Lifeboat Foundation

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/unlimited-realities-with-lisa-z…lth-future

Data centers are the new oil refineries, argues The Economist. Where black sludge and steam once marked the beating heart of the economy, now blinking servers laced with fiber optic cables indicate where the action is.

Biotechnology — like all other industries — must adapt. Synthetic biology teams that embrace modern tools like cloud computing, professionally built software, and laboratory automation will save time, reduce errors, streamline complex workflows, and maintain their agility in the digital economy. Those who fail to adopt new tools will be primed for disruption.

Software is already an integral part of biological research, but most scientific apps lag far behind the rest of the digital frontier. As the software giant Autodesk puts it:

A new potential method to administer gene therapy without triggering an immune response.

Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine managed to administer effective gene therapy in mice without triggering an autoimmune reaction. The research, led by Dr. Peggy Ho, Ph.D., was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [1].

Study abstract

Continue reading “Administering Gene Therapy Without Triggering Immune Response” »

https://speaker.future.consulting/en/home/search/video/video…re-cancer/

“Lego block” artificial cells that can kill bacteria have been created by researchers at the University of California, Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering. The work is reported Aug. 29 in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“We engineered artificial cells from the bottom-up – like Lego blocks – to destroy bacteria,” said Assistant Professor Cheemeng Tan, who led the work. The cells are built from liposomes, or bubbles with a cell-like lipid membrane, and purified cellular components including proteins, DNA and metabolites.

“We demonstrated that artificial cells can sense, react and interact with bacteria, as well as function as systems that both detect and kill bacteria with little dependence on their environment,” Tan said.

Continue reading “Artificial cells are tiny bacteria fighters” »

Researchers at the Wyss Institute were successful in engineering different species of bacteria that can talk to each other.

Gene editing halted the progression of Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy in dogs.

A team of researchers in China has used a form of the CRISPR gene editing technique to repair a genetic defect in a viable human embryo. In their paper published in the journal Molecular Therapy, the group describes their work and how well it worked.

Only three years ago, CRISPR was first used on a human embryo. In that work, a Chinese team attempted to use the technique to repair a genetic fault. Though the work made headlines around the world, it had a low success rate—just four out of 54 embryos that survived the technique carried the repaired genes. Since that time, a new variation of CRISPR has been developed—it is called base editing, and works in a more efficient way. Instead of snipping DNA strands and replacing removed bits with desired traits, the new method does nothing more than swap DNA letters—trading out an A for a G, for example. In this new effort, the researchers used this new method to correct a gene mutation that results in humans having a condition called Marfan syndrome, in which people have an A instead of a G in the FBN1 gene. It is a disorder that causes problems with connective tissue, leading to a myriad of problems for those born with it.

The new research is unique in that the scientists used viable embryos created using in vitro fertilization. The team could have implanted these viable gene-edited embryos into a woman’s uterus, had they chosen to do so.