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Investigators from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai found that an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm can detect an abnormal heart rhythm in people not yet showing symptoms.
The algorithm, which identified hidden signals in common medical diagnostic testing, may help doctors better prevent strokes and other cardiovascular complications in people with atrial fibrillation — the most common type of heart rhythm disorder.
Previously developed algorithms have been primarily used in white populations. This algorithm works in diverse settings and patient populations, including U.S. veterans and underserved populations. The findings were published today in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Cardiology.
“This research allows for better identification of a hidden heart condition and informs the best way to develop algorithms that are equitable and generalizable to all patients,” said David Ouyang, MD, a cardiologist in the Department of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, a researcher in the Division of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, and senior author of the study.
Experts estimate that about 1 in 3 people with atrial fibrillation do not know they have the condition.
In atrial fibrillation, the electrical signals in the heart that regulate the pumping of blood from the upper chambers to the lower chambers are chaotic. This can cause blood in the upper chambers to pool and form blood clots that can travel to the brain and trigger an ischemic stroke.
To create the algorithm, investigators programmed an artificial intelligence tool to study patterns found in electrocardiogram readings. An electrocardiogram is a test that monitors electrical signals from the heart. People who undergo this test have electrodes placed on their body that detect the heart’s electrical activity.

Glioblastoma (GBM), an aggressive brain cancer, is notoriously resistant to treatment, with recurrent GBM associated with survival of less than 10 months. Immunotherapies, which mobilize the body’s immune defenses against a cancer, have not been effective for GBM, in part because the tumor’s surrounding environment is largely impenetrable to assaults from the body’s immune system. To convert this immunosuppressive environment into one amenable to an immune response, investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, engineered a novel oncolytic virus that can infect cancer cells and stimulate an anti-tumor immune response. Results, published in Nature, demonstrated the safety and preliminary efficacy of the novel gene therapy approach in high-grade glioma patients, with prolonged survival in a subgroup of recurrent GBM patients immunologically “familiar” with the virus.
“GBM has an aggressive effect in part because of a milieu of immunosuppressive factors surrounding the tumor, which enable the tumor’s growth by preventing the immune system from entering and attacking it,” said corresponding author E. Antonio Chiocca, MD, PhD, Chair of the BWH Department of Neurosurgery. “This study showed that with a virus we designed, we can reshape this ‘immune desert’ into a pro-inflammatory environment.”
This phase I, first-in-human trial examined the safety of an oncolytic virus, called CAN-3110, which was designed and subjected to preclinical testing by researchers at BWH and licensed to Candel Therapeutics as the trial was ongoing.
The cancer-attacking virus is an oncolytic herpes simplex virus (oHSV), which is the same type of virus used in a therapy approved for the treatment of metastatic melanoma. Unlike other clinical oHSVs, this therapy includes the ICP34.5 gene, which is often excluded from clinical oHSVs because it causes human disease in unmodified forms of the virus. However, the researchers hypothesized that this gene may be necessary to trigger a robust, pro-inflammatory response necessary for attacking the tumor. Therefore, they designed a version of the oHSV1 that contains the ICP34.5 gene but is also genetically “programmed” not to attack healthy brain cells.
Overall, the trial demonstrated the safety of CAN-3110 in 41 patients with high-grade gliomas, including 32 with recurrent GBM. The most serious adverse events were seizures in two participants. Notably, GBM participants who had pre-existing antibodies to HSV1 virus (66% of the patients) had a median overall survival of 14.2 months. In patients with pre-existing antibodies, the researchers saw markers of several changes in the tumor microenvironment associated with immune activation. They hypothesize that the presence of HSV1 antibodies resulted in a rapid immune response to the virus, which brought more immune cells to the tumor and increased the levels of inflammation in the tumor microenvironment.
After CAN-3110 treatment, the investigators also observed an increase in the diversity of the T cell repertoire, suggesting that the virus induces a broad immune response, perhaps by eliminating tumor cells resulting in the release of cancer antigens. These immunological changes after treatment were also shown to be associated with improved survival.
