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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2174

Researchers have invented a new type of cancer immunotherapy by injecting tumours with a series of stimulants. The experimental therapy attracts the body’s own immune system’s attention, so it can come and destroy the cancerous masses.

The radical new approach has already shown promise in patients with an advanced form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that resists conventional treatments, and is currently being tested on a variety of stubborn cancers.

The result can be described as turning the tumours into “cancer vaccine factories”, because attracting the body’s immune cells to the cancer site is a method known as in situ vaccination.

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Allison Duettmann challenges Aubrey De Grey with the top objections against longevity to be debunked and debated before opening up the floor to the public.

Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D.

SENS chief science officer and co-founder.

Dr. de Grey is the biomedical gerontologist who researched the idea for and founded SENS Research Foundation. He received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. Dr. de Grey is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.

Continue reading “Longevity Myth Busting — Aubrey de Grey” | >

Check out the science of biohacking, where biologists go into a patient’s genetic code and reprogram their immune system to recognize and fight cancer cells.

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The human body is made up of about 30 trillion cells that carry a code which has been duplicated over and over for billions of years — with varying degrees of accuracy. So what happens when the system breaks down and the machinery turns on itself, leading to cancer? Greg Foot dives into the science of how biologists are biohacking the human body to try to fix the seemingly unfixable.

Lesson by Greg Foot, directed by Pierangelo Pirak.

Continue reading “How to biohack your cells to fight cancer — Greg Foot” | >

A better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the action of antidepressants is urgently needed. Moda-Sava et al. explored a possible mode of action for the drug ketamine, which has recently been shown to help patients recover from depression (see the Perspective by Beyeler). Ketamine rescued behavior in mice that was associated with depression-like phenotypes by selectively reversing stress-induced spine loss and restoring coordinated multicellular ensemble activity in prefrontal microcircuits. The initial induction of ketamine’s antidepressant effect on mouse behavior occurred independently of effects on spine formation. Instead, synaptogenesis in the prefrontal region played a critical role in nourishing these effects over time. Interventions aimed at enhancing the survival of restored synapses may thus be useful for sustaining the behavioral effects of fast-acting antidepressants.

Science, this issue p. eaat8078; see also p. 129.

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The periodic table of chemical elements turns 150 this year. The anniversary is a chance to shine a light on particular elements – some of which seem ubiquitous but which ordinary people beyond the world of chemistry probably don’t know much about.

One of these is , which was the subject of my postgraduate degrees in chemistry, and which I have been studying for almost 30 years. In chemistry, gold can be considered a late starter when compared to most other metals. It was always considered to be chemically “inert” – but in recent decades it has flourished and a variety of interesting applications have emerged.

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A new technique for the decontamination of organs before transplantation using ultraviolet and red light irradiation has been developed by Brazilian and Canadian researchers and is described in an article titled “Inactivating hepatitis C virus in donor lungs using light therapies during normothermic ex vivo lung perfusion,” published in the journal Nature Communications. The research was partially conducted at the Optics and Photonics Research Center (CEPOF), hosted by the University of S\xE3o Paulo (USP) at S\xE3o Carlos in S\xE3o Paulo State (Brazil).

“This biophotonic technique is revolutionary, as it helps avoid the transmission of diseases during ,” said Vanderlei Bagnato, full professor at the University of S\xE3o Paulo, director of its S\xE3o Carlos Physics Institute (IFSC-USP), and principal investigator for CEPOF.

Bagnato’s group partnered with researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada, which has the world’s largest lung transplantation program, having performed 197 such surgeries in 2018 alone. According to thoracic surgeon Marcelo Cypel, who heads the service, the number of transplants could be higher if organs could be decontaminated, especially when the prospective donor has a such as hepatitis C.

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Scientists say our brains will connect to computers within decades to form an ‘internet of thoughts’ that will provide instant access to information…

Forward-leaning scientists and researchers say advancements in society’s computers and biotechnology will go straight to our heads — literally.

In a new paper published in the Frontiers in Neuroscience, researchers embarked on an international collaboration that predicts groundbreaking developments in the world of ‘Human Brain/Cloud Interface’s’ within the next few decades.

Continue reading “Experts say our brains and computers will form ‘internet of thoughts’” | >

Imagine a future technology that would provide instant access to the world’s knowledge and artificial intelligence, simply by thinking about a specific topic or question. Communications, education, work, and the world as we know it would be transformed.

Writing in Frontiers in Neuroscience, an international collaboration led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, AI, and computation will lead this century to the development of a “Human Brain/Cloud Interface” (B/CI), that connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time.

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