Lifeboat Foundation

Muscle constitutes the largest organ in humans, accounting for 40% of body mass, and it plays an essential role in maintaining life. Muscle tissue is notable for its unique ability for spontaneous regeneration. However, in serious injuries such as those sustained in car accidents or tumor resection which results in a volumetric muscle loss (VML), the muscle’s ability to recover is greatly diminished. Currently, VML treatments comprise surgical interventions with autologous muscle flaps or grafts accompanied by physical therapy. However, surgical procedures often lead to reduced muscular function, and in some cases result in a complete graft failure. Thus, there is a demand for additional therapeutic options to improve muscle loss recovery.

A promising strategy to improve the functional capacity of the damaged muscle is to induce de novo regeneration of skeletal muscle via the integration of transplanted cells. Diverse types of cells, including satellite cells (muscle stem cells), myoblasts, and mesenchymal stem cells, have been used to treat muscle loss. However, invasive muscle biopsies, poor cell availability, and limited long-term maintenance impede clinical translation, where millions to billions of mature cells may be needed to provide therapeutic benefits.

Bonny Lemma. Originally published in the HIR Winter 2019 Issue.

Jennifer Lopez has one more industry to add to her illustrious résumé: molecular biology. In 2016, she was asked to be the executive producer of a new futuristic bio-crime drama for NBC called C.R.I.S.P.R. While that project is a work of science fiction, the CRISPR technology that it is based on is very real.

CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is not just a gene editing technique, but also a phenomenon that carries significant implications for the future of biotechnology. Therefore, the interactions between the countless players in this field and the objectives driving them are crucial to understanding of CRISPR and the promise it holds.

Check out this amazing video about Synthetic Biology! (Credit: Vasil Hnãtiuk, Denis Sibilev, and Andrei Myshev)

Chair emeritus, SETI institute — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Dr. Jill Tarter is Chair Emeritus for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research at the SETI Institute, a not-for-profit research organization whose mission is to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, and to apply the knowledge gained to inspire and guide present and future generations.

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Is a postdoctoral scholar at Tufts University, where she conducts research in their Human Robot Interaction Lab (https://hrilab.tufts.edu/).

With a background in psychology and the social sciences, Dr. Chita-Tegmark is interested in topics at the intersection of technology and psychology, such as using artificial social agents in healthcare and the impact of such emerging technologies on human social interactions and well-being.

Continue reading “Dr. Mihaela Chita-Tegmark — Human Robot Interaction Lab, Tufts U — Co-Founder, Future of Life Inst” »

Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing. The brilliant English mathematician demonstrated in 1952 that it was possible to explain how a completely homogeneous tissue could be used to create a complex embryo, and he did so using one of the simplest, most elegant mathematical models ever written. One of the results of such models is that the symmetry shown by a cell or a tissue can break under a set of conditions.

An anthropologist dives into the world of genetic engineering to explore whether gene-editing tools such as CRISPR fulfill the hope of redesigning our species for the better.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey. St. Martin’s Press, November 2020. Excerpt previously published by Black Inc.

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Self-assembly is ubiquitous in the natural world, serving as a route to form organized structures in every living organism. This phenomenon can be seen, for instance, when two strands of DNA—without any external prodding or guidance—join to form a double helix, or when large numbers of molecules combine to create membranes or other vital cellular structures. Everything goes to its rightful place without an unseen builder having to put all the pieces together, one at a time.

For the past couple of decades, scientists and engineers have been following nature’s lead, designing molecules that assemble themselves in water, with the goal of making nanostructures, primarily for biomedical applications such as drug delivery or tissue engineering. “These small-molecule-based materials tend to degrade rather quickly,” explains Julia Ortony, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), “and they’re chemically unstable, too. The whole structure falls apart when you remove the water, particularly when any kind of external force is applied.”

She and her team, however, have designed a new class of small molecules that spontaneously assemble into nanoribbons with unprecedented strength, retaining their structure outside of water. The results of this multi-year effort, which could inspire a broad range of applications, were described on Jan. 21 in Nature Nanotechnology by Ortony and coauthors.

Imagine going to a surgeon to have a diseased or injured organ switched out for a fully functional, laboratory-grown replacement. This remains science fiction and not reality because researchers today struggle to organize cells into the complex 3D arrangements that our bodies can master on their own.

There are two major hurdles to overcome on the road to laboratory-grown organs and tissues. The first is to use a biologically compatible 3D scaffold in which cells can grow. The second is to decorate that scaffold with biochemical messages in the correct configuration to trigger the formation of the desired organ or tissue.

In a major step toward transforming this hope into reality, researchers at the University of Washington have developed a technique to modify naturally occurring biological polymers with protein-based biochemical messages that affect cell behavior. Their approach, published the week of Jan. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses a near-infrared laser to trigger chemical adhesion of protein messages to a scaffold made from biological polymers such as collagen, a connective tissue found throughout our bodies.