Studies like this one show the promise of gene therapy for treating intractable conditions. Mass General Brigham’s Gene and Cell Therapy Institute is helping to translate scientific discoveries made by researchers into first-in-human clinical trials and, ultimately, life-changing treatments for patients. The Institute’s multidisciplinary approach sets it apart from others in the space, helping researchers to rapidly advance new therapies and push the technological and clinical boundaries of this new frontier.
Going forward, the researchers plan to complete prospective studies to further investigate the effectiveness of the oncolytic virus in patients who do and do not have antibodies to HSV1. Having demonstrated the safety of one viral injection, they are proceeding to test the safety and efficacy of up to six injections over four months, which, like multiple rounds of vaccination, may increase the effectiveness of the therapy. The new, six-injection trial is funded by Break Through Cancer.
“Almost no immunotherapies for GBM have been able to increase immune infiltration to these tumors, but the virus studied here provoked a very reactive immune response with infiltration of tumor-killing T-cells,” Chiocca said. “That’s hard to do with GBM, so our findings are exciting and give us hope for our next steps.”

A research group from the University of Turku and Turku Bioscience Centre together with Misvik Biology Ltd in Finland have developed a new method for studying how cancer cells function in softer and stiffer tissue environments. This insight challenges the existing paradigm, opening up new possibilities for research in cancer biology and tissue engineering.
A longstanding belief has been that cells outside the body prefer to spread and grow on stiffer surfaces. This is similar to when we walk on a concrete sidewalk (very stiff) and find it preferable to walking in mud (very soft). For this reason, cells, including stem cells, are continuously cultured on very stiff plastic or glass for research purposes. This idea also resonates with cancer cells thriving within a hard lump they form in tissues. Usually, the stiffer the tumour, the poorer the patients’ prognosis. However, the stiffness of the tissues in our body (e.g., bone versus brain) is not the same. In fact, some cells like neurons and fat cells grow and function effectively in very soft surroundings.
The research group from the University of Turku and Turku Bioscience Centre collaborated with Misvik Biology Ltd, a biotechnology company based in Turku, Finland, to understand how cells function in softer environments and how these could be better modelled outside the human body. They used computational modelling and a large array of growth conditions to meticulously compare cell behaviour on soft and stiff surfaces at an unprecedented resolution.
New perspective on an old idea
Using an automated machine, the researchers microprinted different protein mixtures onto soft and stiff surfaces. The proteins chosen were those that typically surround cells in the body and give texture and information about the tissue environment.
“By using more diverse protein mixtures in cell culture, we begin to get closer to a more physiologically relevant setting outside the body with which we can more effectively model diseased and healthy states,” says Dr. James Conway from the InFLAMES research flagship, the lead researcher of the Turku Bioscience team.
“We had a specific system for microcontact printing of different protein mixtures onto culture plates and decided to see how we could expand the system. Once the researchers at Turku Bioscience had the idea, it was straightforward for us to then use the system on different stiffness hydrogels,” explains CEO Juha Rantala from Misvik, a key collaborator on the project.
By working together, the team demonstrated that the right combination of proteins can support cells on a soft surface, providing crucial survival cues that result in cell growth similar to that observed on a stiffer surface.
“These findings have unveiled a fundamental new perspective in mechanobiology. We have identified a mechanism through which we can explain how cells can effectively adhere, function, and signal on soft substrates. This insight challenges the existing paradigm, opening up new possibilities for research in cancer biology and tissue engineering,” notes Prof. Johanna Ivaska, the principal investigator of the project.

Injuries of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), located in the knee, are typically thought to be caused by acute traumatic events, such as sudden twists. Led by Penn State researchers, new work analyzing an animal model of ACLs suggests that such injuries can also occur as a result of chronic overuse, specifically due to a reduced ability to repair microtraumas associated with overuse. Importantly, the team said, females also are less able to heal from these microtraumas than males, which may explain why females are two to eight times more likely to tear their ACL ligaments than males.
