reinforces our earlier judgement that our officers behaved properly in the face of a serious threat of lethal force. Because of this, we have been there for them for the last six years, and now that their hardship is over, we are rejoicing in their success.