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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1936

2019 was nuts for neuroscience. I said this last year too, but that’s the nature of accelerating technologies: the advances just keep coming.

There’re the theoretical showdowns: a mano a mano battle of where consciousness arises in the brain, wildly creative theories of why our brains are so powerful, and the first complete brain wiring diagram of any species. This year also saw the birth of “hybrid” brain atlases that seek to interrogate brain function from multiple levels—genetic, molecular, and wiring, synthesizing individual maps into multiple comprehensive layers.

Brain organoids also had a wild year. These lab-grown nuggets of brain tissue, not much larger than a lentil, sparked with activity similar to preterm babies, made isolated muscles twitch, and can now be cloned into armies of near-identical “siblings” for experimentation—prompting a new round of debate on whether they’ll ever gain consciousness.

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You heard about reversing the epigenetic clock 2.5 years? Living drugs? CAR T cells? Fight cancer? Here ya go.

Vision Weekend is the annual member gathering of Foresight Institute, a non-profit for advancing beneficial technologies for the long-term flourishing of life.

More info on speakers and program: https://foresight.org/vision-weekend-2019/.

Continue reading “Zinaida Good | Reversing Epigenetic Aging and Immunosenescent Trends in Humans | VISION WEEKEND 2019” | >

Research led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has uncovered a new process that may help explain how Type 2 diabetes develops. In tests on live mice and human cells in the lab, the team found a new mechanism besides insulin resistance and high glucose levels that triggers pancreatic cells to begin overproducing insulin.

Type 2 diabetes is the form of the disease that’s usually a result of lifestyle choices, such as poor diet and not enough exercise. It involves a kind of vicious cycle of insulin – beta cells in the pancreas produce too much insulin, which causes the body to become resistant to it. That in turn means the beta cells could produce even more to compensate.

It was long thought that high glucose levels – most commonly caused by eating too much sugary and fatty foods – was the trigger for the beta cells to begin overproducing insulin. But it’s also been shown in the past that even beta cells isolated in a lab dish can over-secrete insulin, without glucose playing a part.

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Researchers from MIT have revealed the very first images of a human generated through a novel laser ultrasound imaging technique. Unlike conventional ultrasound, the new technique does not require any skin contact with the body, dramatically amplifying the range of uses for doctors in clinical environments.

A conventional ultrasound is one of the cheapest and easiest imaging methods clinicians currently have in their arsenal. Unlike X-ray or CT scans, an ultrasound does not involve harmful radiation, and unlike PET or MRI scans, there is no need for large expensive machines. Of course, ultrasound does have a number of limitations, from the need for significant bodily contact in the process of imaging, to a variability in imaging results.

A new non-contact ultrasound method involving lasers has now been effectively demonstrated by a team of researchers from MIT. The challenge in developing the new method has been figuring out a way to use a laser to produce sound waves. Traditional ultrasound uses sound waves to penetrate a human body and bounce back off different tissues. Light, of course, cannot penetrate a human body as deeply as sound.

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Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

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Novartis is offering a $250,000 prize to fund development of pioneering innovation with great potential in advancing Assistive Tech for Multiple Sclerosis. Applications will be accepted until January 10, 2020, and the winners will be announced during a panel discussion among experts in the field at SXSW in Austin, TX.

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There’s no sugar coating it—diabetes is shaping up to become one of the greatest health challenges in modern times. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in eleven individuals suffers from diabetes, and the condition was the direct cause of 1.6 million deaths in 2016, based on the latest publicly available data. WHO has since designated diabetes as one of four priority noncommunicable diseases (alongside cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases) to be addressed by global health authorities.

Closer to home, more than 400,000 Singaporeans live with the diagnosis of diabetes, says the Ministry of Health. This constitutes ten percent of the local disease burden. Meanwhile, a separate study by the National University of Singapore projected that by 2050, Singapore would be home to one million diabetics if current trends continue. Wary of the insidious consequences of unchecked chronic illness, Singapore’s Health Minister Gan Kim Yong declared a “war on diabetes,” calling for a concerted national effort to prevent disease onset and better manage disease symptoms.

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Last November, CHIPSA Hospital hosted a unique, first-of-its-kind event celebrating the lives of 22 late stage cancer survivors who, according to doctors, shouldn’t even be alive. Surrounded by world-renowned doctors, scientists, and researchers, these patients shared their inspiring stories of how they healed their terminal disease when conventional treatment had failed them.

CHIPSA is not an ordinary hospital. For one, we take patients who are typically told they have no other treatment options left. We then offer those patients innovative immunotherapies that aren’t available anywhere in the United States.

Our collaborative event highlighted the patients who have benefited from those types of therapies, featuring people on all ends of the treatment spectrum: the researchers who developed them, the doctors who administered them, and the patients who received them.

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From insilico meddicine — the beginning of an AI healthcare revolution.

Poly Mamoshina on Machine Learning for small molecule drug discovery and the beginning of an AI healthcare revolution — interviewed at the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin 2019!

Polina Mamoshina is a senior research scientist at Insilico Medicine, Inc (www.insilico.com), a Baltimore-based bioinformatics and deep learning company focused on reinventing drug discovery and biomarker development and a part of the computational biology team of Oxford University Computer Science Department. Polina graduated from the Department of Genetics of the Moscow State University. She was one of the winners of GeneHack a Russian nationwide 48-hour hackathon on bioinformatics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology attended by hundreds of young bioinformaticians. Polina is involved in multiple deep learning projects at the Pharmaceutical Artificial Intelligence division of Insilico Medicine working on the drug discovery engine and developing biochemistry, transcriptome, and cell-free nucleic acid-based biomarkers of aging and disease. She recently co-authored seven academic papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Continue reading “Polina Mamoshina — The Beginning of an AI Healthcare Revolution” | >