“ACL tears are one of the most common injuries, affecting more than 200,000 people in the U.S. each year, and women are known to be particularly susceptible,” said principal investigator Spencer Szczesny, associate professor of biomedical engineering and of orthopaedics and rehabilitation at Penn State. “While recent research suggests that chronic overuse can lead to ACL injuries, until now, no one had investigated the differential biological response of female and male ACLs to applied force.”
In the study, which was published in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research, researchers placed ACLs from deceased male and female rabbits in a custom-made bioreactor that simulated the conditions of a living animal but allowed direct observation and measurement of the tissue. Next, they applied repetitive forces to the ACLs that mimicked those that would naturally occur during activities such as standing, walking and trotting and measured the expression of genes related to healing.
In male samples, the team found that low and moderate applied forces, such as those that would occur during standing or walking, resulted in increased expression of anabolic genes, which are related to building molecules needed for healing. By contrast, larger applied forces, such as those that would occur with repetitive trotting, decreased expression of these anabolic genes. For female samples, however, the amount of force applied did not influence the level of anabolic gene expression.
“It didn’t matter whether there was low, medium or high activity for females,” said Lauren Paschall, graduate student in biomedical engineering at Penn State and first author on the paper. “Female ACLs exposed to chronic use just didn’t heal as well as male ACLs, which may explain why women are predisposed to injuries. This supports the hypothesis that noncontact ACL injuries are attributed to microtraumas associated with chronic overuse that predispose the ACL to injury.”
According to the researchers, one explanation for the sex differences the team observed could be due to the higher amounts of estrogen in females.
“Some studies have found that the overall effect of estrogen on ACL injury is negative,” Paschall said. “Specifically, studies have shown that human women are more likely to tear their ACLs during the preovulatory phase, when estrogen levels are high, than during the postovulatory phase, when estrogen levels are low.”
She said the team plans to further investigate the role of estrogen on ACL injury.

With a ghostly finger in a lab, researchers coaxed people to hear phantom voices.Some years ago, scientists in Switzerland found a way to make people hallucinate. They didn’t use LSD or sensory deprivation chambers. Instead, they sat people in a chair and asked them to push a button that, a fraction of a second later, caused a rod to gently press their back. After a few rounds, the volunteers got the creeping sense of someone behind them. Faced with a disconnect between their actions and their sensations, their minds conjured another explanation: a separate presence in the room.In a new study published in the journal Psychological Medicine, researchers from the same lab used the ghostly finger setup to probe another kind of hallucination: hearing voices. They found that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a voice when there was a lag between the push of the button and the rod’s touch than when there was no delay.The findings suggest that the neurological roots of hallucinations lie in how the brain processes contradictory signals from the environment, the researchers said.Hearing voices is more common than you might think, said Pavo Orepic, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva and an author of the new paper. In surveys, scientists have discovered that many people without a psychiatric diagnosis — perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the general population — report having heard a disembodied voice at some point in their lives.“There is actually a continuum of these experiences,” Dr. Orepic said. “So all of us hallucinate — at certain times, like if you’re tired, you’ll hallucinate more, for instance — and some people are more prone to do so.”In the new study, as in earlier work, Dr. Orepic and his collaborators had volunteers sit in a chair and push the button that caused the rod to touch their backs. During some sessions, there was no delay between the push and the touch, while others had a half-second delay — enough time to give volunteers that feeling that someone was nearby.During all trials, the volunteers listened to recordings of pink noise, a softer version of white noise. Some recordings contained recorded bits of their own voice, while others had fragments of someone else’s voice or no voice at all. In each trial, the volunteers were asked if they had heard anyone speaking.The study found that when people were already experiencing the peculiar feeling of a ghostly presence, they were more likely to say they had heard a voice when there was none. What’s more, hearing a nonexistent voice was more likely if, earlier in the experiment, they had heard bursts of noise with someone else’s voice in them.That suggests the brain was linking the hallucinated presence and the voice, Dr. Orepic said.Intriguingly, volunteers with no lag between the button-pressing and the rod sometimes reported hearing a nonexistent voice as well, and they were more likely to do so if they had recently been hearing clips of their own voice. If volunteers unconsciously decided they were responsible for the feeling of the finger on their backs, they may have been primed to hear their own voice, the researchers said.Together, the findings support the idea that hallucinations may arise from difficulty in recognizing one’s own actions, as well as being primed to expect a particular outcome, Dr. Orepic said. As time went on, people experiencing a ghostly presence in the trial were increasingly likely to hear voices, implying that the brain was somehow drawing on past experience to build up the impression of someone speaking.Delving more into how the brain builds the impression of a voice when none is there, Dr. Orepic said, may rely on help from healthy people who regularly hear voices — for instance, mediums who feel they can communicate with the dead. He points to ongoing studies at Yale with such people who hear voices as a pathway to understanding how these beliefs arise and how they may be controlled. For mediums, hearing voices is not necessarily unwelcome. But perhaps, with their aid, people whose hallucinations are distressing and disruptive may find some peace.

