Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,860

Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya stunned CNBC anchor Scott Wapner and generated widespread applause on social media by declaring in a television interview Thursday that the U.S. government should let hedge funds and billionaire CEOs “get wiped out” by the coronavirus-induced economic collapse and instead focus its attention on rescuing Main Street.

When Wapner, seemingly incredulous at what he was hearing, asked Palihapitiya why he would support the collapse of large companies, the Social Capital CEO said “this is a lie that’s been purported by Wall Street.”

“When a company fails, it does not fire their employees, it goes through a packaged bankruptcy,” said Palihapitiya. “If anything what happens is the people who have the pensions inside the companies, the employees of these companies, end up owning more of the company. The people that get wiped out are the speculators that own the unsecured tranches of debt or the folks that own the equity. And by the way, those are the rules of the game. That’s right. These are the people that purport to be the most sophisticated investors in the world. They deserve to get wiped out.”

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The Harvard University offshoot i20 Therapeutics is setting the goal of one day having those who suffer from diabetes to be able to treat it with pills rather than injections with a syringe when they need to take their medications.

Bioengineering researchers began to publish their methods in 2018 for turning liquid medications into encapsulated easy to swallow forms, which has demonstrated some early success with insulin in animal models.

Starting out with $4 million in seed money from Sanofi Ventures and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s T1D Fund, i20 Therapeutics plans to take that technology to GLP1 analogs, these are the glucagon like peptides that help to maintain blood sugar levels; i20 is focused on creating the next generation of oral peptide and protein based therapies.

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A drug used for cancer therapy has shown promise in reversing kidney damage caused by systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE, or lupus), according to a Yale-led study published April 8 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

“Kidney damage affects about half of the patients with lupus, sometimes leading to renal failure with a requirement for dialysis or transplantation,” said Joe Craft, the Paul B. Beeson Professor of Medicine (rheumatology) and professor of immunobiology. “Finding what causes that damage is extremely important.”

Lupus is an autoimmune disease in which immune cells attack tissues in the body of the host, with kidneys being particularly susceptible in a condition called lupus nephritis. In lupus nephritis, the patient’s own T cells infiltrate kidney tissue and trigger a decrease in oxygen, leading to and potentially end-stage kidney disease.

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Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed an “off-the-shelf” artificial cardiac patch that can deliver cardiac cell-derived healing factors directly to the site of heart attack injury. In a rat model of heart attack, the freezable, cell-free patch improved recovery. The researchers also found similar effects in a pilot study involving a pig model of heart attack.

Cardiac patches are being studied as a promising future option for delivering cell therapy directly to the site of heart attack injury. However, current cardiac patches are fragile, costly, time-consuming to prepare and, since they use live cellular material, increase risks of tumor formation and arrhythmia.

“We have developed an artificial cardiac patch that can potentially solve the problems associated with using live cells, yet still deliver effective cell therapy to the site of injury,” says Ke Cheng, Randall B. Terry, Jr. Distinguished Professor in Regenerative Medicine at NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine and professor in the NC State/UNC Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering.

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A team of University of Florida engineers developed a cheap and easily sourced ventilator made with PVC, sprinkler valves, and Arduino. The design can be made for around $125 and could help with the demand for ventilators in the COVID-19 pandemic.

A ventilator envisioned by a University of Florida engineer and built with do-it-yourself parts gained first-step FDA authorization this week, offering hope that it could be in use within weeks at hospitals around the world where COVID-19 patients have overwhelmed supplies of traditional medical equipment.

The ventilator, composed of parts readily available for less than $250, can be assembled in less than an hour. UF has made plans and software available free over the internet.

“The testing is obviously important right now because the worst-case scenario is that a patient will need three weeks of ventilator support, so we want to make sure this will run non-stop for three weeks,” said Samsun Lampotang, a professor of anesthesiology in the UF College of Medicine, who led design of the device.

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Resveratrol may reduce aging within the brain.

