Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: bioengineering – Page 122

MIT’s Cheetah 3 robot can now leap and gallop across rough terrain, climb a staircase littered with debris, and quickly recover its balance when suddenly yanked or shoved, all while essentially blind.

Watch more videos from MIT: https://www.youtube.com/user/MITNewsOffice?sub_confirmation=1

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an independent, coeducational, privately endowed university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our mission is to advance knowledge; to educate students in science, engineering, and technology; and to tackle the most pressing problems facing the world today. We are a community of hands-on problem-solvers in love with fundamental science and eager to make the world a better place.
The MIT YouTube channel features videos about all types of MIT research, including the robot cheetah, LIGO, gravitational waves, mathematics, and bombardier beetles, as well as videos on origami, time capsules, and other aspects of life and culture on the MIT campus. Our goal is to open the doors of MIT and bring the Institute to the world through video.

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Over the last 12,000 years or so, human civilization has noticeably reshaped the Earth’s surface. But changes on our own planet will likely pale in comparison when humans settle on other celestial bodies. While many of the changes on Earth over the centuries have been related to food production, by way of agriculture, changes on other worlds will result, not only from the need for on-site production of food, but also for all other consumables, including air.

As vital as synthetic biology will be to the early piloted missions to Mars and voyages of exploration, it will become indispensable to establish a long-term human presence off-Earth, namely colonization. That’s because we’ve evolved over billions of years to thrive specifically in the environments provided by our home planet.

Our physiology is well-suited to Earth’s gravity and its oxygen-rich atmosphere. We also depend on Earth’s global magnetic field to shield us from intense space radiation in the form of charged particles. In comparison, Mars has only patches of localized magnetism, thought to be remnants of a global magnetic field in the distant past. Currently, the Red Planet has no global magnetic field that could trap particle radiation from interplanetary space. Also, the Martian atmosphere is so thin that any shielding against space radiation of any kind is minor compared with the protection that Earth’s atmosphere affords. At the Martian surface, atmospheric pressure never gets above 7 millibars. That’s like Earth at an altitude of about 27,000 m (89,000 ft), which is almost the edge of space. And while the moon’s proximity to Earth could make it a better location than Mars for the first off-world colony, the lunar radiation environment is similar to that of Mars.

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Cellular Aquaculture — Feed The World and Save the Oceans — Lou Cooperhouse, President & CEO, of BlueNalu, joins me on ideaXme (https://radioideaxme.com/) to discuss his company’s technologies to provide the world with healthy and safe cell-based seafood products, and support the sustainability and diversity of our oceans — #Ideaxme #StemCells #Aquaculture #Oceans #Fish #Sushi #Poke #Ceviche #SustainableDevelopment #Agriculture #Health #Wellness #RegenerativeMedicine #Biotech #Longevity #Aging #IraPastor #Bioquark #Regenerage ideaXme BlueNalu Rutgers University Rich Products Sumitomo Chemical: Group Companies of the Americas KBW Investments.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Lou Cooperhouse, President and CEO of BlueNalu.

Ira Pastor comments:

Global demand for seafood is at an all time high, as consumers are increasingly choosing to eat an extraordinary variety of seafood products that exist worldwide. Unfortunately, our global supply for seafood cannot keep pace with this demand, as populations of marine species have halved since 1970. This is due to overfishing, illegal fishing, rising ocean temperatures, acidification, the effects of trawling, and a number of other environmental, social, and political challenges.

At the same time, consumers are looking for more from their food choices. Consumers are increasingly concerned about animal welfare and the conditions in which fish are farmed and caught. In addition, they are increasingly concerned about their own personal welfare, as seafood can be a source of mercury, toxins and poisons, pathogens, viruses, and parasites, micro-particles of plastics due to plastic pollution in our ocean, and a variety of other environmental pollutants.

Continue reading “Feeding the World with Cellular Aquaculture: Food Security and Sustainability” | >

Bioengineering.

There is currently no vaccine or cure towards COVID-19. It is predicted the development of a safe and effective vaccine to prevent COVID-19 will take 12 to 18 months, by which time hundreds of thousands to millions of people may have been infected. With a rapidly growing number of cases and deaths around the world, this emerging threat requires a nimble and targeted means of protection.

Could CRISPR be the next virus killer? To address this global pandemic challenge, we are developing a genetic vaccine that can be used rapidly in healthy and patients to greatly reduce the coronavirus spreading. We developed a safe and effective CRISPR system to precisely target, cut and destroy COVID-19 virus and its genome, which stops coronavirus from infecting the human lung.