Polygenic risk scores, which estimate a person’s disease risk based on thousands or millions of common genetic variants, perform poorly in screening and prediction of common diseases such as heart disease, according to a new study led by UCL (University College London) researchers.
It has been claimed that polygenic risk scores will transform the prediction and prevention of common diseases. Companies have already been established that sell polygenic risk score testing services. Polygenic risk score testing is also one of the aims of the nationwide Our Future Health project.
The new study, published in BMJ Medicine, looked at 926 polygenic risk scores for 310 diseases. It found that, on average, only 11% of individuals who develop disease are identified, while at the same time 5% of people who do not develop the disease test positive. Unaffected people usually outnumber those affected which results in far more false than true positive predictions.
Lead author Professor Aroon Hingorani (UCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science) said: “Strong claims have been made about the potential of polygenic risk scores in medicine, but our study shows that this is not justified.
“We found that, when held to the same standards as employed for other tests in medicine, polygenic risk scores performed poorly for prediction and screening across a range of common diseases.”
For the new study, researchers looked at data available in an open-access database, the Polygenic Score Catalog, to determine what the detection rate and false positive rate of the scores would be if used in screening.
For breast cancer and coronary artery disease, the risk scores identified only 10% and 12% of eventual cases respectively, using a cut-off that resulted in 5% of unaffected individuals testing positive.

A UCLA-led team has identified an essential internal control mechanism that can promote the maturation of human stem cell-derived heart muscle cells, offering a deeper understanding of how heart muscle cells develop from their immature fetal stage to their mature adult form.
The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Circulation, could lead to new therapies for heart disease and cardiac damage.
The collaborative effort with Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and other institutions identified an RNA splicing regulator named RBFox1, which was considerably more prevalent in adult heart cells than in newborns, based on a preclinical model. The sharp rise in RBFox1 during the maturation of heart cells was also confirmed through analyses of existing single-cell data.
“This is the first piece of evidence suggesting that RNA splicing control plays a vital role in postnatal heart cell maturation,” said study lead Jijun Huang, who conducted this research during his postdoctoral training in anesthesiology at UCLA. “While RBFox1 alone may not be sufficient to push mature fetal heart muscle cells all the way to fully matured adult cells, our findings uncover a new RNA-based internal network that can substantially drive this maturation process beyond other available approaches.”
The transformation of heart muscle cells from birth until they reach full maturity involves significant shifts in their structure, functionality, and physiological properties. The mechanisms overseeing this comprehensive maturation have been poorly understood thus far.
Although the precise mechanics associating RBFox1-mediated RNA splicing with ensuing maturation procedures and characteristics still require further exploration, the study provides proof-of-concept that modulating RNA splicing can profoundly affect cardiomyocyte maturation. This newfound knowledge hints at future therapeutic applications, pending additional research to expand upon these initial findings.
