Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,272

64x Bio comes out of the Har­vard De­part­ment of Ge­net­ics. CEO Lex Rovn­er and her team — which right now, sits around 10 peo­ple — are look­ing to tack­le a key hur­dle for ma­jor com­pa­nies: man­u­fac­tur­ing cell and gene therapies.

Rovn­er met Church while get­ting her PhD at Yale, and went on to do a post­doc­tor­al re­search fel­low­ship in his lab, and, when talk­ing to folks in the in­dus­try, found a mas­sive vi­ral vec­tor man­u­fac­tur­ing bot­tle­neck that wasn’t be­ing talked about.

Af­ter a seed fund­ing round and the com­pa­ny’s launch in 2020, it made some noise in the in­dus­try, par­tic­u­lar­ly as Covid-19 made bot­tle­neck is­sues more vis­i­ble. There’s a wait­list to get a vec­tor from man­u­fac­tur­ers, and not much of a so­lu­tion to the problem.

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There is nothing inevitable about aging, or about its rate. Californian bristlecone pines are believed to live for 5,000 years, and there are long-lived mammalian creatures as well. Some marine creatures do not display any signs of aging at all, including hydra, jellyfish, planarian worms, and coral. Certain human cells have immortal characteristics too. When a woman gives birth, she produces a baby which is “new”. Her “germline” (reproduction-related) cells produce a child with no signs of age.

These and many other considerations combine with the unreasonable effectiveness of modern AI to lead some people to believe that significant advances in longevity are imminent. These advances probably cannot happen without the active participation of the wider pharmaceutical industry, and the acceptance by policy makers and regulators that aging is a disease, not just an unfortunate and inevitable component of the human condition. There is still considerable reluctance among major pharmaceutical companies to contemplate specific anti-aging therapeutic developments. But there are encouraging signs of this reluctance being challenged, especially at Novartis and AstraZeneca.

Beyond the pharma giants, Mellon reckons there are 255 companies which claim to be specifically targeting aging, of which 35 are listed on stock markets. But he thinks that only a minority of them are genuinely working to tackle aging, as opposed to one of the diseases it causes, like cancer, dementia, or heart disease. He likens the state of the longevity industry today to the internet industry of 20 years ago, when it was still in its dial-up phase, and downloading information (or, heaven forbid, images) was like sucking jelly through a straw. And although longevity will have such a massive impact on all of us that you might expect progress to be expedited, Mellon points out that the internet did not have to go through lengthy and expensive FDA trials at every step.

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Autophagy is often likened to the trash management system of the cell. And just as municipal waste services involve collection, transportation and ultimately disposal, so too must the cell’s autophagy system follow a coordinated, multistep process. It first requires cellular refuse to be bagged up inside sack-like structures known as phagophores. These then mature into cargo containers called autophagosomes, which fuse with degradation hubs called lysosomes. Only then do waste products get broken down.

Any part of that cell-cleaning process could go wrong, and they often do as cells age. But if researchers do not fully understand what aspects of autophagy are defective in any particular disease, drugs that modulate the wrong parts of the pathway could do more harm than good. A therapy could, for instance, help the cell to package more trash. “But if your trash compactor isn’t working properly, you’re just going to end up with a room full of trash bags,” says Tim Sargeant, who studies autophagy at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute in Adelaide. “That’s one of the dangers here.”

As a result, although some anti-ageing researchers and companies have gone all-in on targeting autophagy, others are more circumspect — especially given the lack of solid evidence in people or even mouse models for many of the proposed interventions.

