Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,074

Researchers implanted 14 electrodes into the brains of volunteers with depression. One says it saved his life.

John’s life changed forever when he broke up with his girlfriend. The breakup sent him into a downward spiral, and led to his first depressive episode when he was 27 years old. “At first it’s just extreme sadness… then you start losing sleep,” says John (not his real name), who spoke on condition of anonymity. He developed crippling anxiety and experienced panic attacks and dark thoughts that eventually led him to attempt to end his own life.

Drugs didn’t work for John—he says he has tried pretty much every antidepressant, antipsychotic, and sedative out there.

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Year 2020 face_with_colon_three

Scientists are working to end the need for human heart transplants by 2028. A team of researchers in the UK, Cambridge, and the Netherlands are developing a robot heart that can pump blood through the circulatory network but is soft and pliable. The first working model should be ready for implantation into animals within the next 3 years, and into humans within the next 8 years. The device is so promising that it is among just 4 projects that have made it to the shortlist for a £30-million prize, called the Big Beat Challenge for a therapy that can change the game in the treatment of heart disease.

The other projects include a genetic therapy for heart defects, a vaccine against heart disease, and wearable technology for early preclinical detection of heart attacks and strokes.

The need

There are about 7 million patients with heart and circulatory issues in the UK of which over 150,000 die every year. About 200 heart transplants occur each year in the UK alone, yet about 20 patients die in the same period while waiting for one. This is especially true if the patient waiting for one is a baby who was born with a defective heart, since babies need to have hearts transplanted from other babies – who must have died. And even with a successful transplant, strong immunosuppressive drugs must be started and often continued lifelong so that immune rejection does not occur. This is, however, accompanied by a higher risk of infectious and other complications.

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Older women heal bone fractures slower than men. Now a team has found that a single, localized delivery of estrogen to a fracture can speed up healing in postmenopausal mice. The findings could have implications for the way fractures in women are treated in the future.

Over 250,000 hip fractures occur each year in adults aged 65 or older in the U.S., three-quarters of which are female. Within a year, between 15 and 36% of hip fracture patients will die. While staggering, the is unsurprising given that more women than men suffer from osteoporosis, a disease that weakens the bones. And yet, only recently has the scientific community shifted their focus to understanding this difference.

“The majority of stem cell research is done on male animals. There’s very little research that has actually been done on females,” said Wu Tsai Alliance member Charles Chan, Ph.D., an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford University and co-senior author of the paper published Oct. 30 in Nature Communications. “The research is long overdue, especially the question of why women heal differently from men.”

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Individuals with long COVID, sometimes referred to as “long-haulers,” experience symptoms that may persist for weeks, months, or even years after their acute viral infection. While symptoms vary widely, a common complaint among patients is “brain fog”—a colloquial term for significant, persistent cognitive deficits, with consistent impairment of executive functioning and working memory.

Long-haulers may experience a lack of mental clarity, poor focus and concentration, memory problems, difficulty with multi-tasking, and more. Brain fog can be debilitating, but there currently are no treatment options that are approved for the condition.

While the number of patients they studied is too small for their results to be definitive, Yale researchers, using their extensive experience with two existing medications, have published initial evidence that those drugs, given together, can mitigate or even eliminate brain fog.

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Summary: The integrity of cholinergic pathways may indicate very early changes in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: Karolinska Institute.

A new collaborative study from Karolinska Institutet, Deutsches Zentrum für Neurodegenerative Erkrankungen (DZNE), and Czech Technical University suggests a novel imaging marker of brain connectivity might be a very early indicator of pathological changes in Alzheimer’s disease.

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Intel Labs and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn Medicine) have completed a joint research study using federated learning – a distributed machine learning (ML) artificial intelligence (AI) approach – to help international healthcare and research institutions identify malignant brain tumours.

The largest medical federated learning study to date with an unprecedented global dataset examined from 71 institutions across six continents, the project demonstrated the ability to improve brain tumour detection by 33%.

“Federated learning has tremendous potential across numerous domains, particularly within healthcare, as shown by our research with Penn Medicine,” says Jason Martin, principal engineer at Intel Labs. “Its ability to protect sensitive information and data opens the door for future studies and collaboration, especially in cases where datasets would otherwise be inaccessible.

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If humans are ever going to be able to regrow damaged tissues the way lizards and fish routinely do, it will require the precise control of gene expression in time and place—otherwise you might end up with random cells growing everywhere or a new body part that never quits growing. That is, stopping the process just as important as starting it.

A team of Duke scientists studying how other animals regrow damaged tissues has made an important step toward controlling at least one part of the regenerative machinery with that kind of precision. They used the mechanisms zebrafish rely on to repair damage to their hearts combined with viral vectors used for in humans.

In a new paper appearing online Dec. 13 in Cell Stem Cell, the researchers demonstrate the ability to control gene activity in response to , limiting it to a specific region of and during a defined time window, rather than being continuously active in the entire organ.

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