Lifeboat Foundation

The economic toll of this superbug crisis is huge: In the United States alone the health-care costs dealing with antimicrobial resistance could reach $65 billion by 2050, according to the OECD report. That is more than the flu, HIV and tuberculosis. If projections are correct, resistance to backup antibiotics will be 70 percent higher in 2030 compared to 2005 in OECD countries. In the same period, resistance to third-line treatments will double across EU countries.

A new report released Wednesday from the OECD estimates that antimicrobial resistant infection is on track to kill 30,000 Americans per year by 2050. The OECD is calling on the US and other rich countries to implement 5 simple reforms to save lives.

Purdue University researchers have developed a new flexible and translucent base for silicon nanoneedle patches to deliver exact doses of biomolecules directly into cells and expand observational opportunities.

“This means that eight or nine silicon nanoneedles can be injected into a single cell without significantly damaging a cell. So we can use these nanoneedles to deliver biomolecules into cells or even tissues with minimal invasiveness,” said Chi Hwan Lee, an assistant professor in Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and School of Mechanical Engineering.

A surgeon performs surgery on the back of a hand of a patient who has melanoma. Purdue researchers are developing a new flexible and translucent base for silicon patches to deliver exact doses of biomolecules directly into cells and expand observational opportunities. The researchers say skin cancer could be one of the applications for the patches.

Continue reading “New flexible, transparent, wearable biopatch, improves cellular observation, drug delivery” »

Researchers at Umeå university in Sweden have published a new study showing that the gut bacteria can carry information of past experiences of an altered environment from parents to offspring. Eggs and sperm are not the only information carriers from one generation to the next.

Eggs and sperm transmit genetic information from one generation to the next. The genetic information contains the blueprint for how to assemble a functional offspring. Most of this information is hardcoded in DNA and cannot be altered by experiences such as changes to the environment.

However, in the last decades, it has been shown that some effects of various lifestyles can be transmitted from parents to offspring through both the egg and the sperm. This study shows for the first time that also the gut bacteria, which are in general also transmitted from parents to offspring, are capable of transmitting information about what environment the parents were exposed to, to the offspring.

You read that correctly. Brain-controlled TVs.

The technology is aimed for people with physical disabilities and should go into testing in Swiss hospitals early next year.

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• Shara Tibken

The pace of work has been accelerating, thanks in part to recent advances in microfluidic technologies, which allow scientists to coordinate the movements of minuscule cellular components. Research groups have already determined ways of sculpting cell-like blobs into desired shapes; of creating rudimentary versions of cellular metabolism; and of transplanting hand-crafted genomes into living cells. But bringing all these elements together remains a challenge.

Built from the bottom up, synthetic cells and other creations are starting to come together and could soon test the boundaries of life.

The human body has always been an incredible machine, from the grand feats of strength and athleticism it can accomplish down to the fine details of each vein, nerve, and cell. But the way we think about the body has changed over time, as has our level of understanding of it.

In Nina Tandon’s view, there have been two different phases of knowledge here. “For so much of human history, medicine was about letting the body come to rest, because there was an assumed proportionality attributed to the body,” she said.

Then, around the turn of the last century, we started developing interchangeable parts (whether from donors, or made of plastic or metal), and thinking of our bodies a bit more like machines. “We’re each made out of 206 bones held together by 360 joints,” Tandon said. “But many of us are more than that. By the time we go through this lifetime, 70 percent of us will be living with parts of our body that we weren’t born with.”

Continue reading “Custom-Grown Bones, and Other Wild Advances in Regenerative Medicine” »

It simply twists its way through the dense tissue.

Credit: Hashem Al-Ghaili.

The International Society on Aging and Disease (ISOAD) recently held its third international conference in Nice, France, bringing together researchers – and longevity activists – from around the world. Journalist and supporter of anti-aging research Oliver Rowland attended the event and has made this great report packed with information gathered from interviews and talks at the event.

Professor Eric Gilson

After working in Lyon, Prof. Gilson founded the Ircan Institute for Research on Cancer and Aging in Nice in 2012. “It was perhaps the first institute that specifically aimed to couple the themes of aging and cancer in the same laboratory, even if the links between them had been known to some extent,” he said. “That was its originality.”