Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,902

How Covid Vaccine Tech Could Fight Cancer Soon

The mRNA technology at the heart of two Covid-19 shots has been decades in the making. Now it may soon be used to fight cancer and HIV.

#Prognosis #Vaccine #BloombergQuicktake.

——-
Like this video? Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/Bloomberg?sub_confirmation=1
Become a Quicktake Member for exclusive perks: https://www.youtube.com/bloomberg/join.

QuickTake Originals is Bloomberg’s official premium video channel. We bring you insights and analysis from business, science, and technology experts who are shaping our future. We’re home to Hello World, Giant Leap, Storylines, and the series powering CityLab, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Green, and much more.

Subscribe for business news, but not as you’ve known it: exclusive interviews, fascinating profiles, data-driven analysis, and the latest in tech innovation from around the world.

Visit our partner channel QuickTake News for breaking global news and insight in an instant.

Continue reading “How Covid Vaccine Tech Could Fight Cancer Soon” | >

The short and long view of how AI is changing health

As the electronic health record grows in detail, the possibilities for customized care are becoming a reality. This article features some useful links to things in the making.

Illustrated woman. While AI is driving value in all aspects of our lives, there are times where it’s hard to separate the aspirations of those who want to use it to do good from those leverag ing AI today to positively impact real change in health and medici ne.

I have the privilege of working with many talented leaders and organizations that are truly making health and medical services better by harnessing the power of healthcare’s data tsunami using AI and other analytical solutions.

COVID-19, p art t wo

There is growing optimism in how we manage COVID-19 going forward to restore many of the daily living activities we miss and treasure. One of the good things we learned from COVID-19 is that, when faced with a challenge, health systems are capable of agile transformation. As part of this, we also demonstrated that AI could drive a “short time to value.”

Gene That Could Help Prevent or Delay Onset of Alzheimer’s Disease Identified

Summary: Boosting the expression of the ABCC1 gene may not only reduce amyloid plaques in the brain, it might also delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: TGen.

Findings of a study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, suggest that increasing expression of a gene known as ABCC1 could not only reduce the deposition of a hard plaque in the brain that leads to Alzheimer’s disease, but might also prevent or delay this memory-robbing disease from developing.

DNA robots designed in minutes instead of days

Someday, scientists believe, tiny DNA-based robots and other nanodevices will deliver medicine inside our bodies, detect the presence of deadly pathogens, and help manufacture increasingly smaller electronics.

Researchers took a big step toward that future by developing a new tool that can design much more complex DNA robots and nanodevices than were ever possible before in a fraction of the time.

In a paper published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from The Ohio State University—led by former engineering doctoral student Chao-Min Huang—unveiled new software they call MagicDNA.

Age-related diseases can be linked by genetics

In a research paper published in Nature Aging, the team reports using a novel approach to provide the first data-driven classification of multiple diseases obtained using human genetic and medical data freely available from the UK Biobank.

Co-author Professor Linda Partridge (UCL Institute of Health Aging and Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging) said: Advancing age is the main risk for major diseases, including cancer, dementia, and . Understanding the molecular links between the aging process and age-related diseases could allow them to be targeted with drugs to improve late-life health.

The striking finding from the study was that diseases with a similar age of onset were genetically more similar to each other than they were to diseases in the other three clusters.

CRISPR: Can we control it? | Jennifer Doudna, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, & more | Big Think

CRISPR: Can we control it?
Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo.
Learn skills from the world’s top minds at Big Think Edge: https://bigth.ink/Edge.
———————————————————————————
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a revolutionary technology that gives scientists the ability to alter DNA. On the one hand, this tool could mean the elimination of certain diseases. On the other, there are concerns (both ethical and practical) about its misuse and the yet-unknown consequences of such experimentation.

“The technique could be misused in horrible ways,” says counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke lists biological weapons as one of the potential threats, “Threats for which we don’t have any known antidote.” CRISPR co-inventor, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, echos the concern, recounting a nightmare involving the technology, eugenics, and a meeting with Adolf Hitler.

Should humanity even have access to this type of tool? Do the positives outweigh the potential dangers? How could something like this ever be regulated, and should it be? These questions and more are considered by Doudna, Clarke, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychologist Steven Pinker, and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee.
———————————————————————————
TRANSCRIPT:

0:41 Jennifer Doudna defines CRISPR
3:47 CRISPR’s risks.
4:52 Artificial selection vs. artificial mutation.
6:25 Why Steven Pinker believes humanity will play it safe.
9:20 Lessons from history.
10:58 How CRISPR can help.
11:22 Jennifer Doudna’s chimeric-Hitler dream.

- Our ability to manipulate genes can be very powerful. It has been very powerful.

- This is going to revolutionize human life.

Continue reading “CRISPR: Can we control it? | Jennifer Doudna, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, & more | Big Think” | >

Virtual Humans Are Equal to Real Ones in Helping People Practice New Leadership Skills

Summary: Computer-generated, or virtual humans, prove to be just as good as humans in helping people practice leadership skills.

Source: Frontiers.

A virtual human can be as good as a flesh-and-blood one when it comes to helping people practice new leadership skills. That’s the conclusion from new research published in the journal Frontiers in Virtual Reality that evaluated the effectiveness of computer-generated characters in a training scenario compared to real human role-players in a conventional setting.

The semiconductor shortage is here to stay, but it will affect chip companies differently

This article is part of a series tracking the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on major businesses and sectors. For other articles and earlier versions, go here.

A global shortage of semiconductors — chips that power massive data-centers, modern autos and countless digital devices — has roiled global manufacturing and is not expected to end soon. It isn’t a blanket problem, however, as different sectors within the chip industry will continue to be affected by the shortage in different ways.

As the industry entered 2020, high demand was expected in the mobile chip area because of the rollout of 5G devices. That path was turned on its head when COVID-19 became a global pandemic, driving millions, if not billions, of people into the safety of their homes to work, go to school, be entertained and to socialize.

Scientists are on a path to sequencing 1 million human genomes and use big data to unlock genetic secrets

The more data collected, the better the results.

Understanding the genetics of complex diseases, especially those related to the genetic differences among ethnic groups, is essentially a big data problem. And researchers need more data.

1000, 000 genomes

To address the need for more data, the National Institutes of Health has started a program called All of Us. The project aims to collect genetic information, medical records and health habits from surveys and wearables of more than a million people in the U.S. over the course of 10 years. It also has a goal of gathering more data from underrepresented minority groups to facilitate the study of health disparities. The All of Us project opened to public enrollment in 2018, and more than 270000 people have contributed samples since. The project is continuing to recruit participants from all 50 states. Participating in this effort are many academic laboratories and private companies.

/* */