“For the first time, we’ve shown that by merely altering RNA splicing, we can encourage the significant maturation of heart cells derived from human stem cells,” said senior author Yibin Wang, director of the Cardiovascular & Metabolic Disorders Program at Duke-NUS. “These findings present a potential molecular approach to enhance heart cell maturation, which could address a major challenge in the domains of cardiac regenerative therapy and disease modeling.”
The study was funded by an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Award (18POST33990469) the National Institutes of Health (R01 HL148714, R00 HL141626) and a Department of Defense Award (PR171540).
Study co-authors are Josh Lee, Christoph Rau, Dr. Arash Pezhouman, Tomohiro Yokota, Hiromi Miwa, Tsz Kin Kong, Shreya Udani, Chen Gao, Linsey Stiles, Dr. Orian Shirihai, Dr. Reza Ardehali, and Dino Di Carlo of UCLA and others from Baylor College of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Meharry Medical College, Forcyte Biotechnologies, the University of Cincinnati, the University of North Carolina, and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore.

Researchers have discovered the link between the gut microbiota and Alzheimer’s disease.
For the first time, researchers have found that Alzheimer’s symptoms can be transferred to a healthy young organism via the gut microbiota, confirming its role in the disease.
The research was led by Professor Yvonne Nolan, APC Microbiome Ireland, a world leading SFI funded research centre based at University College Cork (UCC), and the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience, UCC, with Professor Sandrine Thuret at King’s College London and Dr Annamaria Cattaneo IRCCS Fatebenefratelli, Italy.
The study supports the emergence of the gut microbiome as a key target for investigation in Alzheimer’s disease due to its particular susceptibility to lifestyle and environmental influences.
Published in Brain, the study shows that that the memory impairments in people with Alzheimer’s could be transferred to young animals through transplant of gut microbiota.
Alzheimer’s patients had a higher abundance of inflammation-promoting bacteria in faecal samples, and these changes were directly associated with their cognitive status.
Professor Yvonne Nolan said: “The memory tests we investigated rely on the growth of new nerve cells in the hippocampus region of the brain. We saw that animals with gut bacteria from people with Alzheimer’s produced fewer new nerve cells and had impaired memory.”
“People with Alzheimer’s are typically diagnosed at or after the onset of cognitive symptoms, which may be too late, at least for current therapeutic approaches. Understanding the role of gut microbes during prodromal — or early stage- dementia, before the potential onset of symptoms may open avenues for new therapy development, or even individualised intervention,” said Professor Nolan.

Published13 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingThis video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.By David GrittenBBC NewsHundreds of people have been killed by an explosion at a crowded hospital in Gaza City, health officials say.One doctor condemned what he called “a massacre” at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, while another spoke of a scene of total devastation. Palestinian officials say the blast was caused by an Israeli air strike. But the Israeli military say it was the result of a failed rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad – an accusation the militant group rejected.Israeli warplanes and artillery have been bombarding Gaza in response to an unprecedented attack on Israel on 7 October by the main Palestinian militant group, Hamas, which killed 1,400 people.More than 3,000 people have been reported killed by strikes on Gaza.The hospital blast is threatening efforts to resolve the humanitarian crisis there, with Jordan cancelling a planned summit on Wednesday between US President Joe Biden, King Abdullah and the Palestinian and Egyptian leaders.Mr Biden is still travelling to Tel Aviv to show his country’s “solidarity with Israel” and “ironclad commitment to its security”.More on Israel-Gaza warFollow live: Latest updatesExplained: What’s going on in Gaza and Israel, and why now?History behind the story: The Israel-Palestinian conflictHamas attack: Family seeks answers after live-stream horrorFrom Gaza: BBC reporter flees Israel bomb warningPictures that emerged from Al-Ahli Arab hospital on Tuesday night show scenes of chaos, with bloodied and maimed casualties being rushed out on stretchers in the darkness. Bodies and wrecked vehicles can be seen lying in the rubble-strewn street outside. One video appears to show a projectile hitting the area followed by a blast. “We were operating in the hospital, there was a strong explosion, and the ceiling fell on the operating room. This is a massacre,” said Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a Médecins Sans Frontières plastic surgeon who had been