Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,315

Superconductors are materials that conduct electrical current with practically no electrical resistance at all. This ability makes them extremely interesting and attractive for a plethora of applications such as loss-less power cables, electric motors and generators, as well as powerful electromagnets that can be used for MRI imaging and for magnetic levitating trains. Now, researchers from Nagoya University have detailed the superconducting nature of a new class of superconducting material, magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene.

For a material to behave as a superconductor, low temperatures are required. Most materials only enter the superconducting phase at extremely low temperatures, such as −270°C, which is lower than those measured in outer space. This severely limits their practical applications because such extensive cooling requires very expensive and specialized liquid helium cooling equipment. This is the main reason superconducting technologies are still in their infancy.

High temperature superconductors (HTS), such as some iron and copper-based examples, enter the superconducting phase above −200°C, a temperature that is more readily achievable using liquid nitrogen which cools down a system to −195.8°C. However, the industrial and commercial applications of HTS have been thus far limited. Currently known and available HTS materials are brittle ceramic materials that are not malleable and cannot be made into useful shapes like wires. In addition, they are notoriously difficult and expensive to manufacture. This makes the search for new superconducting materials critical and a strong focus of research for physicists like Prof. Hiroshi Kontani and Dr. Seiichiro Onari from the Department of Physics, Nagoya University.

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Cigarette smoking is overwhelmingly the main cause of lung cancer, yet only a minority of smokers develop the disease. A study led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and published online on April 11, 2022, in Nature Genetics suggests that some smokers may have robust mechanisms that protect them from lung cancer by limiting mutations. The findings could help identify those smokers who face an increased risk for the disease and therefore warrant especially close monitoring.

“This may prove to be an important step toward the prevention and early detection of lung cancer risk and away from the current herculean efforts needed to battle late-stage disease, where the majority of health expenditures and misery occur,” said Simon Spivack, M.D., M.P.H., a co-senior author of the study, professor of medicine, of epidemiology & population health, and of genetics at Einstein, and a pulmonologist at Montefiore Health System.

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New research suggests that socioeconomic hardship during childhood leaves children vulnerable to lower cognitive ability in adolescence and increased trait anxiety during adulthood. The findings, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, further suggest that these effects are driven by the recruitment of the right lateral prefrontal cortex.

Growing up in poverty can have negative repercussions on mental health. For example, children who grow up in socioeconomic deprivation demonstrate lower cognitive ability and report higher trait anxiety as young adults. Researchers Pavla Čermáková and her team launched a study to investigate this interplay between early socioeconomic difficulty, cognitive ability, and trait anxiety and to shed light on the neural mechanism behind these relationships.

“I have always found fascinating how early life influences our mental health when we are adults. I see a huge opportunity for prevention of later mental disorders if we focus on what is happening in the earliest stages of human life,” Čermáková, an associate professor at Charles University in Prague and head of the Department of Epidemiology at the Second Faculty of Medicine.

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Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria — Dr. Erin Duffy, Ph.D., Chief of Research & Development, and Kevin Outterson, ESQ., Executive Director, CARB-X.

The Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X — https://carb-x.org/) is a global non-profit partnership accelerating antibacterial products to address drug-resistant bacteria, a leading cause of death around the world. 1.27 million deaths worldwide were attributed to resistant bacterial infections in 2019.

The CARB-X portfolio is the world’s most scientifically diverse, early development pipeline of new antibiotics, vaccines, rapid diagnostics and other products and represents the only global partnership that integrates solutions for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of life-threatening bacterial infections, translating innovation from basic research to first-in-human clinical trials.

Dr. Erin Duffy, PhD., is Chief of Research & Development at CARB-X and she has two decades of drug-discovery and problem-solving experience in the antibiotic arena. She was previously with Rib-X Pharmaceuticals (now Melinta Therapeutics) where in increasing roles she helped to build and sustain a team of researchers that translated the company’s scientific platform into next-generation and novel antibiotics that target the ribosome. Her team’s most recent achievements include the de novo design and optimization of a completely new class of antibiotics, the pyrrolocytosines, which were supported in part by CARB-X. Prior to Rib-X, Erin was the Associate Director of Innovative Discovery Technologies at Achillion Pharmaceuticals, responsible for building the structure and computational teams and platform for their antiviral efforts. She began her industrial career at Pfizer Central Research, in Groton, Connecticut, where she joined a team of computational and structural drug designers in multiple therapeutic areas. Erin was trained formally at Yale University, where she became a physical-organic chemist focused on defining computationally how small molecules interact and react in the group of Professor William L. Jorgensen. She expanded her experience to large molecules under the mentorship of Professor Axel Brunger, whose group at Yale was transitioning to a mix of computational and laboratory structural biology.

Kevin Outterson, ESQ., is Executive Director of CARB-X and is a global thought leader on business models for antibiotic development and use. He is Professor of Law and N. Neil Pike Scholar of Health and Disability Law at Boston University School of Law, where he leads multi-disciplinary teams to solve global health issues. Professor Outterson is the Executive Director and Principal Investigator of CARB-X and a partner in DRIVE-AB (aka Driving Reinvestment In Research And Development And Responsible Antibiotic Use) a project composed of 15 public and 7 private partners from 12 countries that is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) joint undertaking between the European Union and the European Pharmaceutical Industry Association (EFPIA). He also leads the Social Innovation on Drug Resistance program at Boston University.

