Lifeboat Foundation

• In the future, going to the doctor’s office might start to feel different, with you or your insurer paying a monthly fee for routine access to your doctor without paying a copay.
• It’s the model for Iora Health, a startup that works with “sponsors” — mainly employers or private health plans for the elderly (known as Medicare Advantage) — that cover the monthly fee. Iora also built out care teams of nurses and other health professionals that can help the doctors within the practice.
• We spoke with Iora’s CEO Rushika Fernandopulle about how he built a company that’s raised more than $250 million with plans to grow to 50 practices around the US by the end of 2019.
• Fernandopulle is one of Business Insider’s 10 people transforming healthcare.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

Fifteen years ago, Rushika Fernandopulle had a radical idea.

A primary care doctor by training, he had been treating patients in the standard, insurance-backed way. But he started to realize that wasn’t working, and insurance wasn’t covering what he wanted to do for patients.

O.o.

Biophysicists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have used a new variant of super-resolution microscopy to visualize all the strands of a DNA-based nanostructure for the first time. The method promises to optimize the design of such structures for specific applications.

The term ‘DNA origami’ refers to a method for the design and self-assembly of complex molecular structures with nanometer precision. The technique exploits the base-pairing interactions between single-stranded DNA molecules of known sequence to generate intricate three-dimensional nanostructures with predefined shapes in arbitrarily large numbers. The method has great potential for a wide range of applications in basic biological and biophysical research. Thus researchers are already using DNA origami to develop functional nanomachines. In this context, the ability to characterize the quality of the assembly process is vital. Now a team led by Ralf Jungmann, Professor of Experimental Physics at LMU Munich and Head of the Molecular Imaging and Bionanotechnology lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry (Martinsried), reports an important advance in this regard.

Continue reading “Lighting up DNA-based nanostructures” »

If it enters the brain, one species of gum-disease-causing bacteria might trigger chemical changes linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

A drug that’s used to help control blood sugar in people with diabetes has now been shown to help prevent or slow kidney disease, which causes millions of deaths each year and requires hundreds of thousands of people to use dialysis to stay alive.

Doctors say it’s hard to overstate the importance of this study, and what it means for curbing this problem, which is growing because of the obesity epidemic.

The study tested Janssen Pharmaceuticals’ drug Invokana. Results were discussed Sunday at a medical meeting in Australia and published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Continue reading “Study finds diabetes drug may prevent, slow kidney disease” »

Scientists in the Yakutsk region of Siberia have managed to extract samples of liquid blood from a 42,000-year-old foal that was found embedded in permafrost back in 2018. The scientists are hoping to collect viable cells for the purpose of cloning the extinct species of horse.

The male foal was discovered in the Batagaika depression on August 11, 2018. Permafrost left the remains in remarkably good shape, raising hopes that its cells could be extracted. The specimen is thought to belong to an extinct species of horse known as Lenskaya breed (also known as the Lena horse), as the Siberian Times reported last year.

Q&A with neuroethicist Francis Shen and MRI developer Michael Garwood.

CRISPR Research Moves Out Of Labs And Into Clinics Around The World : Shots — Health News This could be a crucial year for the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR as researchers start testing it in patients to treat diseases such as cancer, blindness and sickle cell disease.

Understandably, the FDA raised concerns about the practice of parabiosis because to date, there is a marked lack of clinical data to support the treatment’s effectiveness.

Elevian

On the other end of the reputability spectrum is a startup called Elevian, spun out of Harvard University. Elevian is approaching longevity with a careful, scientifically validated strategy. (Full Disclosure: I am both an advisor to and investor in Elevian.)

Continue reading “Extending Human Longevity With Regenerative Medicine” »

A number of companies are studying and commercializing rapamycin and rapalogs, including resTORbio, a Boston-based company. Tam Hunt got in touch with Dr. Joan Mannick from the company to find out more about this promising anti-aging therapeutic.

Blagoskonny ([3], [4]) has suggested that rapamycin and rapalogs are effective anti-aging therapies today for humans as well as other animals because they arrest “quasi-programmed hypertrophy.” What are your thoughts on Blagoskonny’s theory?

I think Blagoskonny’s theory is very interesting. mTOR stimulates cell growth, and there is data that mTOR becomes hyperactive in some aging tissues. This may explain why TORC1 inhibitors have benefit in aging-related diseases.

Continue reading “An Interview with Dr. Joan Mannick of resTORbio” »