helping to treat people wounded in the war.Another doctor told the BBC that 80% of the hospital had been taken out of service and estimated that 1,000 people had been killed or injured.The Ahli al-Arab hospital is fully funded by the Anglican Church, which says the facility is independent of any political factions in Gaza. Canon Richard Sewell, the dean of St George’s College in Jerusalem and one of the Church’s top figures in the holy city, said it was difficult to get reliable information about what happened but that he could confirm the hospital had been hit and that a “horrific number of people” had died.He told the BBC that about 6,000 displaced people had been sheltering in the hospital courtyard at the end of last week. The hospital was first hit by an Israeli air strike that caused damage and injured four people on Saturday, he said. After that, 5,000 people left the courtyard – leaving around 1,000 remaining there, many of them invalids or elderly who needed transportation.Revd Sewell said about 600 patients and staff treating them had been inside the hospital at the time of Monday’s explosion, but that he believed most of those killed had been outside.”There is no justification for this type of attack, accidental or deliberate,” he added. “It is an absolute horror show which is unfolding.”Zaher Kuhail, a British-Palestinian civil engineering consultant and university professor who was nearby at the time, told the BBC that what he had witnessed was “beyond imagination”.”I [saw] two rockets coming from an F-16 or an F-35 [fighter jet], shelling these people and killing them ruthlessly, without any mercy,” he said. He added that many people had been killed by fires sparked by the explosion and that first responders had lacked the equipment they needed to rescue survivors.The health ministry in Gaza said 500 people had been killed and hundreds more were feared trapped under the rubble.Hamas blamed an Israeli strike for what it called a “horrific massacre”.A spokesperson for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is based in the occupied West Bank, accused Israel of a “heinous crime”. Anger also spilled onto the streets in the West Bank. Hundreds of protesters clashed with PA security forces who responded by firing tear gas. This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.The Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) first response was to stress that it did not target hospitals, and it urged caution about “unverified claims”.Later, chief spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a video statement: “Following an additional review and cross-examination of the operational and intelligence systems, it is clear that the IDF did not strike the hospital in Gaza.””The hospital was hit as a result of a failed rocket launched by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organisation,” he said.He said 450 of the thousands of rockets fired indiscriminately towards Israel since the beginning of the war had fallen within Gaza, endangering civilians.Palestinian Islamic Jihad denied that any of its rockets had been involved, saying it had not carried out any activity around Gaza City at the time.The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was shocked and horrified by the reports.”Hospitals should be sanctuaries to preserve human life, not scenes of death and destruction. No patient should be killed in a hospital bed. No doctors should lose their lives while trying to save others,” a statement said.”Hospitals must be protected under international humanitarian law.” The World Health Organization also called for the immediate protection of civilians and healthcare and urged the Israeli military to reverse the evacuation orders it has issued to 20 hospitals in northern of Gaza ahead of what is expected to be a major ground offensive.”The order for evacuation has been impossible to carry out given the current insecurity, critical condition of many patients, and lack of ambulances, staff, health system bed capacity, and alternative shelter for those displaced.”Are you in the region? If it is safe to do so, share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:WhatsApp: +44 7756 165803Tweet: @BBC_HaveYourSayUpload pictures or videoPlease read our terms & conditions and privacy policy

If you are reading this page and can’t see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission. More on this storyBritish teen missing in Hamas attack confirmed deadPublished22 hours agoWhy Egypt is reluctant to open crossing with GazaPublished22 hours agoBiden to visit Israel in landmark show of supportPublished1 day agoMia Shem: Mother pleads for release after Hamas videoPublished1 day agoWounded children, no surviving familyPublished1 day ago

