Stem-cell-based therapies can potentially reverse organ dysfunction and diseases, but the removal of impaired tissue and activation of a program leading to organ regeneration pose major challenges. In mice, a 4-day fasting mimicking diet (FMD) induces a stepwise expression of Sox17 and Pdx-1, followed by Ngn3-driven generation of insulin-producing β cells, resembling that observed during pancreatic development. FMD cycles restore insulin secretion and glucose homeostasis in both type 2 and type 1 diabetes mouse models. In human type 1 diabetes pancreatic islets, fasting conditions reduce PKA and mTOR activity and induce Sox2 and Ngn3 expression and insulin production. The effects of the FMD are reversed by IGF-1 treatment and recapitulated by PKA and mTOR inhibition. These results indicate that a FMD promotes the reprogramming of pancreatic cells to restore insulin generation in islets from T1D patients and reverse both T1D and T2D phenotypes in mouse models.
A periodic short-term diet that mimics fasting modulates β-cell regeneration and promotes insulin secretion and glucose homeostasis with potential to treat both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
A man with terminal heart disease is responding well three days after being given a genetically modified pig heart in a first-of-its-kind surgery, his doctors reported on Monday. The surgery, performed by a team at the University of Maryland Medicine in the United States, is among the first to demonstrate the feasibility of a pig-to-human heart transplant, a field made possible by new gene editing tools. If proven successful, scientists hope pig organs could help alleviate shortages of donor organs. For David Bennett, a 57-year-old from Maryland, the heart transplant was his last option.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, in collaboration with TCS Research and Wageningen University, recently devised a new strategy that could improve coordination among different robots tackling complex missions as a team. This strategy, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a split-architecture that addresses communication and computations separately, while periodically coordinating the two to achieve optimal results.
The researchers’ paper was recently presented at the IEEE RoboCom 2022 conference, held in conjunction with IEEE CCNC 2022, a top tier conference in the field of networking and distributed computing. At IEEE RoboCom 2022, it received the Best Paper Award.
“Swarm-robotics is on the path to becoming a key tool for human civilization,” Dr. Sudipta Saha, the lead researcher of the team that carried out the study, told TechXplore. “For instance, in medical science, it will be necessary to use numerous nano-bots to boost immune-therapy, targeted and effective drug transfer, etc.; while in the army it will be necessary for exploring unknown terrains that are hard for humans to enter, enabling agile supervision of borders and similar activities. In construction, it can enable technologies such as large-scale 3D printing and in agriculture it can help to monitor crop health and intervene to improve yields.”
Why they need to return office?🤔🤔.Can’t they work from virtual world?
Meta, the company that at the beginning of this pandemic was called Facebook, has updated its return-to-office guidance, moving its target date from the end of this month to March 28, CNBC reports. With the shifting timetables for reopening and inconsistent guidance, one can only imagine how whiplashed the company’s employees must feel.
To wit: Back in December of 2020, CEO Mark Zuckerberg first told employees they would not be required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in order to return to work. At that time, the company projected remote work could continue until at least July of 2021, though it later pushed to open offices in May. By June, Zuckerberg had passed a new edict: either seek permission from a manager to work from home, or be expected to come to the office for at least half the week.
A month later the Delta variant came along, Zuckerberg changed his stance on vaccine requirements for employees, and the company set a new target of October for a full reopening. By August of last year, it had pushed its the return-to-office to January of 2022. As Omicron spread rapidly this winter, Meta held fast to its January 31 goal, but gave some employees the option to delay in-person work by three to five months via an “office deferral program.” Incidentally, this new March 28 date includes a new requirement that employees receive the vaccine booster as well.
Researchers filtered the air around two zoos and identified genetic material from dozens of species, a technique that could help track and conserve wildlife.
I am happy to say that my recently published computational COVID-19 research has been featured in a major news article by HPCwire! I led this research as CTO of Conduit. My team utilized one of the world’s top supercomputers (Frontera) to study the mechanisms by which the coronavirus’s M proteins and E proteins facilitate budding, an understudied part of the SARS-CoV-2 life cycle. Our results may provide the foundation for new ways of designing antiviral treatments which interfere with budding. Thank you to Ryan Robinson (Conduit’s CEO) and my computational team: Ankush Singhal, Shafat M., David Hill, Jr., Tamer Elkholy, Kayode Ezike, and Ricky Williams.
Conduit, created by MIT graduate (and current CEO) Ryan Robinson, was founded in 2017. But it might not have been until a few years later, when the pandemic started, that Conduit may have found its true calling. While Conduit s commercial division is busy developing a Covid-19 test called nanoSPLASH, its nonprofit arm was granted access to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world Frontera, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to model the budding process of SARS-CoV-2.
Budding, the researchers explained, is how the virus genetic material is encapsulated in a spherical envelope and the process is key to the virus ability to infect. Despite that, they say, it has hitherto been poorly understood:
The Conduit team comprised of Logan Thrasher Collins (CTO of Conduit), Tamer Elkholy, Shafat Mubin, David Hill, Ricky Williams, Kayode Ezike and Ankush Singhal sought to change that, applying for an allocation from the White House-led Covid-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium to model the budding process on a supercomputer.
Bio-Printing Complex Human Tissues & Organs — Dr. Anthony Atala, MD — Director, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Wake Forest University.
Dr. Anthony Atala, MD, (https://school.wakehealth.edu/Faculty/A/Anthony-Atala) is the G. Link Professor and Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the W. Boyce Professor and Chair of Urology.
A practicing surgeon and a researcher in the area of regenerative medicine, fifteen applications of technologies developed Dr. Atala’s laboratory have been used clinically. He is Editor of 25 books and 3 journals, has published over 800 journal articles, and has received over 250 national and international patents. Dr. Atala was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences, to the National Academy of Inventors as a Charter Fellow, and to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
Dr. Atala is a recipient of the US Congress funded Christopher Columbus Foundation Award, bestowed on a living American who is currently working on a discovery that will significantly affect society; the World Technology Award in Health and Medicine, for achieving significant and lasting progress; the Edison Science/Medical Award for innovation, the R&D Innovator of the Year Award, and the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for Bioprinting Tissue and Organs. Dr. Atala’s work was listed twice as Time Magazine’s Top 10 medical breakthroughs of the year, and once as one of 5 discoveries that will change the future of organ transplants. He was named by Scientific American as one of the world’s most influential people in biotechnology, by U.S. News & World Report as one of 14 Pioneers of Medical Progress in the 21st Century, by Life Sciences Intellectual Property Review as one of the top key influencers in the life sciences intellectual property arena, and by Nature Biotechnology as one of the top 10 translational researchers in the world.
Dr. Atala has led or served several national professional and government committees, including the National Institutes of Health working group on Cells and Developmental Biology, the National Institutes of Health Bioengineering Consortium, and the National Cancer Institute’s Advisory Board. He is a founding member of the Tissue Engineering Society, Regenerative Medicine Foundation, Regenerative Medicine Manufacturing Innovation Consortium, Regenerative Medicine Development Organization, and Regenerative Medicine Manufacturing Society.
Even in people with signs of Alzheimer’s and other dementia, a new study found exercise boosted proteins in the brain that may prevent cognitive decline.
46:15–58:52 CHAPTER 2 : Biological Aging a. “Programmed Cell Death” Theory of Aging b. “Intercellular Competition” Theory of Aging c. “Antagonistic Pleiotropy” Theory of Aging.
