Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1270

“We think between now and the end of 2,022 this is the point where we get control over this virus … where we can significantly reduce severe disease and death,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist leading the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 response, told Reuters.

CHICAGO, Nov 3 (Reuters) — As the devastating Delta variant surge eases in many regions of the world, scientists are charting when, and where, COVID-19 will transition to an endemic disease in 2022 and beyond, according to Reuters interviews with over a dozen leading disease experts.

They expect that the first countries to emerge from the pandemic will have had some combination of high rates of vaccination and natural immunity among people who were infected with the coronavirus, such as the United States, the UK, Portugal and India. But they warn that SARS-CoV-2 remains an unpredictable virus that is mutating as it spreads through unvaccinated populations.

None would completely rule out what some called a “doomsday scenario,” in which the virus mutates to the point that it evades hard-won immunity. Yet they expressed increasing confidence that many countries will have put the worst of the pandemic behind them in the coming year.

Continue reading “Analysis: Country by country, scientists eye beginning of an end to the COVID-19 pandemic” | >

Trust in AI. If you’re a clinician or a physician, would you trust this AI?

Clearly, sepsis treatment deserves to be focused on, which is what Epic did. But in doing so, they raised several thorny questions. Should the model be recalibrated for each discrete implementation? Are its workings transparent? Should such algorithms publish confidence along with its prediction? Are humans sufficiently in the loop to ensure that the algorithm outputs are being interpreted and implem… See more.

Earlier this year, I wrote about fatal flaws in algorithms that were developed to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers found two general types of flaws. The first is that model makers used small data sets that didn’t represent the universe of patients which the models were intended to represent leading to sample selection bias. The second is that modelers failed to disclose data sources, data-modeling techniques and the potential for bias in either the input data or the algorithms used to train their models leading to design related bias. As a result of these fatal flaws, such algorithms were inarguably less effective than their developers had promised.

Now comes a flurry of articles on an algorithm developed by Epic to provide an early warning tool for sepsis. According to the CDC, “sepsis is the body’s extreme response to an infection. It is a life-threatening medical emergency and happens when an infection you already have triggers a chain reaction throughout your body. Without timely treatment, sepsis can rapidly lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and death. Nearly 270,000 Americans die as a result of sepsis.”

Continue reading “Trust The AI? You Decide” | >

Rare diseases aren’t so rare. Collectively, up to 30 million Americans, many of them children, are born with one of the approximately 7,000 known rare diseases. Most of these millions of people also share a common genetic feature: their diseases are caused by an alteration in a single gene.

Many of these alterations could theoretically be targeted with therapies designed to correct or replace the faulty gene. But there have been significant obstacles in realizing this dream. The science of gene therapy has been making real progress, but pursuing promising approaches all the way to clinical trials and gaining approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is still very difficult. Another challenge is economic: for the rarest of these conditions (which is most of them), the market is so small that most companies have no financial incentive to pursue them.

To overcome these obstacles and provide hope for those with rare diseases, we need a new way of doing things. One way to do things differently—and more efficiently—is the recently launched Bespoke Gene Therapy Consortium (BGTC). It is a bold partnership of NIH, the FDA, 10 pharmaceutical companies, and several non-profit organizations [1]. Its aim: optimize the gene therapy development process and help fill the significant unmet medical needs of people with rare diseases.

Read more | >

LISBON, Nov 2 (Reuters) — Chip designer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) has been able to skirt most of the problems linked with the global chip supply shortage by forecasting demand years in advance, a top executive said on Tuesday.

Demand for electronics gadgets from people stuck in homes due to the pandemic has led to a shortage of semiconductors that are used from anything from mobile phones and cars.

But despite a squeeze in supply, AMD has been able to take market share away from rival Intel (INTC.O) in both PCs and servers with its latest line of processors.

Read more | >

Fighting The Battle Against Biological Aging — Dr. Eric Verdin MD, President & CEO, Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Dr. Eric Verdin, MD (https://www.buckinstitute.org/lab/verdin-lab/) is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, as well as Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco (https://bms.ucsf.edu/people/eric-verdin-md).

Dr. Verdin’s lab currently studies the relationship between aging and the immune system per associated defects in the adaptive immune system, and over chronic activation of the innate immune system, as well as programs on how metabolism, diet, and small molecules regulate the activity of histone deacetylases and sirtuins, and thereby the aging process and its associated diseases, including Alzheimer’s.

Continue reading “Dr. Eric Verdin, MD — President and Chief Executive Officer — Buck Institute for Research on Aging” | >

Ebola Vaccine: Information about Ervebo® | Clinicians | Ebola (Ebola Virus Disease) | CDC.

A safe and effective vaccine is an important tool to protect frontline workers and prevent the introduction and spread of Ebola in the United States.

Ebola virus is a zoonotic pathogen that causes severe hemorrhagic fever in humans, known as Ebola virus disease (EVD). There are four species of Ebola virus that have been known to cause disease in humans. Of these, species Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) is the most lethal, with case fatality rates of 70–90% if left untreated. EBOV is responsible for the majority of recorded EVD outbreaks. This includes the two largest EVD outbreaks in history, the 2014–2016 West Africa outbreak and the 2018 outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where over 32,000 people were infected, and more than 13,600 deaths were reported.

Importation of EVD to the United States from an epidemic region through an infected traveler is a recognized risk with the potential for spread to other people. During the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, 11 people were treated for EVD in the U.S., and two of them died. Nine of these cases were imported into the U.S. Two were domestic healthcare workers who were infected while caring for the first travel-associated EVD case diagnosed in the U.S. Both healthcare workers recovered.

Continue reading “Ebola Vaccine: Information about Ervebo®” | >