ENIGMA consortium’s probe of many brain disorders finds common structural changes in diverse kinds of epilepsy.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,232
UMBC’s Hua Lu, professor of biological sciences, and colleagues have found new genetic links between a plant’s circadian rhythm (essentially, an internal clock) and its ability to fend off diseases and pests. The findings were 10 years in the making and published in Nature Communications this week. The results could eventually lead to plants that are more resistant to disease-causing pathogens and better treatment for human diseases.
“It’s quite cool,” Lu says, “because, in both plants and animals, people are beginning to study the crosstalk between the circadian clock and the immunity system.”
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Artificial wombs.
LIFE.com republishes part of a 1965 LIFE magazine series that grappled with some of the era’s most exciting and troubling advances in science and medicine.
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Caner is man made
Posted in biotech/medical
This technology is being pushed as “New”. This was already perfected in 1965 if not before.
A recent article in Nature Communications announces the development of a kind of artificial womb (or extracorporeal gestational system). So far it has been used to further the development of premature lambs. Technology website Gizmodo breaks down the technical journal article in more understandable terms.
The research team, led by Alan Flake from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has shown that it’s possible to support extremely premature lambs in an external artificial womb, and to recreate the conditions required for normal gestational development. The lambs were able to grow inside a fluid-filled device, which sustained them for a record-breaking four weeks. Subsequent tests on the lambs indicated normal development of their brain, lungs, and organs. It may take another decade before this technology can be used on premature human infants, but it’s an important step in that direction.
Lambs were selected for the experiment because their lung development is in many ways similar to human lung development and thus important comparisons can be made.
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AI, Immunology, and Healthcare — Professor Shai Shen-Orr PhD., Associate Professor at Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, and Founder and Chief Scientist CytoReason — ideaXme — Ira Pastor
Posted in aging, big data, bioengineering, biotech/medical, business, disruptive technology, DNA, genetics, health, life extension
Telegenomics provider Genome Medical has raised $23 million to help scale up its “last-mile” patient counseling services for healthcare systems and individuals across the U.S.
The company also plans to expand its team of clinical genomics specialists as well as continue the development of its delivery platform. The series B round brings Genome Medical’s fundraising total up to $46 million since its 2016 founding.
The latest financing was led by Echo Health Ventures, a collaboration between Cambia Health Solutions and Mosaic Health Solutions. Other new backers included LRVHealth, Casdin Capital, Perceptive Advisors, Manatt Venture Fund and Dreamers Fund.
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Each year, 1 million men in the U.S. undergo biopsies to determine whether they have prostate cancer. The biopsy procedure traditionally has been guided by ultrasound imaging, but this method cannot clearly display the location of tumors in the prostate gland.
A multidisciplinary team of UCLA physicians has found that a new method, which includes biopsy guided by magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, can be used together with the traditional method to increase the rate of prostate cancer detection.
Ultrasound has been used to visualize the prostate in order to take a representative sampling of tissue to biopsy. The introduction of MRI has allowed doctors to see specific lesions in the prostate and only take tissue samples from those spots. But the two sampling methods often aren’t used in combination.
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Isaac Asimov referred to a 70-old man as an old individual who is unlikely to live much longer. Yet, given the present pace of discovery in the ageing field, the pace of ageing could be slowed within our lifetime, with science surpassing science fiction.
Thus, genetic studies have now firmly established that aging is regulated by specific genes conserved from yeast to mice [23,30–34].
Independently of discoveries of AP genes in model organisms, research in cellular senescence yielded complementary results. Cellular senescence is now widely recognized as an essential tumor suppressor mechanisms, and is not a decline due to cellular degeneration. In contrast, the senescence response is an active process caused by activation of both DNA-damage responses (DDR) and mitogen-activated pathways. Senescent fibroblasts acquire phenotypes that include hyper-secretion of inflammatory cytokines and other tissue-altering molecules and hypertrophic morphologies [35–42]. Senescent cells can alter the behavior of neighboring cells [35], and may drive aging and age-related diseases [43]. Cellular senescence can be prevented by knocking out cell cycle inhibitors such as p53, pRb, p21 and p16 [44–48].
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