Many of them must wait for years to get a kidney transplant and live normally, with seemingly no other solution on the horizon. However, there’s finally a light in the dark tunnel – scientists from the University of California at San Francisco, USA, have developed the world’s first bionic kidney which can replace damaged kidneys easily and effectively.
In July last year, the American Red Cross declared an emergency blood shortage — it simply wasn’t receiving enough donations to help all the patients that needed blood.
A team of researchers at the University of British Columbia has found two types of enzymes that together, can transform type A blood to type O blood in the human gut biome. In their paper published in the journal Nature Microbiology, the group describes their metagenomic study of bacteria in human feces and what they found.
There are four blood types: A, B, AB and O. These types are not compatible for blood transfusions, except for type O, which can be transfused into recipient, making it highly valued. The difference between the blood types is due to sugar molecules known as blood antigens that reside on the surfaces of red blood cells. Those with A-type antigens have A-type blood, those with B-type antigens have B-type blood and those with both antigens have AB-type blood. Type O is different because it does not have any antigens on its surface. An immune response is initiated if blood is found with the wrong type of antigen—since type O red blood cells have none, no immune response is initiated.
Prior research by the team at UBC showed that certain enzymes could be used to convert A, B, or AB to O by removing the antigens. In this new effort, the researchers found that two enzymes working together convert type A blood to O, and that they exist in the human gut biome.
In March, a team of Chinese scientists published a study detailing how they made monkeys smarter by splicing a human gene into their DNA.
The news was met by a wave of backlash. But now, one of the scientists behind the study is defending the team’s work — and pledging to push forward on the controversial research.
Posted in biotech/medical, life extension
Aging is one of the world’s greatest health problems. And subsequently, is the cause of most fatal diseases. Age-related processes are inevitable and cause a range of diseases. It is much more efficient and effective to tackle the aging itself rather than each disease it causes.
At the end of every chromosome are telomere caps which degrade as we age. This causes a number of issues. For example:
The human body secretes an enzyme that might increase our lifespan if properly developed.
We are drawing close now to the Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference in New York City, so with less than a month before the big day, today is the ideal time to have a look at what has been happening.
Tickets are priced at only $500 and include access to two action-packed days of aging research and biotech business discussion. There will be talks covering the latest research progress along with talks involving the business and investment side of the industry, and this conference will feature a total of 34 leading experts in the field of rejuvenation biotechnology.
Refreshments and lunch are provided on site for your enjoyment during both days of the conference, and a conference program is available here.
An artificial nose developed at Tampere University, Finland, helps neurosurgeons to identify cancerous tissue during surgery and enables the more precise excision of tumours.
Electrosurgical resection using devices such as an electric knife or diathermy blade is currently a widely used technique in neurosurgery. When tissue is burned, tissue molecules are dispersed in the form of surgical smoke. In the method developed by researchers at Tampere University, the surgical smoke is fed into a new type of measuring system that can identify malignant tissue and distinguish it from healthy tissue.
An article on using surgical smoke to identify brain tumours was recently published in the Journal of Neurosurgery. “In current clinical practice, frozen section analysis is the gold standard for intraoperative tumour identification. In that method, a small sample of the tumour is given to a pathologist during surgery,” says researcher Ilkka Haapala from Tampere University.
This post originally appeared at Fight Aging!
Sizable factions within the research and advocacy communities are very interested in having aging officially classified as a disease, meaning its inclusion in the International Classification of Diseases maintained by the World Health Organization, as that is the basis for the definition of disease used by national regulatory bodies. The view is that this would open the door to greater large-scale institutional funding, more relevant clinical trials for therapies targeting the mechanisms of aging, and that this greater level of funding and activity will percolate back down the chain of research and development to accelerate progress. I think this a reasonable argument to make, though I would advocate for greater effort to be placed on finding a way to bypass the system rather than change it directly – the threat of competition tends to be more effective than petitions as a way to force change.
Lobbyists have made more progress towards classifying aging as a disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) has implemented the extension code “Ageing-related” (XT9T) in the latest version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The previous version, the ICD-10, was released in 1983 and is now replaced by the new version, the ICD-11, which is expected to serve the medical community for many years, much as its predecessor has.
