Lifeboat Foundation

Today, thanks to remarkable advances in antiretroviral drugs, most people with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can expect to live an almost normal lifespan. But that means staying on medications for life. If those are stopped, HIV comes roaring back in just weeks. Finding a permanent cure for HIV infection, where the virus is completely and permanently eliminated from the body, has proven much tougher. So, I’m encouraged by recent work that shows it may be possible to eliminate HIV in a mouse model, and perhaps—with continued progress—someday we will actually cure HIV in humans.

This innovative approach relies on a one-two punch: drugs and genetic editing. First, HIV-infected mice received an experimental, long-acting form of antiretroviral therapy (ART) that suppresses viral replication. This step cleared the active HIV infection. But more was needed because HIV can “hide” by inserting its DNA into its host’s chromosomes—lying dormant until conditions are right for viral replication. To get at this infectious reservoir, researchers infused the mice with a gene-editing system designed to snip out any HIV DNA still lurking in the genomes of their spleen, bone marrow, lymph nodes, and other cells. The result? Researchers detected no signs of HIV in more than one-third of mice that received the combination treatment.

The new study in Nature Communications is the product of a collaboration between the NIH-funded labs of Howard Gendelman, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, and Kamel Khalili, Temple University, Philadelphia [1]. A virologist by training, Khalili years ago realized that HIV’s ability to integrate into the genomes of its host’s cells meant that the disease couldn’t be thought of only as a typical viral infection. It had a genetic component too, suggesting that an HIV cure might require a genetic answer.

How about some life extension optimism to start your day?

People 50 and older have a lot to look forward to, according to Juvenescence’s Greg Bailey—mainly that we won’t be aging as fast or poorly as our parents. “Science fiction has become science,” said the UK-based anti-aging biotech’s CEO about the company’s completing its $100 million Series B round of financing last week. “I think the world is going to be shocked,” he said in an interview. In total, Juvenescence has now raised $165 million in just 18 months to fund longevity projects with the lofty goal of extending human lifespans to 150 years.

A little bit of norovirus—the highly infectious microbe that causes about 20 million cases of food poisoning in the United States each year—goes a long way. Just 10 particles of the virus can cause illness in humans. A team of University of Arizona researchers has created a simple, portable and inexpensive method for detecting extremely low levels of norovirus.

Jeong-Yeol Yoon, a researcher in the Department of Biomedical Engineering; Soo Chung, a biosystems engineering doctoral student who works in Yoon’s Biosensors Lab; and Kelly A. Reynolds, Chair of the Department of Community, Environment and Policy in the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, led the project. The team published their results in ACS Omega, the official journal of the American Chemical Society, and Yoon is presenting the research at the ACS Fall 2019 National Meeting & Exposition in San Diego this week.

Continue reading “Using a smartphone to detect norovirus” »

Unaffected areas of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge opened on Saturday, August 17.

Numerous sites with plague-infected fleas affecting local prairie dog colonies will remain closed through Labor Day Weekend so that authorities can continue to treat the prairie dogs’ holes with insecticide to kill any remaining fleas that could transmit the disease to prairie dogs, people, and pets.

The Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge will reopen to visitors on Saturday, August 17, including the refuge’s Visitor Center, Wildlife Drive, and recreational fishing access. Some trails and parking lots will remain closed through Labor Day weekend due to ongoing monitoring and plague management efforts. These areas are clearly marked and will reopen to visitors in early September. For up-to-date information about visitor access and activities, please visit www.fws.gov/refuge/rocky_mountain_arsenal.

A simple ten-minute universal cancer test that can be detected by the human eye or an electronic device — published in Nature Communications (Dec 2018) by the Trau lab at the University of Queensland. Red indicates the presence of cancerous cells and blue doesn’t.

Sometimes the line between science and science fiction is blurry, and it can be interesting to look at sci-fi stories through the lens of real science. Previous blog posts have explored whether genome engineering could be used to create the X-Men and Hawkeye, and we now turn to investigate whether Ant-Man’s powers could be engineered using CRISPR.

The character Ant-Man is remarkable, but can a real-life Ant-Man be possible? Perhaps the most obvious roadblock is, well, the laws of physics. In the first movie, Ant-Man gets his ant-like powers thanks to fictitious “Pym particles,” which reduce the distance between atoms while increasing density and strength.

There is also the problem of scaling in biological systems. If kept in proportion, our bodily systems simply wouldn’t work well shrunken down. Read discussions about the physics and scaling of Ant-Man here and here.

Homicide kills far more people than armed conflict, says new UNODC study

VIENNA/NEW YORK, 8 July (UN Information Service) – Some 464,000 people across the world were killed in homicides in 2017, surpassing by far the 89,000 killed in armed conflicts in the same period, according to the Global Study on Homicide 2019 published today by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

“The Global Study on Homicide seeks to shed light on gender-related killings, lethal gang violence and other challenges, to support prevention and interventions to bring down homicide rates,” said UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov. “Countries have committed to targets under the Sustainable Development Goals to reduce all forms of violence and related death rates by 2030. This report offers important examples of effective community-based interventions that have helped to bring about improvements in areas afflicted by violence, gangs and organized crime.”

Cellular senescence, a permanent state of replicative arrest in otherwise proliferating cells, is a hallmark of ageing and has been linked to ageing-related diseases like cancer. Senescent cells have been shown to accumulate in tissues of aged organisms which in turn can lead to chronic inflammation. Many genes have been associated with cell senescence, yet a comprehensive understanding of cell senescence pathways is still lacking. To this end, we created CellAge (http://genomics.senescence.info/cells), a manually curated database of 279 human genes associated with cellular senescence, and performed various integrative and functional analyses. We observed that genes promoting cell senescence tend to be overexpressed with age in human tissues and are also significantly overrepresented in anti-longevity and tumour-suppressor gene databases. By contrast, genes inhibiting cell senescence overlapped with pro-longevity genes and oncogenes. Furthermore, an evolutionary analysis revealed a strong conservation of senescence-associated genes in mammals, but not in invertebrates. Using the CellAge genes as seed nodes, we also built protein-protein interaction and co-expression networks. Clusters in the networks were enriched for cell cycle and immunological processes. Network topological parameters also revealed novel potential senescence-associated regulators. We then used siRNAs and observed that of 26 candidates tested, 19 induced markers of senescence. Overall, our work provides a new resource for researchers to study cell senescence and our systems biology analyses provide new insights and novel genes regarding cell senescence.

• http://genomics.senescence.info/cells/

Not only has Su Metcalfe’s treatment succeeded in early trials, it involves zero drugs and no side effects—and it could begin human trials as soon as 2020.