Lifeboat Foundation

The development could lead to personalized, responsive medical devices.

Editing of hemoglobin gene leads two people with different conditions to no longer need regular blood transfusions.

Artificial neurons which could be implanted in the brain to repair the damage caused by Alzheimer’s disease or other neurodegenerative conditions, have been invented by scientists.

The electronic cells, developed by teams at the University of Bath and a team of international collaborators, sit on a silicon chip and mimic the responses of biological neurons when triggered by the nervous system.

Neurons are specialised cells which transmit nerve impulses, allowing parts of the body to communicate, and are the core components of the brain, spinal cord and nervous system. They are also present around the heart.

More than 10,000 people are waiting for a lifesaving liver transplant.

The liver is one of the only organs that can be donated from a living person, and now, a new technique is making it easier than ever before to give the gift of life.

Nikko Velazquez, 29, watched helplessly as his girlfriend’s father, Abraham Aviv, 66, experienced end stage liver disease.

Artificial neurons on silicon chips that behave just like the real thing have been invented by scientists—a first-of-its-kind achievement with enormous scope for medical devices to cure chronic diseases, such as heart failure, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases of neuronal degeneration.

Critically the artificial neurons not only behave just like biological neurons but only need one billionth the power of a microprocessor, making them ideally suited for use in medical implants and other bio-electronic devices.

The research team, led by the University of Bath and including researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Zurich and Auckland, describe the artificial neurons in a study published in Nature Communications.

The tumor in one mouse that was injected with human cancer cells completely disappeared.

Cyrus Biotechnology in Seattle and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard launch collaboration to develop optimized CRISPR gene technology.

Cyrus Biotechnology, Inc. Lucas Nivon, 206−258−6561 [email protected]

Researchers in Vienna from Ulrich Elling’s laboratory at IMBA—Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences—in collaboration with the Vienna BioCenter Core Facilities have developed a revolutionary CRISPR technology called “CRISPR-Switch,” which enables unprecedented control of the CRISPR technique in both space and time.

CRISPR/Cas9 technology is based on a modified version of a bacterial defense system against bacteriophages. One of the landmark discoveries for this technique in fact was laid in Vienna and published in 2012 in a study co-authored by Emmanuelle Charpentier and VBC Ph.D. student, Krzysztof Chylinski. Due to its power to also edit mammalian genomes, CRISPR/Cas9 has rapidly established itself as the most employed gene editing method in laboratories across the world with huge potential to find its way to the clinics to cure rare disease. Just a week ago, the first success in the treatment of sickle cell anemia was announced.

To control the power of genome editing, several groups have worked on systems to control editing activity. Scientists from the lab of Ulrich Elling at IMBA were now able to gain unprecedented control over sgRNA activity, in a system termed “CRISPR-Switch.” The results are published in the renowned journal Nature Communications.