Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,481

How to get a Cuban COVID jab in 1,000 easy steps

On Valentine’s Day 2022 in Havana, Cuba, I received the Soberana Plus booster shot, one of the island nation’s five homegrown COVID-19 vaccines. The jab had been a long time coming.

For the past year, I had been fixated on the idea of being injected with a made-in-Cuba coronavirus vaccine. While obviously not offering protection against the imperial machinations of my homeland and Cuba’s chief antagonist, the United States, the Cuban serums were at least being developed in the interest of global public health rather than pharmaceutical profit or “vaccine apartheid”, as World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has described it.

The story of how I finally got my made-in-Cuba booster in Havana.

Looking Through Mojo Vision’s Newest AR Contact Lens

With batteries, motion sensors, and a microLED on board, Mojo lets me try out its first apps.

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a single star whose light has traveled for 12.9 billion years to Earth, having come from a universe just 900 million years old. It’s currently the most distant star known, and the team has dubbed it Earendel*.

The discovery is a huge jump, as the previous record-holder for more distant star existed in a universe 4 billion years old.

The iconic observatory had some help from nature’s own optics: The vast mass of a foreground cluster of galaxies, sitting just so between us and the distant star, acts like a lens, its gravity magnifying the star’s light thousands-fold. The discovery is published in the March 31st Nature.

Rewards in Reinforcement Learning Make Machines Behave Like Humans

Reward maximisation is one strategy that works for reinforcement learning to achieve general artificial intelligence. However, deep reinforcement learning algorithms shouldn’t depend on reward maximisation alone.

Identifying dual-purpose therapeutic targets implicated in aging and disease will extend healthspan and delay age-related health issues.

Insilico identifies therapeutic targets implicated in aging using AI and hallmarks of aging framework

AI is all that matters now, and reaching Agi before 2030 is all that matters for this decade.

A substantial percentage of the human clinical trials, including those evaluating investigational anti-aging drugs, fail in Phase II, a phase where the efficacy of the drug is tested. This poor success is in part due to inadequate target choice and the inability to identify a group of patients who will most likely respond to specific agents. This challenge is further complicated by the differences in the biological age of the patients, as the importance of therapeutic targets varies between the age groups. Unfortunately, most targets are discovered without considering patients’ age and being tested in a relatively younger population (average age in phase I is 24). Hence, identifying potential targets that are implicated in multiple age-associated diseases, and also play a role in the basic biology of aging, may have substantial benefits.

Identifying dual-purpose targets that are implicated in aging and disease at the same time will extend healthspan and delay age-related health issues – even if the target is not the most important in a specific patient, the drug would still benefit that patient.

“When it comes to targets identification in chronic diseases, it is important to prioritize the targets that are implicated in age-associated diseases, implicated in more than one hallmark of aging, and safe,” said Zhavoronkov. “So that in addition to treating a disease, the drug would also treat aging – it is an off-target bonus.”

Life Extension and Anti-Aging Have a Branding Problem

Great article by the great Steve Hill. One little thing:

“The life extension community unfortunately does have a reputation for being long on promises and short on delivery. With what is now decades of research, there are still no effective therapies against aging.”

Well, George Church commented recently that life extension does exist for mice and worms. And there is one human trial underway via plasma dilution and another one later this year.

It seems bizarre that in 2022, some biotech companies interested in doing something about aging are still saying that they are not. Cellular rejuvenation seems to be the latest buzzword and an attempt to rebrand and escape the stigma of anti-aging.

The Potential of CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing as a Treatment Strategy for Alzheimer’s Disease

Despite a wealth of knowledge gained in the past three decades concerning the molecular underpinnings of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), progress towards obtaining effective, disease modifying therapies has proven to be challenging. In this manner, numerous clinical trials targeting the production, aggregation, and toxicity of beta-amyloid, have failed to meet efficacy standards. This puts into question the beta-amyloid hypothesis and suggests that additional treatment strategies should be explored. The recent emergence of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing as a relatively straightforward, inexpensive, and precise system has led to an increased interest of applying this technique in AD. CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing can be used as a direct treatment approach or to help establish better animal models that more faithfully mimic human neurodegenerative diseases. In this manner, this technique has already shown promise in other neurological disorders, such as Huntington’s disease. The purpose of this review is to examine the potential utility of CRISPR/Cas9 as a treatment option for AD by targeting specific genes including those that cause early-onset AD, as well as those that are significant risk factors for late-onset AD such as the apolipoprotein E4 (APOE4) gene.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, CRISPR/Cas9, Gene editing, Treatment, Huntington’s disease, iPSC neurons.