Continue reading “Dr. Erin Duffy, Ph.D. & Kevin Outterson, ESQ — Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (CARB-X)” | >

Targeting Root Causes Of Diseases And Aging — Dr. Andrew Adams, Ph.D., Vice President, Neurodegeneration Research; Co-Director, Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine, Eli Lilly.

Dr. Andrew Adams, Ph.D. is Vice President of Neurodegeneration Research at Eli Lilly (https://www.lilly.com/) and Co-Director of their new Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine (https://lilly.mediaroom.com/2022-02-22-Lilly-Announc…ort-Site), a $700 million initiative to establish an institute for researching and developing genetic medicines, specifically acting at the nucleic acid level, to advance an entirely new drug class that target the root cause of diseases, an approach that is fundamentally different than medicines available today.

In this role, Dr. Adams will be responsible for leading the discovery of various new types of therapies, via both internal research, and robust collaborations with external partners.

These novel approaches will also allow Lilly access to previously “undruggable” targets across the breath of therapeutic areas at Lilly, as well as potentially opening up novel avenues of clinical investigation.

In addition to these major roles, Dr. Adams over the recent years also took on scientific leadership of Lilly’s COVID-19 neutralizing antibody projects, as well as serving as Vice President for Lilly Genetic Medicine, and during his time at Lilly has served in roles across early discovery, external innovation, and as a leader of Lilly’s early trailblazer teams, championing new ways to bring Lilly science to patients with speed.

Continue reading “Dr. Andrew Adams, PhD — Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine — Targeting Root Causes Of Diseases” | >

Circa 2021

As described above, molecular therapeutics enabling expression of a truncated dystrophin have been far developed. However, an unprecedented opportunity to correct the disease-causing mutation has arisen with the advent of Crispr-Cas9 technology (Fig. 1).

Since the generation of a Cas9-transgenic mouse [28], which allowed for pinpoint gene alterations specifically in organs targeted by AAVs encoding for the corresponding guide RNAs (gRNAs), it became clear that the inevitable course of inherited diseases might be altered by Cas9-mediated correction. Although certain limitations were unmasked early on, such as the preference of non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) over homology-directed repair (HDR) upon enzymatic cleavage of the double stranded DNA by Cas9, or the packaging capacity of AAVs, muscular dystrophies seemed an ideal target for genome editing. DMD mutations inducing Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) seemed particularly well suited, since internal truncations of the protein may lead to a shortened but stable protein with partial functional restitution and a milder disease progression, as seen in the allelic Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD).

The group of E. Olson was first in showing that correction of the loss-of-function mutation on exon 23 in mdx mouse zygotes is possible [29]. Notably, Cas9 combined with a single gRNA was used to inflict a cut in the vicinity of the mutation, accompanied by a single-stranded oligodeoxynucleotide, was efficient in providing HDR in 7 and NHEJ in 4 of the 11 reported corrected mdx mice. Whereas HDR correction of 41% of genomes in the mosaic mice sufficed for a full restoration of dystrophin expression in the muscles examined, a 17% HDR correction level yielded a 47–60% of muscle fibers expressing dystrophin, indicating a selection advantage of the corrected muscle and satellite cells. Moving DMD correction into the postnatal arena, the same group [30] and others [31,32,33] demonstrated feasibility of an AAV-based systemic Cas9 treatment, albeit in different flavors.

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Death Valley brings the heat, but there are other hot spots on this sweltering planet.

Summers can be hot in Death Valley, California. In fact, it is likely the hottest place on Earth—ever. Especially on Sunday, August 16 and—again—on June 17, 2021. The mercury spiked to a sweltering 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the national park, drawing crowds of tourists who flocked to take pictures with the park’s digital thermometer.

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The brain is inarguably the single most important organ in the human body. It controls how we move, react, think and feel, and enables us to have complex emotions and memories. The brain is composed of approximately 86 billion neurons that form a complex network. These neurons receive, process, and transfer information using chemical and electrical signals.

Learning how respond to different signals can further the understanding of cognition and development and improve the management of disorders of the brain. But experimentally studying neuronal networks is a complex and occasionally invasive procedure. Mathematical models provide a non-invasive means to accomplish the task of understanding , but most current models are either too computationally intensive, or they cannot adequately simulate the different types of complex neuronal responses. In a recent study, published in Nonlinear Theory and Its Applications, IEICE, a research team led by Prof. Tohru Ikeguchi of Tokyo University of Science, has analyzed some of the complex responses of neurons in a computationally simple neuron model, the Izhikevich neuron model.

“My laboratory is engaged in research on neuroscience and this study analyzes the basic mathematical properties of a neuron model. While we analyzed a single neuron model in this study, this model is often used in computational neuroscience, and not all of its properties have been clarified. Our study fills that gap,” explains Prof. Ikeguchi. The research team also comprised Mr. Yota Tsukamoto and Ph.D. student Ms. Honami Tsushima, also from Tokyo University of Science.

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Imagine a future in which you could 3D-print an entire robot or stretchy, electronic medical device with the press of a button—no tedious hours spent assembling parts by hand.

That possibility may be closer than ever thanks to a recent advancement in 3D-printing technology led by engineers at CU Boulder. In a new study, the team lays out a strategy for using currently-available printers to create materials that meld solid and liquid components—a tricky feat if you don’t want your robot to collapse.

“I think there’s a future where we could, for example, fabricate a complete system like a robot using this process,” said Robert MacCurdy, senior author of the study and assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering.

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