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Archive for the ‘biotech/medical’ category: Page 1924

Nov 12, 2019

How Much Can We Delay Aging? A Gene Therapy Trial Is About to Find Out

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

The combination treatment reversed diabetes and obesity while improving heart and kidney function—even when those organs had already begun failing.

Nov 12, 2019

How Gene Therapy can Help You Stop Aging, Build Muscles, and Fight Diseases

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, education, genetics, life extension

On this episode of Anti-Aging Hacks show, we get into the following topics:

1. What is Gene Therapy and how Practical is it?

Continue reading “How Gene Therapy can Help You Stop Aging, Build Muscles, and Fight Diseases” »

Nov 12, 2019

The gut may be the ticket to reducing chemo’s side effects

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

In a new study, scientists observed several simultaneous reactions in mice given a common chemotherapy drug: Their gut bacteria and tissue changed, their blood and brains showed signs of inflammation, and their behaviors suggested they were fatigued and cognitively impaired.

The research is the first to show these combined events in the context of chemotherapy, and opens the door to the possibility that regulating could not only calm chemo side effects like nausea and diarrhea, but also potentially lessen the memory and concentration problems many cancer survivors report.

More research is needed to further understand how the chemo-modified gut influences the in a way that can have an impact on behavior. The same lab at The Ohio State University is continuing mouse studies to test the relationship and running a parallel clinical trial in .

Nov 12, 2019

Engineer Finds Way to Pull Diseases From Blood Using Magnets

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology

A British engineer has found a way to filter unwanted cells from blood using magnets — and his tool could be used in clinical trials as soon as next year.

Thanks to existing research, biochemical scientist George Frodsham knew it was possible to force magnetic nanoparticles to bind to specific cells in the body. But while other researchers did so primarily to make those cells show up in images, he wondered whether the same technique might allow doctors to remove unwanted cells from the blood.

“When someone has a tumour you cut it out,” he told The Telegraph. “Blood cancer is a tumour in the blood, so why not just take it out in the same way?”

Nov 12, 2019

Gene-editing Gets Major Funding

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

The program, called Somatic Cell Genome Editing, will be investing $190 million. (2018)


Last year, I wrote about a team of Chinese scientists having received ethical approval to perform a clinical trial of gene-editing. The goal was to test whether gene-editing may be a potential cure for cancer. The technology used for the trial is called CRISPR/Cas9, not exactly a household name. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Cas9 stands for CRISPR associated protein 9, an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme. If you read all these words a few times, it can make your head hurt. The topic is complex, but I hope in this post to make it more understandable.

Continue reading “Gene-editing Gets Major Funding” »

Nov 12, 2019

Immortality Debate: Can Science Cheat Death?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, neuroscience, science

Death means an end, but one recent research challenges the idea and fuels the possibility of reviving the brain. And it has plunged the scientific community into an ethical debate.

Physical movements, thoughts, and actions are traits that define how we know the difference between what’s alive and what’s lifeless i.e. death. But beyond that, we hardly understand what death means. We’ve known that death is an eventuality and irreversible. But recent research done back in April 2019 changed all that. Consequently, science is making us rethink the definition of death and the sheer fact that it is permanent.

Continue reading “Immortality Debate: Can Science Cheat Death?” »

Nov 12, 2019

Carol’s 30 years of back pain gone after stem cell therapy — Stemcures

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Carol has been suffering from back pain for 30 years.

Her MRI revealed disc degeneration, facet arthritis and nerve involvement.

Continue reading “Carol’s 30 years of back pain gone after stem cell therapy — Stemcures” »

Nov 12, 2019

Human Safety Trial of NMN Concludes

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A human trial of NMN has recently concluded, and the results are not impressive at all; however, this is perfectly fine because that was not the purpose of the study, and, despite the lackluster results, the study was a success!

This might sound strange, but perhaps the words of the study authors may make it a bit clearer why this is absolutely no cause for alarm.

We, therefore, conducted a clinical trial to investigate the safety of single NMN administration in 10 healthy men.

Nov 12, 2019

Breakthrough as scientists create a new cowpox-style virus that can kill EVERY type of cancer

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering

Scientists have created a new cowpox-style virus in a bid to cure cancer.

The treatment, called CF33, can kill every type of cancer in a petrie dish and has shrunk tumours in mice, The Daily Telegraph reported.

US cancer expert Professor Yuman Fong is engineering the treatment, which is being developed by Australia biotech company Imugene.

Nov 12, 2019

Specific neurons that map memories now identified in the human brain

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, neuroscience, virtual reality

An important aspect of human memory is our ability to conjure specific moments from the vast array of experiences that have occurred in any given setting. For example, if asked to recommend a tourist itinerary for a city you have visited many times, your brain somehow enables you to selectively recall and distinguish specific memories from your different trips to provide an answer.

Studies have shown that —the kind of you can consciously recall like your home address or your mother’s name—relies on healthy medial temporal lobe structures in the , including the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex (EC). These regions are also important for spatial cognition, demonstrated by the Nobel-Prize-winning discovery of “place cells” and “grid cells” in these regions— that activate to represent specific locations in the environment during navigation (akin to a GPS). However, it has not been clear if or how this “spatial map” in the brain relates to a person’s memory of events at those locations, and how in these regions enables us to target a particular memory for retrieval among related experiences.

A team led by neuroengineers at Columbia Engineering has found the first evidence that in the human brain target specific memories during recall. They studied recordings in neurosurgical patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains and examined how the patients’ brain signals corresponded to their behavior while performing a virtual-reality (VR) object-location memory task. The researchers identified “memory-trace cells” whose activity was spatially tuned to the location where subjects remembered encountering specific objects. The study is published today in Nature Neuroscience.