The drugs had been the third rail of scientific inquiry. But in a landmark study, he saw them as a legitimate way to help alleviate suffering and even to reach a mystical state.Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral science and psychiatry whose pioneering work in the study of psychedelics helped usher in a new era of research into those once banned substances — and reintroduced the mystical into scientific discourse about them — died on Monday at his home in Baltimore. He was 77.The cause was colon cancer, said Claudia Turnbull, a longtime friend.Dr. Griffiths, a distinguished psychopharmacologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, spent decades studying the mechanisms of dependence on mood-altering drugs. He published scores of papers on opiates and cocaine, on sedatives and alcohol, on nicotine and caffeine.His work on caffeine, which he noted was the most commonly used drug in the world, was groundbreaking, showing that, yes, it was addictive, that withdrawal could be painful and that caffeine dependence was a “clinically meaningful disorder.”But in August 2006 he published a paper that wasn’t just groundbreaking; it was mind-blowing.The paper had an unusual title: “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” And when it appeared in the magazine Psychopharmacology, it caused a media ruckus.“The God Pill,” read the headline in The Economist. Here was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical study in decades to examine the psychological effects of a psychedelic on what scientists call “healthy normals” — healthy volunteers. Its focus was not on the beneficial properties of the drug for those suffering from depression, or being treated for cancer, or facing end-of-life terrors, or trying to quit smoking. Those landmark studies would come later.This work involved trained doctors administering high doses of psilocybin — the psychoactive, or mind-altering, component found in the psilocybe genus of mushrooms — to healthy people in a controlled, living room-like setting.Eighty percent of the participants described the experience as among the most revelatory and spiritually meaningful episodes of their lives, akin to the death of a parent or the birth of a child, as Dr. Griffiths often said.Their experience had all the attributes of a mystical event. They described profound feelings of joy, love and, yes, terror, along with a sense of interconnectedness and even an understanding of a sublime, sacred and ultimate reality.Such positive effects on their mood and behavior lasted for months and even years, as the author Michael Pollan discovered when he interviewed many of the participants for his 2018 book, “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.”“To listen to these people describe the changes in their lives inspired by their psilocybin journeys is to wonder if the Hopkins session room isn’t a kind of human transformation factor,” Mr. Pollan wrote.But Dr. Griffiths’s work showed that researchers could do more than induce a mystical experience in a lab; they could also use the tools of science — brain imaging, for example — to prospectively, as he put it, examine the nature of consciousness and of religious experience.As Charles Schuster, a former director of the government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, told The New York Times in 2006, “This represents a landmark study, because it is applying modern techniques to an area of human experience that goes back as long as humankind has been here.”In a phone interview, Mr. Pollan said, “Roland had such a sterling reputation as being a rigorous and conscientious scientist.”“No one of his stature had stepped into this area in such a long time that it gave a lot of other people confidence,” he added. “When he presented this completely weird study, which was so out there for science, it could have been dumped on, but it wasn’t.”Dr. Griffiths’s work, which began in 1999, was endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration as well as a cohort of experts that included the former deputy of the drug czar under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And it ushered in what many have called a renaissance in psychedelic research.“The fact that psychedelic research was being done at Hopkins — considered the premier medical center in the country — made it easier to get it approved here,” said Anthony P. Bossis, a psychologist specializing in palliative care at New York University.He told Mr. Pollan that Dr. Griffiths’s work had paved the way for him and his colleagues to begin using psilocybin to successfully treat anxiety in cancer patients.Theirs was not the only institution to do so. Similar research involving cancer patients, alcoholics, smokers and sufferers of depression began in earnest in this country and overseas following the publication of Dr. Griffiths’s paper.