Lifeboat Foundation

My editorial from today’s (3/18/19) Financial Times:

Far sooner than most people realise, the genetics revolution will transform the world within and around us. Although we think about genetic technologies primarily in the context of healthcare, these tools are set to change the way we make babies, the nature of the babies we make and, ultimately, our evolutionary trajectory as a species — and we are not remotely ready for what’s coming. Yet we must be, to optimise the benefits and minimise the potential harms of genetic technologies.

Continue reading “Human gene editing is too transformative to be guided by the few” »

Takeda said it has begun development of TAK-888, an anti-SARS-CoV-2 polyclonal hyperimmune globulin (H-IG) designed to treat high-risk individuals with COVID-19.

Takeda’s H-IGs are plasma derived-therapies that have previously shown effectiveness in treating of severe acute viral respiratory infections. Such therapies are designed to concentrate pathogen-specific antibodies from plasma collected from recovered patients or vaccinated donors in the future. By transferring the antibodies to a new patient, Takeda reasons, a person’s immune system can better respond to the infection and increase their chance of recovery.

Two big-name biopharmas—Takeda Pharmaceutical and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals—have separately entered the scramble to develop new treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infection, the virus identified as the cause of the global COVID-19 outbreak. [NIH].

Continue reading “Coronavirus: Takeda Pursues Plasma-Derived Treatment; Alnylam and Vir Eye siRNA Therapy” »

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These predictions were drawn from DeepMind’s new deep learning system but have yet to be experimentally verified, DeepMind noted.

In a study of epilepsy patients, researchers at the National Institutes of Health monitored the electrical activity of thousands of individual brain cells, called neurons, as patients took memory tests. They found that the firing patterns of the cells that occurred when patients learned a word pair were replayed fractions of a second before they successfully remembered the pair. The study was part of an NIH Clinical Center trial for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy whose seizures cannot be controlled with drugs.

“Memory plays a crucial role in our lives. Just as musical notes are recorded as grooves on a record, it appears that our brains store memories in neural firing patterns that can be replayed over and over again,” said Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and senior author of the study published in Science.

Dr. Zaghloul’s team has been recording electrical currents of drug-resistant epilepsy patients temporarily living with surgically implanted electrodes designed to monitor brain activity in the hopes of identifying the source of a patient’s seizures. This period also provides an opportunity to study neural activity during memory. In this study, his team examined the activity used to store memories of our past experiences, which scientists call episodic memories.

An international team of scientists led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has launched a comprehensive overview of all proteins expressed in the brain, published today in the journal Science. The open-access database offers medical researchers an unprecedented resource to deepen their understanding of neurobiology and develop new, more effective therapies and diagnostics targeting psychiatric and neurological diseases.

The brain is the most complex organ, both in structure and function. The new Brain Atlas resource is based on the analysis of nearly 1,900 brain samples covering 27 brain regions, combining data from the human brain with corresponding information from the brains of the pig and mouse. It is the latest database released by the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) program which is based at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Sweden, a joint research centre aligned with KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm University and Uppsala University. The project is a collaboration with the BGI research centre in Shenzhen and Qingdao in China and Aarhus University in Denmark.

“As expected, the blueprint for the brain is shared among mammals, but the new map also reveals interesting differences between human, pig and mouse brains,” says Mathias Uhlén, Professor at the Department of Protein Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Visiting professor at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet and Director of the Human Protein Atlas effort.

A new joint study by Tel Aviv University (TAU) and Weizmann Institute of Science researchers has yielded an innovative method for bolstering memory processes in the brain during sleep.

The method relies on a memory-evoking scent administered to one nostril. It helps researchers understand how sleep aids memory, and in the future could possibly help to restore memory capabilities following brain injuries, or help treat people with post–traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for whom memory often serves as a trigger.

The new study was led by Ella Bar, a Ph.D. student at TAU and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Other principal investigators include Prof. Yuval Nir of TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Sagol School of Neuroscience, as well as Profs. Yadin Dudai, Noam Sobel and Rony Paz, all of Weizmann’s Department of Neurobiology. It was published in Current Biology on March 5.

Powerful antibiotics and widespread sanitation practices have expanded lifespans across the industrialized world. But they have also come at a cost. Our microbiomes, or the trillions of microbes collectively working in our bodies to help regulate our immune system and food digestion, have lost much of its health-promoting bacteria because of our modern lifestyles and sanitation practices.

Scientists across the world are now looking to the planet’s few remaining pre-industrialized societies to see what industrialized guts have lost–and in doing so, could fundamentally change the way scientists think about germs. Thomas Morton heads to the Central African Republic to see this emerging field of microbiome science.

Continue reading “The Hunt for a Better Gut Bacteria in Central Africa” »

Should we be forced to die? Live? We’re going to dig into some deep questions about health and longevity in our discussion this week with the CEO of BioViva Sciences, Elizabeth Parrish. BioViva is dedicated to improving healthy human longevity through bioinformatics used in health predictions and recommendations, precision medicine, and the discovery of novel biomarkers by applying state of the art computational methods on vast collections of biological data.