Lifeboat Foundation

Libella Gene Therapeutics, LLC (“Libella”) announces a clinical trial in Colombia (South America) using telomere-lengthening gene therapy to reverse aging and possibly cure age-related diseases. Libella has chosen bioaccess™ as its CRO for this trial.

UCLA scientists have discovered a link between a protein and the ability of human blood stem cells to self-renew. In a study published today in the journal Nature, the team reports that activating the protein causes blood stem cells to self-renew at least twelvefold in laboratory conditions.

Multiplying blood stem cells in conditions outside the human body could greatly improve treatment options for blood cancers like leukemia and for many inherited blood diseases.

Dr. Hanna Mikkola, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and senior author of the study, has studied blood stem cells for more than 20 years.

The technique promises to eliminate cutting, scarring, pain, and recovery time.

A team of University of Tokyo researchers said Thursday it will begin a clinical study later this month on a vaccine for the Ebola virus, a first in Japan, with the vaccine developed using an artificially produced detoxified virus.

The new vaccine developed by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a professor at the university’s Institute of Medical Science, and others is believed to have fewer side effects compared to those produced abroad, according to the institute.

The researchers said they aim to develop the Ebola vaccine to prevent further outbreaks of the deadly hemorrhagic fever in Africa.

A much broader array of stakeholders must engage with the problems that DNA databases present. In particular, governments, policymakers and legislators should tighten regulation and reduce the likelihood of corporations aiding potential human-rights abuses by selling DNA-profiling technology to bad actors — knowingly or negligently. Researchers working on biometric identification technologies should consider more deeply how their inventions could be used. And editors, reviewers and publishers must do more to ensure that published research on biometric identification has been done in an ethical way.

Corporations selling DNA-profiling technology are aiding human-rights abuses. Governments, legislators, researchers, reviewers and publishers must act.

Drugs that tamp down inflammation in the brain could slow or even reverse the cognitive decline that comes with age.

In a publication appearing today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, University of California, Berkeley, and Ben-Gurion University scientists report that senile mice given one such drug had fewer signs of brain inflammation and were better able to learn new tasks, becoming almost as adept as mice half their age.

“We tend to think about the aged brain in the same way we think about neurodegeneration: Age involves loss of function and dead cells. But our new data tell a different story about why the aged brain is not functioning well: It is because of this “fog” of inflammatory load,” said Daniela Kaufer, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and a senior author, along with Alon Friedman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Dalhousie University in Canada. “But when you remove that inflammatory fog, within days the aged brain acts like a young brain. It is a really, really optimistic finding, in terms of the capacity for plasticity that exists in the brain. We can reverse brain aging.”

The gut has long been suspected to play a role in autoimmune disease. A research team has now identified evidence of a potential mechanism.

A new University of Barcelona study reveals the first empirical genetic evidence of human self-domestication, a hypothesis that humans have evolved to be friendlier and more cooperative by selecting their companions depending on their behaviour. Researchers identified a genetic network involved in the unique evolutionary trajectory of the modern human face and prosociality, which is absent in the Neanderthal genome. The experiment is based on Williams Syndrome cells, a rare disease.

The study, published in Science Advances, results from the collaboration between a UB team led by Cedric Boeckx, ICREA professor from the Section of General Linguistics at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics, and member of the Institute of Complex Systems of the UB (UBICS), and researchers from the team led by Giuseppe Testa, lecturer at the University of Milan and the European Institute of Oncology.

Bacterial biofilms that develop around golden staph infections make treatment difficult and prolonged, but researchers have shown in laboratory work that the hybrid antibiotics they have developed can destroy staph biofilms.

Eradicating deadly staph using a new breed of antibiotics has revealed promising results in research released by QUT, to help overcome one of the biggest modern medical challenges.

The bacteria attach to medical devices including catheters, artificial joints, implants and patients’ burns and wounds, establishing bacterial biofilms, a leading cause of failing antibiotic therapies and chronic infections.