Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,100

Prokaryotic Pangenomes Act as Evolving Ecosystems

Abstract. Understanding adaptation to the local environment is a central tenet and a major focus of evolutionary biology. But this is only part of the adaptionist story. In addition to the external environment, one of the main drivers of genome composition is genetic background. In this perspective, I argue that there is a growing body of evidence that intra-genomic selective pressures play a significant part in the composition of prokaryotic genomes and play a significant role in the origin, maintenance and structuring of prokaryotic pangenomes.

Read more | >

Wearable tech, AI and clinical teams join to change the face of trial monitoring

A multi-disciplinary team of researchers has developed a way to monitor the progression of movement disorders using motion capture technology and AI.

In two ground-breaking studies, published in Nature Medicine, a cross-disciplinary team of AI and clinical researchers have shown that by combining human data gathered from wearable tech with a powerful new medical AI technology they are able to identify clear movement patterns, predict future disease progression and significantly increase the efficiency of clinical trials in two very different rare disorders, Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and Friedreich’s ataxia (FA).

DMD and FA are rare, degenerative, that affect movement and eventually lead to paralysis. There are currently no cures for either disease, but researchers hope that these results will significantly speed up the search for new treatments.

Read more | >

Scientists explain emotional ‘blunting’ caused by common antidepressants

Scientists have worked out why common anti-depressants cause around half of users to feel emotionally “blunted.” In a study published today in Neuropsychopharmacology, they show that the drugs affect reinforcement learning, an important behavioral process that allows people to learn from their environment.

According to the NHS, more than 8.3 million patients in England received an in 2021/22. A widely used class of antidepressants, particularly for persistent or severe cases, is (SSRIs). These drugs target serotonin, a chemical that carries messages between in the brain and has been dubbed the “pleasure chemical.”

One of the widely reported side effects of SSRIs is “blunting,” where patients report feeling emotionally dull and no longer finding things as pleasurable as they used to. Between 40% and 60% of patients taking SSRIs are believed to experience this side effect.

Read more | >

DARPA Wants to Develop a Drug to Make People Resistant to Extreme Cold

Last week, Rice University in Houston announced that one of its assistant professors of bioengineering, Jerzy Szablowski, received a Young Faculty Award from DARPA to research non-genetic drugs that can “temporarily enhance the human body’s resilience to extreme cold exposure.”

Thermogenesis is the use of energy to create heat, and our bodies have two different ways of doing this. One is shivering, which we’re all familiar with. The other, which Szablowski simply calls non-shivering thermogenesis, involves burning off brown adipose tissue (BAT), or brow n fat.

This type of fat exists specifically to warm us up when we get cold; it stores energy and only activates in cold temperatures. Most of our body fat is white fat. It builds up when we ingest more calories than we burn and stores those calories for when we don’t get enough energy from food. An unfortunate majority of American adults have the opposite problem: too much white fat, which increases the risk of conditions like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Read more | >

Cellular Reprogramming Extends Lifespan in Mice, Longevity Startup Says

Cellular reprogramming builds on the Nobel Prize-winning work of Shinya Yamanaka, who showed that adult cells could be transformed back into stem cells by exposing them to a specific set of genome-regulating proteins known as transcription factors. The Salk team’s innovation was to reduce the exposure times to the so-called Yamanaka factors, which they found could reverse epigenetic changes to the cells without reverting them to stem cells.

While the approach led to clear increases in lifespan in prematurely aging mice, the fact that no one had been able to replicate the result in healthy mice since then raised doubts about the approach. “Different groups have tried this experiment, and the data have not been positive so far,” Alejandro Ocampo, from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who carried out the original Salk experiments, told MIT Technology Review.

But now, Rejuvenate Bio claims that when they exposed healthy mice near the end of their lives to a subset of the Yamanaka factors, they lived for another 18 weeks on average, compared to just 9 weeks for those that didn’t undergo cellular reprogramming.

Read more | >

Gene Therapy Mediated Partial Reprogramming Extends Lifespan and Reverses Age-Related Changes in Aged Mice

Aging is a complex process best characterized as the chronic dysregulation of cellular processes leading to deteriorated tissue and organ function. While aging cannot currently be prevented, its impact on lifespan and healthspan in the elderly can potentially be minimized by interventions that aim to return these cellular processes to optimal function. Recent studies have demonstrated that partial reprogramming using the Yamanaka factors (or a subset; OCT4, SOX2, and KLF4; OSK) can reverse age-related changes in vitro and in vivo. However, it is still unknown whether the Yamanaka factors (or a subset) are capable of extending the lifespan of aged wild type mice. Here, we show that systemically delivered AAVs, encoding an inducible OSK system, in 124-week-old mice extends the median remaining lifespan by 109% over wild-type controls and enhances several health parameters. Importantly, we observed a significant improvement in frailty scores indicating that we were able to improve the healthspan along with increasing the lifespan. Furthermore, in human keratinocytes expressing exogenous OSK, we observed significant epigenetic markers of age-reversal, suggesting a potential reregulation of genetic networks to a younger, potentially healthier state. Together, these results may have important implications for the development of partial reprogramming interventions to reverse age-associated diseases in the elderly.

