Lifeboat Foundation

Generet prize will fund more trials by Steven Laureys to help written-off ‘vegetative’ patients.

The lungs and placentas of fetuses in the womb — as young as 11 weeks after conception — already show a bacterial microbiome signature, which suggests that bacteria may colonize the lungs well before birth. This first-time finding deepens the mystery of how the microbes or microbial products reach those organs before birth and what role they play in normal lung and immune system development.

A team led by University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher Charitharth Vivek Lal, M.D., found that a human fetal microbiome DNA signature is present in lungs as early as the first trimester. This fetal lung microbiome showed changes in diversity during fetal development, suggesting microbiome maturation with advancing gestational age. Finally, a placental microbiome was also present in human fetal tissue, and this microbiome signature showed some taxonomic overlap with the corresponding human fetal lung microbiome.

“We speculate that maternal-fetal microbial DNA transfer — and perhaps of other microbial products and whole live or dead bacteria — is a realistic possibility,” said Lal, an associate professor in the UAB Pediatrics Division of Neonatology. “This may serve to ‘prime’ the developing innate immune system of the fetus and help in establishment of a normal host-commensal relationship.”

Northwestern University researchers have added a new dimension to the importance of diversity.

For the first time, physicists have experimentally demonstrated that certain systems with interacting entities can synchronize only if the entities within the system are different from one another.

This finding offers a new twist to the previous understanding of how collective behavior found in nature—such as fireflies flashing in unison or pacemaker cells working together to generate a heartbeat—can arise even when the individual insects or cells are different.

3D bio-printed Lung tissue.

Rice University researcher’s bioprinting method could be scaled up to one day construct an entire organ and allow organs to be made using some of a patient’s own cells to prevent organ rejection. Researcher’s long term goals are to bioprint fully functioning organs. Synthetic organs can extend the waiting period of an average 3.6 years for a real organ.

Continue reading “3D Bioprinted Organ Just Took Its First ‘Breath’” »

Research is at an early stage but scientists said it had huge potential for destroying cancers.

Jane McLelland beat cervical, lung, and blood cancers using the missing link to defeat cancer: starving it. She is partnering with Life Extension® to help other patients achieve the same results.

By Laurie Mathena.

After getting a considerable success in convincing scientists and investors, in the last decades, that undoing aging through a damage repair approach is possible and desirable, Aubrey de Grey is turning his advocacy efforts to politicians. In this video, he explains why.

https://thelongevityforum.com/
Aubrey de Grey delivers a keynote on the next steps for longevity for policy makers.

Continue reading “Aubrey de Grey, CSO, SENS, ‘Scientists, check — Investors, check — Next up, policy makers’” »

The company’s machine learning-based tool applies advanced algorithms to Maccabi’s existing electronic patient data to identify unvaccinated individuals at highest risk of developing serious flu-related complications. These could include elderly people; those with uncontrolled chronic diseases or respiratory diseases; long-term smokers; those that are immunodeficient or have diabetes; or children, explained Dr. Jeremy Orr, CEO of EarlySign.

The EarlySign investigational algorithm flags these individuals, who are then contacted by their healthcare providers and encouraged to come into the clinic and be vaccinated. Patients can be contacted by phone, text message or even snail mail, depending on their communication preferences and the methods offered by their clinics.

Orr noted that the program is especially important this year when many people have already died from the flu in Israel and the virus is expected to take an exceptionally heavier toll than usual this year.

Science is enabling women to have children later in life as new technologies transform IVF success rates. But an increasingly globalised IVF trade also poses dangers.

Science is changing how and when families are made. Women are going to be able to have both career and family in a way that we’ve never seen before. New technologies are transforming IVF success rates. AI allows us to look at features of the embryo invisible to the human eye.

Continue reading “How science is changing the nature of families | The Economist” »