Lifeboat Foundation

Dr. Kimathi is a medical oncologist in a community setting where she sees patients with a variety of cancer diagnoses. Recently, she had several patients with toxicities to different treatments, including tamoxifen, cisplatin, and methotrexate. Concerned, she wondered if there was a common factor these patients shared to have experienced these toxicities. On review, she found that these patients had different cancer diagnoses and did not share any known comorbidities or risk factors.

Why do some cancer patients experience toxicities from certain treatments and others don’t? Drug metabolism is highly variable among patients, and even within the same patient, depending on age and disease state. Both the toxicity and efficacy of cancer chemotherapy can be affected by many different factors, including other medications, foods, dietary supplements, environmental conditions, and genetic variants in drug-metabolizing genes and drug transporters.

Throughout Gray’s life before she got the treatment, the deformed, sickle-shaped red blood cells caused by the genetic disorder would regularly incapacitate her with intense, unpredictable attacks of pain. Those crises would send Gray rushing to the hospital for pain medication and blood transfusions. She could barely get out of bed many days; when she became a mom, she struggled to care for her four children and couldn’t finish school or keep a job.

But then she received the treatment on July 2, 2019. Doctors removed some of her bone marrow cells, genetically modified them with CRISPR and infused billions of the modified cells back into her body. The genetic modification was designed to make the cells produce fetal hemoglobin, in the hopes the cells would compensate for the defective hemoglobin that causes the disease.

A Mississippi woman’s life has been transformed by a treatment for sickle cell disease with the gene-editing technique CRISPR. All her symptoms from a disease once thought incurable have disappeared.

Continue reading “Sickle cell patient’s success with gene editing raises hopes and questions” »

It’s the beginning of the flu season and hospitals in the city have reported an increase in the number of people coming in with fever, severe body pain, and fatigue. Infectious diseases expert Dr V Ramasubramanian in an interview to Pushpa Narayan explains why people should take the flu shot.

Will the flu vaccine prevent the flu?

The flu vaccine prevents the infection in up to 70% of cases, and reduces the chances of severe disease. The infection can stimulate inflammation of different parts of the body including blood vessels. This leads to a series of complications in the body including heart attacks and strokes.

In 1993, acclaimed sci-fi author and computer scientist Vernor Vinge made a bold prediction – within 30 years, advances in technology would enable the creation of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence, leading to “the end of the human era.”

Vinge theorized that once AI becomes capable of recursively improving itself, it would trigger a feedback loop of rapid, exponential improvements to AI systems. This hypothetical point in time when AI exceeds human intelligence has become known as “the Singularity.”

While predictions of superhuman AI may have sounded far-fetched in 1993, today they are taken seriously by many AI experts and tech investors seeking to develop “artificial general intelligence” or AGI – AI capable of fully matching human performance on any intellectual task.

Scientist proved for the first time that kidney cells, housed in an implantable device functioning as an artificial kidney, can survive inside the body of an animal.

A major _New York Times_ investigation reveals how the United States’ aquifers are becoming severely depleted due to overuse in part from huge industrial farms and sprawling cities. The _Times_ reports that Kansas corn yields are plummeting due to a lack of water, there is not enough water to support the construction of new homes in parts of Phoenix, Arizona, and rivers across the country are drying up as aquifers are being drained far faster than they are refilling. “It can take millions of years to fill an aquifer, but they can be depleted in 50 years,” says Warigia Bowman, director of sustainable energy and natural resources law at the University of Tulsa College of Law. “All coastal regions in the United States are really being threatened by groundwater and aquifer problems.”

Transcript: democracynow.org.

Continue reading “U.S. Aquifers Are Running Dry, Posing Major Threat to Drinking Water Supply” »

AI will likely play a role in building startups faster, cheaper and more efficiently. I asked Steve Blank, the man who invented the concept of the lean startup, to see what he thinks.

Interfacing modern electronics-based technology with biology is notoriously difficult. One major stumbling block is that the way they are powered is very different. While most of our gadgets run on electrons, nature relies on the energy released when the chemical bonds of ATP are broken. Finding ways to convert between these two very different currencies of energy could be useful for a host of biotechnologies.

Genetically engineered microbes are already being used to produce various high-value chemicals and therapeutically useful proteins, and there are hopes they could soon help generate greener jet fuel, break down plastic waste, and even grow new foods in giant bioreactors. But at the minute, these processes are powered through an inefficient process of growing biomass, converting it to sugar, and feeding it to the microbes.

Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Germany have devised a much more direct way to power biological processes. They have created an artificial metabolic pathway that can directly convert electricity into ATP using a cocktail of enzymes. And crucially, the process works in vitro and doesn’t rely on the native machinery of cells.

Finally reality is catching up to science fiction from the golden age and we’re seriously talking about moving industry to space and zoning the earth as residential…

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