“It was an amazing study,” Dr. Bossis told Mr. Pollan, “with such an elegant design. And it opened up the field.”Dr. Griffiths spoke at an academic conference in Austin, Texas, in March 2022. He learned he had Stage 4 colon cancer earlier this year. Travis P Ball via Getty Images for SXSWPsychedelics had been the third rail of scientific inquiry ever since Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were thrown out of Harvard for passing out LSD with messianic fervor in the early 1960s. By the end of that decade, psychedelics had been declared controlled substances deemed illegal for recreational and medical use.Yet beginning in the 1950s, well before Dr. Leary exhorted a generation to “turn on, tune in and drop out,” LSD — a synthetic chemical derived from a fungus, along with psilocybin and other psychedelics — were being studied and used successfully to treat alcoholism, depression, anxiety and distress among the terminally ill.The term psychedelic was coined in 1956 and drawn from the Greek root psyche, which translates to mind or soul. Freighted with the counterculture baggage of the 1960s, however, it devolved from its original meaning as a mind-altering drug into an aesthetic rendered in loopy typefaces and black-light posters.Dr. Griffiths was well-suited to bring psychedelics back as a legitimate area of scientific inquiry. Like many students of psychology of his generation, he had been heavily influenced by the work of B.F. Skinner, the “radical behaviorist” who disdained the focus on emotions and the unconscious that had long dominated the field and rather dwelled on the role of environment in determining, or conditioning, human behavior.In 1994, Dr. Griffiths began meditating regularly, which led to a transformative experience that, he said, “profoundly shifted my worldview and got me very curious about the nature of spiritual experiences.”He told Mr. Pollan that the experience was so profound that he nearly quit science to devote himself to a spiritual practice. But, as it happened, others were working to rehabilitate the study of psychedelics. One was Bob Jesse, a former vice president of the software company Oracle, who had established a nonprofit to encourage research on mystical experiences and whose introduction to Dr. Griffiths became the engine for what would soon change the direction of Dr. Griffiths’s research and reinvigorate the field.As researchers in his lab and elsewhere were studying the use of psilocybin in treating cancer patients, smokers and those with depression, he began focusing on examining the mystical aspects of their experiences and plumbing the nature of consciousness. He came to believe that the insights gleaned from psilocybin could have profound effects on humanity, which he saw heading toward disaster.Psychedelics, he suggested, might right the ship.“A hallmark feature of these experiences is that we’re all in this together,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education in April. “It opens people up to this sense that we have a commonality and that we need to take care of each other.”Roland Redmond Griffiths was born on July 19, 1946, in Glen Cove, N.Y., to William and Sylvie (Redmonds) Griffiths. His father, who had trained as a psychologist, specialized in public health; his mother was a homemaker until the family moved to El Cerrito, Calif., in about 1951, after William had taken a job as a professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley. There, Sylvie began successfully pursuing a master’s in psychology.Roland majored in psychology at Occidental College in Los Angeles and studied psychopharmacology at the University of Minnesota, earning his Ph.D. there in 1972. Johns Hopkins hired him immediately afterward, and he began concentrating his research on drug use and addiction.Dr. Griffiths is survived by his wife, Marla Weiner; his three children, Sylvie Grahan, Jennie Otis and Morgan Griffiths; five grandchildren; and his siblings, Kathy Farley and Mark Griffiths. His marriage in 1973 to Kristin Ann Johnson ended in divorce, as did his marriage to Diana Hansen.Dr. Griffiths was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer earlier this year, a finding he came to embrace, as he told David Marchese of The New York Times Magazine. He established a foundation at Johns Hopkins to fund research on psychedelics. At his death, he was completing a paper about a study he had conducted in which clergy from a wide range of faiths received a high dose of psilocybin to see how it would affect their life and work.Notably, his laboratory’s first therapeutic study with psilocybin was with cancer patients, but Dr. Griffiths said he waited a bit before using a psychedelic to investigate his own condition. When he did — he took LSD — he approached the session like a reporter, and queried his cancer: What are you doing here? Is this going to kill me?“The answer was,” he told Mr. Marchese, “‘Yes, you will die, but everything is absolutely perfect; there’s meaning and purpose to this that goes beyond your understanding, but how you’re managing that is exactly how you should manage it.’”Long before his cancer diagnosis, Dr. Griffiths told Mr. Pollan that he hoped his own death would not be sudden, that he would have time to savor it. “Western materialism says the switch gets turned off and that’s it,” he said. “But there are so many other descriptions. It could be a beginning! Wouldn’t that be amazing.”Alain Delaquérière contributed research.