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disorder that primarily affects older adults and is the most common cause of dementia [1]. Currently it afflicts 5.5 million Americans and that number is expected to triple by 2050. At the present time, it is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer, with an estimated 700,000 Americans ages65 years will have AD when they die [2]. In addition, the cost of the disease is substantial with $259 billion health care dollars going to manage the disease currently, and by the middle of the century costs are predicted to soar over $1.2 trillion, which will completely bankrupt the healthcare system in the USA [3]. Worldwide, 47 million people live with dementia and that number is projected to increase to more than 131 million by 2050 with an estimated worldwide cost of US $818 billion [4].

Dyson’s First Wireless Headphones: Fresh Tunes and Fresh Air

In addition to its premium vacuums 0, hair styling products 0, and gale-force bathroom hand dryers, Dyson is also known for its air purifiers featuring a bladeless design that makes them quieter and safer, but also a glass HEPA filter inside that promises to remove 99.97% of unwanted air particles in a home like pollen, mold, bacteria, pollution, and odors. There’s even one that can eliminate formaldehyde. That’s great for when you’re at home or the office, but a four-foot tall purifier tethered to a power outlet offers no protection from pollution anywhere else.

The Dyson Zone is the company’s first personal air purification device, and it comes with headphones as a side dish. Trojan-horsed into the high-end bluetooth headset, the Zone offers a buffer of filtration between the wearer and the outside world. When worn out in public, users may feel a bit like Bane from Batman. There may be some awkward stares, but perhaps there will be fewer than expected, thanks to the presence of the headphones.

The company started working on the Zone six years ago. The initial protype was a “snorkel-like clean air mouthpiece paired with a backpack to hold the motor and inner workings,” according to a press release. The final product—over 500 iterations later—is a huge improvement when it comes to design and ergonomics. It still looks like it might take some time to get used to, though maybe less so in the era of Covid-19 than when Dyson’s engineers first started on it.

New computational model proposed for Alzheimer’s disease

Mayo Clinic researchers have proposed a new model for mapping the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease to brain anatomy. This model was developed by applying machine learning to patient brain imaging data. It uses the entire function of the brain rather than specific brain regions or networks to explain the relationship between brain anatomy and mental processing. The findings are reported in Nature Communications.

“This new model can advance our understanding of how the brain works and breaks down during aging and Alzheimer’s disease, providing new ways to monitor, prevent and treat disorders of the mind,” says David T. Jones, M.D., a Mayo Clinic neurologist and lead author of the study.

Alzheimer’s disease typically has been described as a protein-processing problem. The toxic proteins amyloid and tau deposit in areas of the brain, causing neuron failure that results in clinical symptoms such as , difficulty communicating and confusion.

Producing faster CAR-T cell therapy inside the body with a spongelike implant

Despite the remarkable efficacy of CAR-T cell therapies to treat certain blood cancers, they are expensive thanks partly to complex and lengthy manufacturing procedures. | CAR-T therapies are expensive thanks partly to complex and lengthy manufacturing procedures. Now, scientists have found a potential way that could cut the CAR-T processing time from more than two weeks to a single day by using an implant.

Tuberculosis Induces Premature Cellular Aging

Tuberculosis (TB) is a potentially serious infectious disease caused by a type of bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The bacteria usually affect the lungs, but also can invade other organs.

In 2018, tuberculosis bacteria infected 1.7 billion people — roughly 23% of the world’s population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2020, the CDC reported 7,174 TB cases and 13 million people living with a latent tuberculosis infection (the germs are in the body but do not cause sickness) in the United States.

Even after successful therapy for tuberculosis, survivors of the disease have an increased risk of recurrent infection and death. A new study published recently by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine found that the cells of humans and animals who have recovered from tuberculosis had prematurely aged up to 12 to 14 years.