Biohacking future of avoiding doctors?
This man claims experimental gene therapy cured his lactose intolerance.
Category: bioengineering – Page 187
All-star team of synthetic biologists raise $53 million for cancer therapy startup Senti
A who’s-who from the world of synthetic biological research have come together to launch Senti Biosciences with $53 million in funding from a slew of venture capital investors.
Led by Tim Lu, a longtime researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the founding fathers of synthetic biology, Senti’s aim is nothing less than developing therapies that are tailored to an individual’s unique biology — and their first target is cancer.
Here’s how Lu described a potential cancer treatment using Senti’s technology to me. “We take a cell derived from humans that we can insert our genetic circuits into… we insert the DNA and encoding and deliver those cells via an IV infusion. We have engineered the cells to locate where the tumors are… What we’ve been doing is engineering those cells to selectively trigger an immune response against the tumor.”
Scientists Just Made Sheep-Human Hybrids. Here’s What You Need to Know
Researchers have achieved a new kind of chimeric first, producing sheep-human hybrid embryos that could one day represent the future of organ donation – by using body parts grown inside unnatural, engineered animals.
With that end goal in mind, scientists have created the first interspecies sheep-human chimera, introducing human stem cells into sheep embryos, resulting in a hybrid creature that’s more than 99 percent sheep – but also a tiny, little bit like you and me.
Admittedly, the human portion of the embryos created in the experiment – before they were destroyed after 28 days – is exceedingly small, but the fact it exists at all is what generates considerable controversy in this field of research.
Japan has just invented Robo-bees that can legitimately pollinate the earth
In an example of life imitating art, scientists have come up with a technology straight out of an episode of Black Mirror: Bee-like pollinating drones.
A team at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan engineered the devices using a combination of horsehair, $USD 100 drones and a sticky ion gel.
It’s pretty simple really – first, the drones fly into flowers much like a bee would. Inside the flower, pollen gets stuck to the drone due to the combination of the ion gel and horsehair. That same pollen is then shaken off into the next flower, and so on. It’s just your run of the mill birds and the robots bees.