All authors performed the work while employed at Rejuvenate Bio Inc. Rejuvenate Bio is a therapeutics company translating gene therapies to treat age-related diseases.

Read more | >

Worst Avian Flu in U.S. History Is Hitting Poultry, Wild Birds, Even Bears

Nearly a year after it began, the worst avian-influenza outbreak in U.S. history is continuing to decimate poultry flocks across the Midwest and Colorado, frustrating efforts to keep the virus from affecting the nation’s egg prices and supply.

In South Dakota, the highly contagious bird flu, typically transmitted by the feces, mucus and saliva of wild birds, first hit commercial poultry farms in March 2022 and has continued to affect flocks. Within the last month, egg-laying hens and turkeys at several local farms were infected, leading to the deaths of more than 1.3 million poultry over that period, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Nearly four million poultry have died in the state since the start of the outbreak.

Read more | >

Exploring Potential Longevity Applications of Rapamycin With ChatGPT

In 2020 I joined the private beta test of Open AI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), which is an earlier version of ChatGPT. When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, I started experimenting with it. For over two years I’ve been exploring the strengths and limits of this technology and assessing how this tool could be useful to me. I’m also interested how this new technology is being utilized by scientists and academics to make meaningful contributions to academic work and education.

A recent study demonstrated that ChatGPT was able to pass the US Medical Licensing Exam without any special training prior to the exam and was able to demonstrate a high level of insight in its explanations. The results suggest that ChatGPT may be able to assist with medical education.

I published the first article about my experiments with ChatGPT last week. The article entitled How The Evolution Of AI In Healthcare Aligns With Thomas Kuhn’s Structure has been viewed over 13,000 times, and has received and

Read more | >

‘Partly Alive’: Scientists Revive Cells in Brains From Dead Pigs

Year 2019 face_with_colon_three

In a study that raises profound questions about the line between life and death, researchers have restored some cellular activity to brains removed from slaughtered pigs.

The brains did not regain anything resembling consciousness: There were no signs indicating coordinated electrical signaling, necessary for higher functions like awareness and intelligence.

But in an experimental treatment, blood vessels in the pigs’ brains began functioning, flowing with a blood substitute, and certain brain cells regained metabolic activity, even responding to drugs. When the researchers tested slices of treated brain tissue, they discovered electrical activity in some neurons.

Read more | >

UK Meteorite That Fell To Earth Contains Building Blocks For Life

Basically many have theorized that these seeds coming from meteorites mean that essentially perhaps that life started from seeds like this. Going much deeper down the rabbit hole we actually are starting to see a grand design possibly by actually organisms that evolved into what we have now over millions of years which is actually weird because all earth would have been just a rock but this could be a grand architecture genetically even from the first seed to the biological singularity. This could Basically prove the existence of some entity that may have created humans and all life most like from this seed which means whether it is alien gods or God there will be so much more discover due to this complexity which can benefit all medicine and also genetic engineering 🤔 😉 😀

The fact the first of four surviving pieces was collected within 12 hours of landing, allowing little time for contamination, added to the meteorite’s value. Indeed, because the abundance of organic material in the meteorite was ten times lower than in other carbonaceous chondrites, they might not have been distinguishable from Earthly contamination had it not been retrieved so quickly. As it is, some of the amino acids found are quite rare on Earth, confirming their extraterrestrial origins.

The Winchcombe stones had a number of features never previously seen in meteorites, including low amino acid abundance for a carbonaceous chondrite but unusual ratios among the amino acids and PAHs that are present. Combined with the incomplete conversion of Winchcombe’s components into solid rock, this led the authors to speculate Winchcombe could represent a new class of meteorite that has not been studied before.

Perhaps in part because of its weak structure, very little of the Winchcombe meteorite made it to the ground. Just 600 grams (1.3 pounds) have been recovered, compared to a 27-kilogram (60-pound) carbonaceous chondrite that landed in Costa Rica in 2019. This prevented certain forms of analysis that require bulk samples.

Read more | >