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Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and bears an immense economic burden. Late-stage heart failure often requires total heart transplantation; however, due to donor shortages and lifelong immunosuppression, alternative cardiac regenerative therapies are in high demand. Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), including human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells, have emerged as a viable source of human cardiomyocytes for transplantation. Recent developments in several mammalian models of cardiac injury have provided strong evidence of the therapeutic potential of hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CM), showing their ability to electromechanically integrate with host cardiac tissue and promote functional recovery. In this review, we will discuss recent developments in hPSC-CM differentiation and transplantation strategies for delivery to the heart. We will highlight the mechanisms through which hPSC-CMs contribute to heart repair, review major challenges in successful transplantation of hPSC-CMs, and present solutions that are being explored to address these limitations. We end with a discussion of the clinical use of hPSC-CMs, including hurdles to clinical translation, current clinical trials, and future perspectives on hPSC-CM transplantation.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. In the United States alone, CVD is responsible for ~655,000 deaths and contributes to $200 billion in spending each year. CVD can lead to myocardial infarction (MI), also known as a “heart attack,” which results in restricted blood flow and extensive cell death within the infarct zone. Due to the limited regenerative capacity of the human heart, infarcted myocardium is replaced by fibrotic scar tissue with inferior contractile performance. Over time, pathological remodeling leads to ventricular wall thinning, which can progress to heart failure. There is currently no treatment available that can restore lost cardiomyocytes after MI, and conventional therapies typically only manage the symptoms (3, 4).

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Frogs briefly treated with a five-drug cocktail administered by a wearable bioreactor on the stump were able to regrow a functional, nearly complete limb.

For millions of patients who have lost limbs for reasons ranging from diabetes to trauma, the possibility of regaining function through natural regeneration remains out of reach. Regrowth of legs and arms remains the province of salamanders and superheroes.

But in a study published in the journal Science Advances, scientists at Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute have brought us a step closer to the goal of regenerative medicine.

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A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before. The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf—collapsed cores of stars—wi…

Electric bicycle sales have been on a skyward trajectory since early in the pandemic, and new numbers show they are selling more units than electric cars and plug-in hybrids combined. Those figures recently released by the Light Electric Vehicle Association trade group help bolster the case for personal electric vehicles as alternatives to larger cars […].

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Electric bicycle sales have been on a skyward trajectory since early in the pandemic, and new numbers show they are selling more units than electric cars and plug-in hybrids combined.

Those figures recently released by the Light Electric Vehicle Association trade group help bolster the case for personal electric vehicles as alternatives to larger cars and trucks.

According to data released by the LEVA, the US saw nearly 790,000 electric bike imports in 2021. That marks a 70% increase from the 463,000 imports in 2020.

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This is a bit interesting. As we all know, education has been crushed by the pandemic measures. Jeff Bezos has been operating one free preschool program in Washington State where Amazon is based. Now he is adding three more such programs in Texas.

I assume he picked Texas because Blue Origin is based there and he wishes to focus more on Blue Origin. Elon Musk regularly donates to education in Texas as well, likely because Starship is currently based in Texas.

Houston city council member Karla Cisneros said the partnership will help support the development and success of some of the city’s neediest children and help the future workforce be prepared for jobs. “We are helping women get back to work, and we are giving young children a good shot at a better life,” Cisneros said in the release.

The Bezos Academy opened its first school in Des Moines, Washington in October 2020. The preschool program has three other locations opening in Texas this year, including two in Dallas.

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Surgeries require a lot of planning, practice, and precision. Doctors cannot afford to get distracted or lose focus when operating on a person. The use of AI in surgery aims to support doctors and supply them with the necessary information and surgical tools without disturbing them at any point.

Mixed reality makes it possible to use technology to assist doctors during surgeries and minimize risks.

Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino first introduced the term mixed reality in 1994 in their paper titled A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays. MR combines computer vision, cloud computing, graphical processing, etc., to blend the physical and virtual worlds. Many companies have been developing MR applications that can be used in various industries.

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Telecom provider AT&T this week said some local customers now have access to faster internet with the addition of 2 gigabit and 5 gigabit fiber internet to the community. Reno is one of more than 70 metro regions in the country to get the upgrade.

The top speeds for AT&T fiber internet had previously been 1 gig.

AT&T officials said the rollout of the improved fiber network for residential customers was in response to pandemic shifts in how people work, with many more people setting up home offices or making their homes a permanent workplace.

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