Machines on display at World Robot Conference in China can fly, swim and even do brain surgery…
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2047
‘It was mesmerizing to watch her stop’: Four-year-old girl with a rare disease is captivated by a beauty advertisement featuring a model in a wheelchair — just like her own
It seems that billionaire biotech investor Jim Mellon is the flavor of the month as he continues the drive to create a rejuvenation biotech industry. Jim and his colleagues at Juvenescence have announced that they have secured another $100M for the company, and it will be used to invest and support the growth of promising biotech companies working in this field.
Juvenescence has a varied investment portfolio of companies that range in potential usefulness, depending on your point of view, and they mostly favor the more traditional small molecule drug approach. There are a few companies that are of particular interest.
By his late 20s, Moe had attained the young adult dream. A technology job paid for his studio apartment just blocks from the beach in Santa Barbara, California. Leisure time was crowded with close friends and hobbies, such as playing the guitar. He had even earned his pilot’s license. “There was nothing I could have complained about,” he says.
Yet Moe soon began a slide he couldn’t control. Insomnia struck, along with panic attacks. As the mild depression he’d experienced since childhood deepened, Moe’s life collapsed. He lost his job, abandoned his interests, and withdrew from his friends. “I lost the emotions that made me feel human,” Moe says. (He asked that this story not use his full name.)
Although many people with depression respond well to treatment, Moe wasn’t one of them. Now 37, he has tried antidepressant drugs and cycled through years of therapy. Moe has never attempted suicide, but he falls into a high-risk group: Though most people with depression don’t die by suicide, about 30% of those who don’t respond to multiple antidepressant drugs or therapy make at least one attempt. Moe was desperate for relief and fearful for his future. So when he heard about a clinical trial testing a new approach to treating depression at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, near his home, he signed up.
Neurotoxic anticancer drugs, such as platinum-based anticancer drugs, taxanes, vinca alkaloids, and proteasome/angiogenesis inhibitors are responsible for chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN). The health consequences of CIPN remain worrying as it is associated with several comorbidities and affects a specific population of patients already impacted by cancer, a strong driver for declines in older adults. The purpose of this review is to present a comprehensive overview of the long-term effects of CIPN in cancer patients and survivors. Pathophysiological mechanisms and risk factors are also presented. Neurotoxic mechanisms leading to CIPNs are not yet fully understood but involve neuronopathy and/or axonopathy, mainly associated with DNA damage, oxidative stress, mitochondria toxicity, and ion channel remodeling in the neurons of the peripheral nervous system. Classical symptoms of CIPNs are peripheral neuropathy with a “stocking and glove” distribution characterized by sensory loss, paresthesia, dysesthesia and numbness, sometimes associated with neuropathic pain in the most serious cases. Several risk factors can promote CIPN as a function of the anticancer drug considered, such as cumulative dose, treatment duration, history of neuropathy, combination of therapies and genetic polymorphisms. CIPNs are frequent in cancer patients with an overall incidence of approximately 38% (possibly up to 90% of patients treated with oxaliplatin). Finally, the long-term reversibility of these CIPNs remain questionable, notably in the case of platinum-based anticancer drugs and taxanes, for which CIPN may last several years after the end of anticancer chemotherapies. These long-term effects are associated with comorbidities such as depression, insomnia, falls and decreases of health-related quality of life in cancer patients and survivors. However, it is noteworthy that these long-term effects remain poorly studied, and only limited data are available such as in the case of bortezomib and thalidomide-induced peripheral neuropathy.
Platinum-based anticancer drugs (i.e., cisplatin, oxaliplatin), proteasome/angiogenesis inhibitors (bortezomib/thalidomide), vinca alkaloids (i.e., vincristine, vinorelbine) and taxanes (i.e., paclitaxel, docetaxel) are the most common anticancer drugs used as first-line chemotherapy for several cancers, including colorectal, gastric, breast and lung cancers, and multiple myeloma. Despite their different action mechanisms, all these anticancer drugs share a common adverse and disabling effect for patients, namely CIPN (Balayssac et al., 2011). CIPN has a considerable impact on cancer treatments and their related symptoms severely affect patients’ daily activities and quality of life. Thus CIPN is often the main adverse effect leading to the reduction or discontinuation of chemotherapy.
The evolving gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 is useful for changing one gene, or maybe a few genes at a time. A team at ETH Zurich has tweaked the technology so they can change 25 different gene sites at once. Instead of using the Cas9 enzyme to do the DNA cutting, though, they used Cas12a. That allowed them to create a long “address list” of gene sites to target, they explained in the journal Nature Methods. They created a DNA molecule called a plasmid to store the list, inserted it in human cells and were able to modify several genes, they reported. (Release)
Chemotherapy and radiation suppress blood stem cells, often for several weeks or even months after cancer treatments are complete. This leaves patients vulnerable to infections and other health problems. Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles have created a new drug that targets the protein tyrosine phosphatase-sigma (PTP-sigma), which is prevalent on blood stem cells. They showed that blocking the protein in rodent models with the drug, called DJ009, helped blood cells recover more quickly after they were damaged by radiation. They published their findings in the journal Nature Communications. (Release)
Supplementing psychotherapy with small doses of MDMA could be an effective strategy to prevent relapses of alcohol addiction in patients, an ongoing small clinical trial suggests. The research is yet another example of how scientists and doctors are finding or rediscovering therapeutic uses for recreational and illicit drugs.
MDMA-assisted therapy is actually an old idea, which enjoyed some popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. Though the exact mechanisms are unclear, the synthetic drug’s euphoric effects are thought to amplify the positive patterns of thinking taught by therapy, as well as make people feel less anxious during sessions. Of course, these same mood-boosting attributes made MDMA a popular recreational drug. This popularity led the U.S. government to ban MDMA in 1985, by classifying it as a Schedule 1 drug with no accepted medical use.
People say, well, but we’re going to stop being human if we merge with machines. No, that is what it means to be human.
Dr. Kurtzweil, I would like to ask you. You have made hundreds of predictions out of which many already have come true, and with no doubt many more will come through. But if you would have to single out your three most important predictions for the upcoming decade, what would they be?
Well, one is health and medicine. We talked about our bodies and our bodies are basically actually information because it’s governed by our genes. They are information processes. We didn’t used to treat it that way. It was basically hit or miss. We’d find something. Oh, here’s something that lowers blood pressure. Here’s something that kills HIV. And we would find these things accidentally, so progress was linear. Still valuable. I gave a speech to 12 and 13 year old science winners recently and I said you all would be senior citizens if it hadn’t been for this progress because life expectancy was 19 a thousand years ago. But this is going to go into high gear now. The enabling factor for health and medicine to become an information technology was the genome project. That itself is a perfect exponential and we now have the software of life and we’re also making exponential progress in being able to model it, simulate it, understand it and reprogram it.
In 2006, scientists discovered a way to “reprogram” mature cells—adult skin cells, for example—into stem cells that could, in principle, give rise to any tissue or organ in the body. Many assumed it was only a matter of time until this groundbreaking technique found its way into the clinic and ushered in a regenerative medicine revolution.
Because the same patient would be both the donor and the recipient of cells derived from these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), these cells would be seen as “self” by the immune system, the thinking went, and not subject to the problems of rejection that plague conventional transplants.
But iPSCs haven’t emerged as the cure-all that was originally envisioned, due to unforeseen setbacks, including the surprising preclinical finding that iPSC-derived cell transplants are often rejected, even after being reintroduced into the organism the cells were sourced from.