Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,080

😗

Not to mention the potential for cost-savings. If you have been severely sick, you will have felt the unfairness of the high cost of drugs. The latest drugs for cancer, cardiovascular or gastrointestinal diseases, nervous disorders, and rare conditions are so costly that even selling an expensive car won’t cover a year’s supply of them.

The most poignant example is that of cancer drugs, whose approval is by far the most wasteful process of all drug types: The FDA approves less than four percent of cancer drugs, meaning 96 percent of them spend more than a decade being tested in petri dishes, mice, and a small set of patients, before scientists finally realize that they aren’t suitable for human use. Each drug in the four percent that does get approved bears an average price tag of more than a billion dollars, a bill passed down to you, the patient-customer.

Given what is at stake, it is not surprising that a growing number of companies are offering their organs-on-chips to pharma, each with a different technology, patented chip design, or organ. The three oldest companies in this space — Hurel Corporation, Hepregen, and Organovo, founded in 2007 — are all from the United States. InSphero (Switzerland, 2009), TissUse (Germany, 2010), and Mimetas (Netherlands, 2011) were started shortly afterward. Nortis (Seattle, 2012) and Emulate (Boston, 2013, by Don Ingber) followed, and after them half a dozen startup companies are fighting to grow in this exciting cauldron. Thanks to the organs-on-chips pioneered by Grotberg, Huh, and Takayama, the day when most new drugs will be developed and tested directly (and only) using human tissues is fast approaching.

Read more | >

Diabetes tracking can be a scary and tedious task, but University of California at San Diego researchers have developed a needless glucose monitor tattoo sensor that measures insulin levels through sweat on the skin.

There are approximately 30.3 million people living with diabetes in the U.S., according to the American Diabetes Association. Monitoring blood sugar levels is an important part of managing their condition. For people like Angela Valdez, that daily task is avoided because of the traditional pricking of the finger.

“I don’t handle monitoring my diabetes as I should,” said Valdez in a press release. “I have the diet down a lot better now and I take my medication as I should, but the finger pricking is a struggle for me. I only test if I feel bad. If I don’t feel my blood sugar level is high, and I’m taking the pill every day, I think I’m alright. Which is really bad thinking, but the pin prick is terrifying.”

Read more | >

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of vision loss among people aged 50 and older, affecting an estimated 7.3 million individuals in the United States. Of these patients, 1.75 million have advanced AMD and will lose vision from this condition. This includes patients with the “wet” form of AMD, characterized by the growth of abnormal blood vessels in the retina that can bleed or leak damaging fluids into the central portion of this light-sensing tissue.

Read more | >

Researchers have just caught bacteria sidestepping antibiotic treatment with a never-before-seen trick.

Bacteria’s troublesome talent for developing resistance against antibiotics is a rapidly growing health threat. This ability has ancient origins and allows drug-resistant bacterial infections like MRSA and gonorrhea to kill 1.3 million people globally each year.

These superbugs are even finding their way into wild animals, such as dolphins and bears.

Read more | >

A new study led by UCL researchers has identified patterns in how common health conditions occur together in the same individuals, using data from 4 million patients in England.

With advancing age, millions of people live with multiple conditions—sometimes referred to as multimorbidity—and the proportion of people affected in this way is expected to rise over the next decades. However, and training, , clinical guidelines and research have evolved to focus on one disease at a time.

The Academy of Medical Sciences and the UK Chief Medical Officer (CMO) have recognized this problem and set out a challenge of investigating which diseases co-occur in the same individuals and why.

Read more | >

Anne Austin/University of Missouri-St. Louis, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology (2022).

Because the second mummy was still wrapped, researchers analyzed it via infrared photography. It’s worth noting that archaeologists do not unwrap mummies at this point in time. The mummy turned out to be of a middle-aged woman and featured a different tattoo — a wedjat, or eye of Horus, and again an image of the god Bes, but now with a crown of feathers. The scientists also spotted a zigzag line below the other figures that probably depicted a marsh, which was associated with cooling waters used to relieve pain from menstruation or childbirth, as the researchers deduced from ancient medical texts. They propose that the two tattoos were essentially a request by the wearer for protection during childbirth.

Read more | >

If your morning never starts without a cup of coffee, you may be intrigued to learn that drinking the wildly popular beverage could significantly lower your risk of dying within the next few years, a new study suggests.

The study, published online May 31, 2022, by Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed data about coffee consumption from more than 170,000 people (average age 56) from the United Kingdom who did not have cancer or cardiovascular disease at the study’s start. The researchers tracked participants over an average of seven years. They also accounted for such factors as lifestyle, diet, sex, age, and ethnicity.

People who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee each day, even with a teaspoon of added sugar per cup, were up to 30% less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. It didn’t appear to matter if the coffee contained caffeine or not, but the benefit tapered off for those drinking more than 4.5 cups each day.

Read more | >

The only time might be willing to take shit off someone.

— Cancer patients weren’t responding to therapy. Then they got a poop transplant.

— The same exact foods affect each person’s gut bacteria differently.

But now, Rebyota is available as the first FDA-approved “fecal microbiota product.” In a late-stage clinical trial, the one-dose treatment reduced the rate of C. diff flare-ups by 29.4% in the eight weeks after antibiotic treatment, compared with a placebo, STAT reported. Taking two clinical trials of the treatment into account, the success rate of the treatment “was significantly higher in the Rebyota group (70.6%) than in the placebo group (57.5%),” the FDA noted.

Read more | >