Deficits in the cerebral microcirculation contribute to age-related cognitive decline. In a pilot study of postmenopausal women, we found that supplementation with a low dose of resveratrol, a phytoestrogen, for 14 weeks improved cerebrovascular and cognitive functions. We have since undertaken a larger, longer term study to confirm these benefits. Postmenopausal women aged 45–85 years (n = 129) were randomized to take placebo or 75 mg trans-resveratrol twice daily for 12 months. Effects on cognition, cerebral blood flow, cerebrovascular responsiveness (CVR) and cardiometabolic markers (blood pressure, diabetes markers and fasting lipids) were assessed. Compared to placebo, resveratrol improved overall cognitive performance (P < 0.001) and attenuated the decline in CVR to cognitive stimuli (P = The latter effect was associated with reduction of fasting blood glucose (r = P = This long-term study confirms that regular consumption of resveratrol can enhance cognitive and cerebrovascular functions in postmenopausal women, with the potential to slow cognitive decline due to ageing and menopause. View Full-Text.

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Researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) are working to create a protective coating that would include a new nanomaterial to catch #COVID19 and kill it within seconds.

ORLANDO, Fla., April 10, 2020 — The masks that health care workers wear to protect them from the virus that causes COVID-19 block the virus before it reaches their faces, but do not destroy it. To further protect doctors, nurses, and others on the front lines of the pandemic, researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) are working to create a protective coating that would include a new nanomaterial to catch the virus and kill it within seconds.

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If you’ve been interested in nanotech, but have been too afraid to ask, here is an introductory and interesting article that I’d like to recommend.

My interest in nanotech is based on my hope that nanotech can lead to methods of constructing substrates that are suitable for mind uploading. It may lead to a technique to create duplicate minds.

“These ‘biological engineering’ technologies have made real one of the dreams of the nanotechnology pioneers: the deployment of molecular assemblers able to construct any shape with atomic precision, following a rational design.”

“…hybrid bioinorganic devices that mimic biological processes will soon be used in new computers and electronic devices.”

In the mid-1980s, evidence started to emerge from labs across the world confirming that scientists were finally able to reach the nano level in experimental conditions and not just with their theories. Working at scales defined in millionths of a millimetre, Richard Smalley, Robert Curl and Harold Kroto reported the discovery of ‘buckminsterfullerene’ – a nanosized polyhedron, with 32 faces fused into a cage-like, soccer-ball structure, and with carbon atoms sitting in each of its 60 vertices.

These miniature ‘Bucky’ balls (named for their similarity to the geodesic dome structures made by the architect R Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s), are found in tiny quantities in soot, in interstellar space and in the atmospheres of carbon-rich red giant stars, but Kroto was able to recreate them in chemical reactions in the lab while visiting Rice University in Texas. Then, in 1991, Nadrian Seeman’s lab at New York University used 10 artificial strands of DNA to create the first human-made nanostructure, connecting up the DNA strands to resemble the edges of a cube, so marking the beginning of the field now known as ‘DNA nanotechnology’. Clever scientists with broad visions started to realise that a new kind of technology, prophesied by Richard Feynman in the 1950s, was finally materialising, as researchers achieved the capacity to visualise, fabricate and manipulate matter at the nanometre scale.

Continue reading “The future is nano, and it will revolutionise medical science Essays” | >

Ongoing clinical trial to test the effectiveness of vitamin C infusion to help fight against Covid-19:

2019 new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infected pneumonia, namely severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) has caused global concern and emergency. There is a lack of effective targeted antiviral drugs, and symptomatic supportive treatment is still the current main treatment for SARI.

Vitamin C is significant to human body and plays a role in reducing inflammatory response and preventing common cold. In addtion, a few studies have shown that vitamin C deficiency is related to the increased risk and severity of influenza infections.

We hypothize that Vitamin C infusion can help improve the prognosis of patients with SARI. Therefore, it is necessary to study the clinical efficacy and safety of vitamin C for the clinical management of SARI through randomized controlled trials during the current epidemic of SARI.

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