A combination of vaccination and natural infection seems to offer enhanced immunity across variants.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,524
Supercentenarian (112 — 116y) Blood Test Analysis
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Papers referenced in the video:
Main study:
Clinical course of the longest-lived man in the world: A case report.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34973348/
Age and cystatin C in healthy adults: a collaborative study.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19749145/
Cystatin C and long-term mortality among subjects with normal creatinine-based estimated glomerular filtration rates: NHANES III (Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21109116/
High-density lipoprotein cholesterol and all-cause mortality by sex and age: a prospective cohort study among 15.8 million adults.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33313654/
High-sensitivity C-reactive protein and coronary heart disease in a general population of Japanese: the Hisayama study.
Cybersecurity in 2022 — A Fresh Look at Some Very Alarming Stats
*The past two years has seen a rapid shift of work to remote and hybrid offices. The statistics show that hackers welcomed that shift and took advantage of the vulnerabilities and gaps in security by businesses.
* Cyber perils are the biggest concern for companies globally in 2022, according to the Allianz Risk Barometer. The threat of ransomware attacks, data breaches or major IT outages worries companies even more than business and supply chain disruption, natural disasters or the COVID-19 pandemic, all of which have heavily affected firms in the past year.
Cyber incidents tops the Allianz Risk Barometer for only the second time in the survey’s history (44% of responses), Business interruption drops to a close second (42%) and Natural catastrophes ranks third (25%), up from sixth in 2021. Climate change climbs to its highest-ever ranking of sixth (17%, up from ninth), while Pandemic outbreak drops to fourth (22%).y affected firms in the past year. past two years has seen a rapid shift of work to remote and hybrid offices. The statistics show that hackers welcomed that shift and took advantage of the vulnerabilities and gaps in security by businesses.
Research Shows Supplement Boosts Muscle and Mitochondria Health
A study cohort that received an oral supplement of a gut-produced compound had better endurance in two small exercises.
An oral supplement intended to stimulate a natural body process appears to promote muscle endurance and mitochondrial health in humans. New research suggests that the supplement, urolithin A, may help improve or prolong muscle activity in people who are aging or who have diseases that make exercise difficult.
The paper was published in JAMA Network Open.
VTT’s innovation delivers heat where it’s needed
The heat-producing electronic components are printed on a substrate material with a method known as roll-to-roll processing. The 0.05-millimetre thick metal mesh can then be cut to form and installed on materials such as fabrics, paper and floor laminates without any additional support layers and without significantly affecting the properties of the material – be it elasticity or breathability.
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has unveiled a thin and flexible precision heater suitable not only for indoor environments, but also for food packaging and clinical surfaces.
New research into remote robotic surgery
A literature review by researchers at the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences fleshes out key issues currently preventing the proliferation of robotic procedures, specifically their use in image-guided interventional procedure in the brain.
Key criteria for future success are also highlighted.
The researchers conducted the systematic review of the literature by looking at applications of robotic systems in interventional neuroradiology—image-guided interventional procedures using devices in the blood vessels to treat diseases in the brain such as the treatment of aneurysms (blisters forming in blood vessels) which can cause catastrophic bleeding if they rupture. Another procedure is clot removal in stroke. Clot removal, known as mechanical thrombectomy, is performed to stop that area of the brain from dying.
Elon Musk nears human testing of brain chip
I wonder if you could use this stuff for brain scans.
Neuralink, the US neurotechnology firm co-founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, has begun recruiting key employees to run its clinical trials, signaling that it’s inching closer to starting human testing of its brain implants.
The company has posted advertisements to hire a clinical trial director and a clinical trial coordinator. The ads note that the staffers will “work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers, as well as working with Neuralink’s first clinical trial participants.” Neuralink said the director will lead and help build its clinical research team and will develop “regulatory interactions that come with a fast-paced and ever-evolving environment.”
Musk, who ranks as the world’s richest person with a fortune estimated at $256 billion, said last month that he expects to have Neuralink brain chips implanted in humans sometime in 2022, pending approval for testing plans by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Kernel Flow: A wearable device for noninvasive optical brain imaging
Recent advances in brain imaging techniques facilitate accurate, high-resolution observations of the brain and its functions. For example, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a widely used noninvasive imaging technique that employs near-infrared light (wavelength 700 nm) to determine the relative concentration of hemoglobin in the brain, via differences in the light absorption patterns of hemoglobin.
Most noninvasive brain scanning systems use continuous-wave fNIRS, where the tissue is irradiated by a constant stream of photons. However, these systems cannot differentiate between scattered and absorbed photons. A recent advancement to this technique is time-domain (TD)-fNIRS, which uses picosecond pulses of light and fast detectors to estimate photon scattering and absorption in tissues. However, such systems are expensive and complex and have a large form factor, limiting their widespread adoption.
To overcome these challenges, researchers from Kernel, a neurotechnology company, have developed a wearable headset based on TD-fNIRS technology. This device, called “Kernel Flow,” weighs 2.05 kg and contains 52 modules arranged in four plates that fit on either side of the head. The specifications and performance of the Kernel Flow system are reported in the Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO).
Human Brain Signals Recorded in Record-Breaking Resolution
High-resolution recordings of electrical signals from the surface of the brain could improve surgeons’ ability to remove brain tumors and treat epilepsy, and could open up new possibilities for medium-and longer-term brain-computer interfaces.
A team of engineers, surgeons, and medical researchers has published data from both humans and rats demonstrating that a new array of brain sensors can record electrical signals directly from the surface of the human brain in record-breaking detail. The new brain sensors feature densely packed grids of either 1,024 or 2,048 embedded electrocorticography (ECoG) sensors. The paper was published by the journal Science Translational Medicine on January 19, 2022.
These thin, pliable grids of ECoG sensors, if approved for clinical use, would offer surgeons brain-signal information directly from the surface of the brain’s cortex in 100 times higher resolution than what is available today. Access to this highly detailed perspective on which specific areas of the tissue at the brain’s surface, or cerebral cortex, are active, and when, could provide better guidance for planning surgeries to remove brain tumors and surgically treat drug-resistant epilepsy.
What to Expect in Neuroscience, Genetics, Longevity, Biotech, and Psychedelics in 2022
Church points to factors that helped make such a success of three of the top COVID-19 vaccine technologies. For one thing, they all used gene therapy technologies, and each was a new method relative to the past and to each other. For instance, the AstraZeneca vaccine was based on an adenovirus capsid containing double-stranded DNA as opposed to an adeno-associated virus (AAV) of the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccine, while the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were based on single-stranded mRNA inside lipid nanoparticles.
“Implementation science is the unsung handmaiden of biomedical discovery!”
Secondly, each of them was approved by the FDA 10 times faster than the vast majority of therapeutic products, and finally, the cost per vaccine has been as low as $2 per dose for the United Nations’ COVAX global access program. That’s about a million times cheaper than Zolgensma, he says, referring to the AAV gene therapy medication used to treat spinal muscular atrophy. So since “any one of these could spark a revolution,” according to Church, imagine what could happen in the next 12 months if all four factors pertain again?