We’ve shown that the CRISPR system can reduce 90% of coronavirus load in human cells. It can also protect humans against essentially 90% of all current and emerging coronaviruses. The project is ongoing, and we are working around the clock towards getting an actual product by combing our CRISPR method with an inhaler-based delivery device.

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Nature has spent millennia honing the virus into a ruthlessly efficient delivery vehicle for nucleic acids. Viruses have even been harnessed for our own delivery purposes. But some applications have had only mixed success. For example, commercial applications of genetic engineering, which require high scalability, low cost, and impeccable safety, remain a challenge.

Although they can easily enter the body and inject their payload into cells, viruses may stimulate a dangerous immune reaction and cause long-term medical complications. In addition, viruses can be expensive and time consuming to cultivate.

Safer and more practical alternatives to viruses are being sought by innovative companies. For example, these companies are developing nonviral gene delivery systems that incorporate nanoparticle formulations, ultrasound, and electric fields. These systems can slip bits of genetic material into cells efficiently and cost-effectively in a range of applications.

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Sarcos Robotics, a startup developing robots for industrial and defense applications, today nabbed $40 million in equity financing, bringing its total venture capital raised to nearly $100 million. The company plans to use the capital to commercialize its first full-body, self-powered product — the Guardian XO — ahead of an anticipated 2021 ship date.

According to a 2020 Grand View Research report, the exoskeleton market could be worth $4.2 billion by 2027. The firm sees adoption growing steeply in health care, where exoskeletons could address the increased prevalence of spinal cord injuries in industries like security, disaster recovery, infrastructure inspection and maintenance, maritime, oil and gas, and mining. The National SCI Statistical Center reported 17,730 new spinal cord injuries in 2019 in the U.S. alone.

Sarcos spun out from the University of Utah in 1983 and for years operated as a bioengineering research institution. By 2000, the lab had expanded into segments like animated film props, prostheses, and human-computer interfaces. A DARPA grant to develop a military exoskeleton steered Sarcos toward defense applications. After DARPA accepted Sarcos’ proposal in 2006, the company began developing prototypes and contracted with the U.S. Navy to pilot salvage robots.

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White fat cells can be turned into energy-burning brown fat using CRISPR gene-editing technology. These engineered cells have helped mice avoid weight gain and diabetes when on a high-fat diet, and could eventually be used to treat obesity-related disorders, say the researchers behind the work.

Human adults have plenty of white fat, the cells filled with lipid that make up fatty deposits. But we have much smaller reserves of brown fat cells, which burn energy as well as storing it. People typically lose brown fat as they age or put on weight. While brown fat seems to be stimulated when we are exposed to cold temperatures, there are no established methods of building up brown fat in the body.

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Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, USA, have used gene editing to remove latent herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), also known as oral herpes.

In mice, the technique showed a 92% decrease in the latent virus – enough to keep the infection from coming back, according to the scientists. The study used two sets of “genetic scissors” to damage the virus’s DNA, fine-tune a delivery vehicle to the infected cells, and target the nerve pathways connecting the neck with the face, reaching the tissue where the virus lies dormant. The findings are published in Nature Communications.

“This is the first time that scientists have been able to go in and actually eliminate most of the herpes in a body,” said senior author Dr. Keith Jerome, Professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at Fred Hutch. “We are targeting the root cause of the infection: the infected cells where the virus lies dormant and are the seeds that give rise to repeat infections.”

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Biologists often speak of switching genes on and off to give microbes new abilities–like producing biofuels or drugs, or gobbling up environmental toxins. For the most part, though, it’s nearly impossible to turn off a gene without deleting it (which means you can’t turn it on again). This limits biologists’ ability to control how much of a particular protein a microbe produces. It also restricts bioengineers’ ability to design new microbes.

Now researchers at Boston University, led by biomedical engineering professor James Collins, have developed a highly tunable genetic “switch” that offers a greater degree of control over microbes. It makes it possible to stop the production of a protein and restart it again. The switch, which could be used to control any gene, can also act as a “dimmer switch” to finely tune how much protein a microbe would produce over time.

The researchers made a highly effective microbe “kill switch” to demonstrate the precision of the approach. For years, researchers have been trying to develop these self-destruction mechanisms to allay concerns that genetically engineered microbes might prove impossible to eradicate once they’ve outlived their usefulness. But previous kill switches haven’t offered tight enough control to pass governmental regulatory muster because it was difficult to make it turn on in all the cells in a population at the same time.

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