Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2039

He lay in a hospital bed at the University of Arkansas, stricken with a rare disease. His blood platelet count was so low that even a slight bump to his body could trigger a lethal brain bleed. A doctor told him to write his living will on a piece of paper.

Fajgenbaum was rushed to a CT scan. Tears streamed down his face and fell on his hospital gown. He thought about the first patient who’d died under his care in medical school, and how her brain had bled in a similar way from a stroke.

He didn’t believe he’d live out the scan.

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It was a pleasure speaking to Dr. Ronald Kohanski at the 2019 Ending Age-Related Diseases conference. Dr. Kohanski joined the field of aging research in 2005 as a Program Officer for the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging. He moved on to become its Deputy Director in 2007 and has held the position ever since. Within aging research, he has focused his efforts on the areas of stem cell and cardiovascular biology.

Besides his work at the NIA, Ronald Kohanski is a co-founder and co-leader of the trans-NIH Geroscience Interest Group (GSIG) with which he has organized several summits to discuss and disseminate the group’s focus. The GSIG directs its attention toward aging as the major risk factor for most chronic age-related diseases, and Dr. Kohanski actively encourages researchers to expand studies beyond laboratory animals. He underwrites the importance of addressing the basic biology of aging explicitly in human and non-laboratory animal populations. He believes that age should be considered a fundamental parameter in research that uses animal models of chronic disease.

Dr. Kohanski was trained in the field of biochemistry. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1981, after which he conducted a postdoctoral fellowship with M. Daniel Lane at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He held a faculty position at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine for 17 years before returning to Johns Hopkins as a faculty member and researcher in the areas of enzymology and developmental biology of the insulin receptor.

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Dr. Qingsong Zhu, the COO of Insilico Medicine, discussed the use of deep learning in creating biomarkers for aging. Initially discussing existing clocks and the problems with animal translation, he went on to discuss what sorts of markers are ideal for age-related research and the details of training and testing a model that works with these markers, showing that a deep model compares favorably to other models.

He also used his model to show that smoking does, in fact, cause accelerated aging.

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Bio printing footage provided by College of Engineering, and heart valve footage provided by Regenerative Biomaterials Group, Carnegie Mellon University.
https://regenerativebiomaterials.com/

Lulzbot invited us out to showcase the BIO, their OPEN SOURCE 3D printer capable of 3D bioprinting. Materials like unmodified collagen and fetal stem cells! It’s open source, and launches at a price of $7500 USD.

http://www.lulzbot.com/bioprinting

#3dprinting #3dbioprinting #lulzbotbio

Continue reading “3D Printing Organs is CLOSER thanks to Lulzbot BIO” | >

MS is thought to affect 100,000 people in the UK, with 14 patients being diagnosed every day, MS Society statistics show.

And in the US, nearly one million are living with the condition, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

The disorder, which strikes twice as many women as men, damages nerves in the body, causing mobility loss, sight problems, fatigue and pain.

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By and Targeting Metabesity to examine the links between metabesity, Longevity and the USA’s current health shortfalls, including low health-adjusted life expectancy (“HALE”) and the large gap between HALE and life expectancy, despite its extremely high per-capita healthcare expenditures, and to chart policy recommendations to neutralize this vast health vs wealth deficit.

€œMetabesity and Longevity: USA Special Case Study € is an 85-page open-access analytical report produced jointly by Aging Analytics Agency and Targeting Metabesity to examine the links between metabesity, Longevity and the USA €™s current health shortfalls, including low health-adjusted life expectancy ( €œHALE €) and the large gap between HALE and life expectancy, despite its extremely high per-capita healthcare expenditures, and to chart policy recommendations to neutralize this vast health vs wealth deficit.

Link to Special Case Study: https://aginganalytics.com/longevity-usa/

As the issue of aging population intensifies, sick care will become increasingly expensive and ineffective. America needs to rapidly deploy a government-led shift from treatment to prevention, and from prevention to precision health, using deep diagnostics and prognostics in combination with biomarkers of aging, metabesity, health and intervention-effectiveness, to delay the onset of disease with as minimal intervention as possible, as early as possible. Seeking synergies between Longevity research, P4 (preventive, personalized, precision and participatory) medicine and Artificial Intelligence has the potential to enable rapid and widespread policy and infrastructural reforms for USA healthcare to quickly boost National Healthy Longevity, but only with sufficient government commitment.

Continue reading ““Metabesity and Longevity: USA Special Case Study” is an 85-page open-access analytical report produced jointly” | >

Each year, heart attacks kill almost 10 million people around the world, and more than 6 million die from stroke. A heart attack is caused by clots that block arterial blood flow. Tissues are deprived from blood-borne oxygen. Under these conditions, the affected tissues undergo a rapid necrosis. But why? Scientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, the University of Lyon and the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (Inserm), France, have discovered that the synthesis of a lipid called deoxydihydroceramide provokes necrosis. This lipid accumulates in the absence of oxygen and blocks cellular functions. By inhibiting its synthesis in a mouse suffering a heart attack, the biologists were able to reduce the tissue damage by 30 percent. These results, published in Nature Metabolism, suggest a new model of treatment for victims of heart attack or stroke.

“But what causes necrosis under these conditions?” asked Howard Riezman, professor in the Department of Biochemistry of the Faculty of Science at UNIGE and Director of the NCCR Chemical Biology. Not all animals are so sensitive to the absence of —worms can live three days without oxygen, some turtles can live several months, and certain bacteria indefinitely.

“That is why we sought to find the link between the lack of oxygen and necrosis in mammals,” said the scientist.

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