Lifeboat Foundation

3D printing has revolutionized the fields of healthcare, biomedical engineering, manufacturing and art design.

NEW YORK (AP) — Somewhere in the Midwest, a restaurant is frying foods with oil made from gene-edited soybeans. That’s according to the company making the oil, which says it’s the first commercial use of a gene-edited food in the U.S.

Calyxt said it can’t reveal its first customer for competitive reasons, but CEO Jim Blome said the oil is “in use and being eaten.”

The Minnesota-based company is hoping the announcement will encourage the food industry’s interest in the oil, which it says has no trans fats and a longer shelf life than other soybean oils. Whether demand builds remains to be seen, but the oil’s transition into the food supply signals gene editing’s potential to alter foods without the controversy of conventional GMOs, or genetically modified organisms.

Nature India: All about science in India.

Press Release for Aging Analytics Agency and Vetek Association’s new 500+ page open-access report on the Longevity Industry in Israel, featuring quotes from Nir Barzilai MD, the founding director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Rafi Eitan, former chairman of the Israel Pensioners’ Party “GIL”, founding minister of the Israel Ministry for Senior Citizens, and the current chairman of Vetek Association, Ilia Stambler, the Chief Science Officer of Vetek Association and Eric Kihlstrom, Director of Aging Analytics Agency and former Interim Director of the £98-million Healthy Ageing Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

Link to the Press Release: http://analytics.dkv.global/data/pdf/Longevity-in-Israel/Lon…elease.pdf

Link to the Report: https://www.aginganalytics.com/longevity-in-israel

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Waking up during surgery – it’s terrifying to think about. But it does happen. There is evidence that around 5 per cent of people may experience so-called anaesthesia awareness at some point on the operating table, though not everyone remembers it.

Living through such an event can be traumatic and painful. So what can be done to prevent it?

Anaesthetists have a few tools that can open a channel of communication while a patient is paralysed by neuromuscular blocking drugs.

A new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution led by scientists from the University of Chicago challenges one of the classic assumptions about how new proteins evolve. The research shows that random, noncoding sections of DNA can quickly evolve to produce new proteins. These de novo, or “from scratch,” genes provide a new, unexplored way that proteins evolve and contribute to biodiversity.

“Using a big genome comparison, we show that noncoding sequences can evolve into completely novel proteins. That’s a huge discovery,” said Manyuan Long, PhD, the Edna K. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor of Ecology and Evolution at UChicago and senior author of the new study.

In a first-of-its-kind study from researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, a new kind of non-invasive electrical brain stimulation has been trialed in patients with major depression. The results show this new technique to be extraordinarily promising in reducing depressive symptoms, with larger trials set to explore this novel treatment in greater detail.

Snipr Biome has raised (PDF) $50 million (€43 million, DKK320 million) to take CRISPR-based microbiome drugs into clinical trials. The Danish biotech is using CRISPR/Cas to selectively target and kill bacteria with specific DNA sequences.

Christian Grøndahl, the CEO of Snipr, began working with his co-founders on the use of gene editing to modify or kill bacteria shortly after he left Kymab in 2015. The work led to a series of patents on altering microbiota, for reasons including immune modulation, and a €2.6 million investment from Lundbeckfonden Emerge to support research into potential applications for the technology.

Now, Lundbeckfonden has joined with Dutch VC shop LSP to lead a $50 million series A round. The jump in funding follows a period in which Snipr has begun to validate its technology and refine its R&D strategy.

Continue reading “Snipr raises $50M to use CRISPR to modulate the microbiome” »

For a newborn giraffe or wildebeest, being born can be a perilous introduction to the world—predators lie in wait for an opportunity to make a meal of the herd’s weakest member. This is why many species have evolved ways for their juveniles to find their footing within minutes of birth.

It’s an astonishing evolutionary feat that has long inspired biologists and roboticists—and now a team of USC researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering believe they have become the first to create an AI-controlled robotic limb driven by animal-like tendons that can even be tripped up and then recover within the time of the next footfall, a task for which the robot was never explicitly programmed to do.

Francisco J. Valero-Cuevas, a professor of Biomedical Engineering a professor of Biokinesiology & Physical Therapy at USC in a project with USC Viterbi School of Engineering doctoral student Ali Marjaninejad and two other doctoral students—Dario Urbina-Melendez and Brian Cohn, have developed a bio-inspired algorithm that can learn a new walking task by itself after only 5 minutes of unstructured play, and then adapt to other tasks without any additional programming.

Continue reading “A robotic leg, born without prior knowledge, learns to walk” »