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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2212

Smart watches. Pacemakers. Internet-connected glasses. These are devices designed to make life easier. And yet, all this wearable technology can be hacked. The devices send personal health information to your smartphone over the airways, so anyone with the know-how could scoop it up and steal it. But now, researchers at Northeastern have a better, more secure idea: Send data through your body.

Associate professor Kaushik Chowdhury worked with a team of researchers from the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil to develop a safe, hacker-proof method to transmit sensitive data.

“The truth is, no matter what I do when it comes to wireless devices, I’m radiating the signal through the air,” Chowdhury says. “There is the danger that the signal can be jammed, or analyzed by someone else. Our method secures this so it can’t be leaked.”

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You can live without food for three weeks and without water for up to three days. But you can’t live without air for more than three short minutes. It’s not just the abundance of air that matters – the quality is essential, too. Unfortunately, air can be contaminated with dangerous germs known as airborne pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses.

Airborne diseases are very easily transmitted, and can result in respiratory illness that can be life threatening. It’s therefore no wonder that outbreaks of airborne infectious diseases are a major public health concern, and that researchers are working hard to come up with technologies to provide clean air. So far, however, such technologies have had limited success.

Now a new study suggests that non-thermal plasma – a cool gas made up of electrically charged particles, despite having no overall charge – could inactivate airborne viruses and provide sterile air. Although the technology has a long history and many applications (in medicine and food industry), this is a completely new use for it.

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Urine testing may be as effective as the smear test at preventing cervical cancer, according to new research by University of Manchester scientists.

The study, led by Dr. Emma Crosbie and published in BMJ Open, found that urine testing was just as good as the at picking up high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV), the virus that causes cervical .

The research team say a urine could help increase the numbers of who are screened for cervical cancer, which affects more than 3,000 women every year in the UK.

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If the virus that causes flu were an ice cream cone, then the yearly vaccine teaches the immune system to recognize just the scoop – chocolate one year, strawberry the next. As the virus changes each year, so too must the vaccine.

A new approach that teaches the body to recognize the cone portion of the – which stays the same year-to-year – could shake up that yearly vaccination ritual and protect people against pandemic flu like the one that killed 40 to 50 million people in 1918. The team working on this new approach, led by Stanford biochemist Peter Kim, has shown early signs that their technique works in . They warn that they still need to make their more specific and show it works in much larger studies before testing it in people.

“We think it could be very generalizable,” said Kim, who is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig professor of biochemistry and the lead investigator of the infectious disease initiative at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. “It could be important for coming up with a universal that would protect against pandemic flu, as well as for HIV.”

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A drug commonly used to treat multiple sclerosis may, after necessary modifications, one day be used to treat patients with epilepsy, researchers in Prof. Inna Slutsky’s lab at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University have discovered.

This is good news for patients with Dravet syndrome, one of the most dangerous forms of childhood epilepsy, for which there is currently no .

According to a new study published on April 29 in Neuron, Tel Aviv University researchers uncovered a piece of a puzzle that has eluded scientists for 100 years of studying homeostasis: What is the mechanism that maintains activity set points in ?

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The recent clinical trial was only conducted on patients with lymphoma, but the researchers suggested their approach could be potentially used to treat other types of cancer — and that it could improve the efficacy of other immunotherapies, including checkpoint blockade.

“The in situ vaccine approach has broad implications for multiple types of cancer,” said Brody, the study’s lead author and the director of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This method could also increase the success of other immunotherapies such as checkpoint blockade.”

Related Articles Around the Web.

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MeiraGTx’s founders were interested in those uses; the biotech’s programs today are in diseases of the eye, salivary gland and brain.

But “we wanted to have a broader perspective on how you could potentially use gene therapy” too, CEO Alexandria Forbes says.

That vision is a high-tech, futuristic one, in which the human body can essentially become a medicine-making factory, enabled by gene therapy. But it’ll require more research, and is still years from fruition.

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“Smart” contact lenses sound like something from a sci fi movie — but they’re real, and they could help troops in the field.

French engineering school IMT Atlantique revealed what it calls “the first stand-alone contact lens with a flexible micro battery” earlier this month.

And, notably, it caught the attention of the U.S. military’s attention: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is reportedly interested in the contact lens to augment troops’ visual capabilities in the field, according to Task and Purpose — meaning the gadget could represent the augmented contact lens that DARPA has spent a decade searching for.

Weird Flex

Continue reading “DARPA: This Smart Contact Lens Could Give Soldiers Superpowers” | >

Jose Cordeiro is promoting the development of rejuvenation biotechnologies in Spain and the integration of Latin American immigrants into Spain’s aging society to maintain the country’s productivity. He was at the recent Undoing aging conference in Berlin and gave us an interview about his political goals.

At Undoing Aging 2019, jointly organized by SENS Research Foundation and Forever Healthy Foundation, there was a session focused on the ways to make healthy life extension and medical progress a greater part of the global agenda. Among the speakers there was Jose Cordeiro, the vice chair of Humanity Plus, director of The Millennium Project, fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, and board member of the Lifeboat Foundation.

Jose earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His thesis was focused on the modeling of the International Space Station. Jose has also studied International Economics and Comparative Politics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and received his MBA in France at INSEAD, where he focused on Finance and Globalization.

Continue reading “An Interview with Jose Cordeiro” | >