Australia has approved the use of CRISPR gene editing tool on plants and animals without the oversight of a governmental body. The controversial move has been called a ‘middle ground’ compared to regulations on other countries.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,229
Follow the life, death, and groundbreaking 3D resurrection of Susan Potter whose body became a high resolution digital cadaver.
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Susan Potter knew in exquisite and grisly detail what was going to happen to her body after death. It seems that for the last 15 years of her life, she lived for Vic Spitzer, the scientist committed to fulfilling her dream of helping medical students become compassionate doctors. For the past 16 years, National Geographic has followed Potter’s life and death and her 3D resurrection to the highest resolution.
Experience the interactive story “Susan Potter Will Live Forever” featured in the special single-topic January 2019 issue of National Geographic: https://on.natgeo.com/2Ekgq1Z
“It was a huge surprise, we didn’t expect to find so many melanoma cancer cell markers in blood exosomes,” explains Hubert Girault, who heads up the Laboratory of Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry at EPFL Valais Wallis. Professor Girault and his team made the discovery almost by accident. Their findings, which have been published in the journal Chem, offer insight into how cancer cells communicate with each other and send information around the body.
All biological cells excrete exosomes, microscopic spheres or vesicles that are less than 100 nanometers in size and contain a wealth of information in the form of nucleic acids, proteins and markers. Exosomes perform cell-to-cell signaling, conveying information between cells. Under the supervision of Senior Scientist Dr. Horst Pick, EPFL doctoral assistant Yingdi Zhu used cell culture and mass spectrometry to isolate melanoma cancer cell exosomes. She was able to identify cancer cell markers in exosomes for each stage of melanoma growth.
When analyzing the blood exosomes of melanoma patients, the researchers were surprised to discover large quantities of cancer cell markers. The blood collects and transports all the exosomes that the body generates. While healthy cells usually produce exosomes in small quantities, cancer cells produce many more. But it was previously thought that these would be so diluted in the blood that they would be hard to detect. For Professor Girault, the discovery of large quantities of cancer cell markers in blood exosomes raises numerous questions about signaling between cancer cells, which until now were not thought to communicate over longer distances within the body.
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Statins may hold the answer to slowing the deterioration of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), scientists have said.
In a new trial hailed as “highly promising”, patients who took the daily pill retained their coordination better and suffered less brain shrinkage than those given a placebo.
It raises the prospect that MS sufferers, of whom there are more than 90,000 in the UK, may be prescribed the common cholesterol-busting drug to improve their symptoms.
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Great news for Repair Biotechnologies a new startup company developing solutions to age-related immune system decline and heart disease.
In 2018, Reason and Bill Cherman founded Repair Biotechnologies, which, as its name suggests, is a rejuvenation biotechnology company focused on damage repair approaches to aging. The company has recently completed a seed round of investment funding, with a total of $2.15 million being put into the company’s coffers to bolster research and development. Reason described this seed round as follows:
We are very pleased to have the support of noted investors such as Jim Mellon. They are the people who are presently providing the fuel and publicity for ever faster progress in the longevity biotechnology industry.
We are also very pleased to have the support of important non-profit organizations such as the SENS Research Foundation. Non-profit groups are just as important as the venture community when it comes to accelerating progress in this field: they are the ones who establish the path and point the way for each new class of therapy.
Non-profit groups are the ones who undertake the hard work of coordinating and funding overlooked research programs in order to create the conditions necessary for venture capital to pay attention to rejuvenation biotechnology.
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We’re tantalizingly close to growing organs in the lab, but the biggest remaining challenge has been creating the fine networks of blood vessels required to keep them alive. Now researchers have shown that a common food dye could solve the problem.
In the US there are currently more than 100,000 people on organ transplant waiting lists. Even if you’re lucky enough to receive a replacement, you face a lifetime on immunosuppressant drugs. That’s why scientists have long dreamed of growing new organs from patients’ own cells, which could simultaneously tackle the shortage and the risk of organ rejection.
The field of tissue engineering has seen plenty of progress. Lab-grown skin has been medically available for decades, and more recently stem cells have been used to seed scaffolds—either built form synthetic materials or made by stripping cells from natural support structures—to reproduce more complex biological tissue.
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Michigan State University senior vice president Stephen Hsu, a theoretical physicist and the founder of Genomic Prediction, demonstrates how the machine learning revolution, combined with the dramatic fall in the cost of human genome sequencing, is driving a transformation in our relationship with our genes. Stephen and Azeem Azhar explore how the technology works, what predictions can and cannot yet be made (and why), and the ethical challenges created by this technology.
In this podcast, Azeem and Stephen also discuss:
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