Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,093

In a first-of-its-kind clinical trial, a human has received a 3D-bioprinted ear implant grown from the patient’s own living cells – thanks to a technology platform developed by a Cornellian-founded startup company.

This bioengineered breakthrough has the potential to significantly improve the lives of the approximately 1,500 children who are born annually in the U.S. with microtia, a congenital ear deformity. The approach could eventually lead to tissue implants for treating other conditions and traumatic injuries, reconstructive and regenerative therapy, and possibly even the biomanufacture of whole organs.

The company, 3DBio Therapeutics, was founded in 2014 by Dan Cohen ‘04, M.S. ‘07, Ph.D. ‘10, along with Lawrence Bonassar, the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor in Biomedical Engineering and in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the College of Engineering, and Hod Lipson, who taught at Cornell for 14 years and is now a professor at Columbia University.

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Honda is pulling away from a design practice that’s (literally) shaped auto making since the ’30s.

The $43 billion company still depends on life-size clay models to evaluate its designs, a tried and true method pioneered by GM designer Harley Earl. But Honda is gradually relying less on the practice, ever since the Coronavirus tore across the globe and resulting lockdowns divided its teams in Los Angeles, Ohio and Japan. The way Honda tells it, those early 2020 travel rules “threatened” its designers’ ability to work with engineers on the ’24 Prologue, creating a window for a deeper dive into virtual reality.

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Researchers have discovered that salen can effectively bind a number of proteins of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the official name of the virus strain that causes coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Previous to this name being adopted, it was commonly referred to as the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), the Wuhan coronavirus, or the Wuhan virus.

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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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