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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2241

Researchers have achieved a new kind of chimeric first, producing sheep-human hybrid embryos that could one day represent the future of organ donation – by using body parts grown inside unnatural, engineered animals. Scientists have created the first interspecies sheep-human chimera, introducing human stem cells into sheep embryos, resulting in a hybrid creature that’s more than 99 percent sheep – but also a tiny, little bit like you and me.

Admittedly, the human portion of the embryos created in the experiment – before they were destroyed after 28 days – is exceedingly small, but the fact it exists at all is what generates considerable controversy in this field of research.

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An artificial intelligence solution (AI) can accurately identify precancerous changes that could require medical attention in images from a woman’s cervix. Researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Global Good developed the computer algorithm, which is called automated visual evaluation.

Researchers created the algorithm by using more than 60,000 cervical images from a National Cancer Institute (NCI) archive of photos collected during a cervical cancer screening study that was carried out in Costa Rica in the 1990s.

More than 9,400 women participated in that population study, with follow up that lasted up to 18 years. Because of the prospective nature of the study, the researchers said that they gained nearly complete information on which cervical changes became pre-cancers and which did not.

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Prof Pugh is using motion-tracking sensors to test how trainee surgeons use the instruments, for example in a simulated hernia repair. Their performance is measured, videoed and compared with best practice at each stage, so they can understand where they need to improve.

“Like Olympic athletes, they can practise repeatedly until they understand the routine and where they need to improve. That is the goal in training surgeons.” The next step is to use sensors in real operations.

Being able to measure pressure will help create better surgical robots, says Richard Trimlett, a cardiothoracic surgeon and head of mechanical support at the Royal Brompton and Harefield Trust, London.

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Parts of human DNA are of viral origin: many of them were inserted into the primordial genetic material of our ancestors many millions of years ago and have been inherited by successive generations ever since. Thus, they are not thought to vary much in the genomes of modern humans. Human endogenous retroviruses (HERV) are by far the most common virus-derived sequences in our genome. New research published in Mobile DNA shows a mechanism that has introduced more inter-individual variation in HERV content between humans than previously appreciated.

Jainy Thomas & Cédric Feschotte 25 Jan 2019.

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We have launched a new webinar series featuring discussion panels with the researchers + Q&A session for patrons. The first episode hosted by Dr. Oliver Medvedik will feature Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, Michael Rae, and Dr. Amutha Boominathan from the SENS Research Foundation.

If you are a Lifespan Hero you can join us live for the show and get access to the recording for a few months before the public release.

Our work is largely supported by the generosity of our monthly patrons, the Lifespan Heroes, and this year, we will be showing our appreciation for that support with the launch of a brand new initiative – our new webinar series where you can meet the scientists working on the solutions to aging and age-related diseases.

Introducing a new webinar series for Lifespan Heroes

Continue reading “Announcing a New Webinar Series – MitoSENS” | >

From the article:

In recent years, a growing number of scientific studies have backed an alarming hypothesis: Alzheimer’s disease isn’t just a disease, it’s an infection.

While the exact mechanisms of this infection are something researchers are still trying to isolate, a litany of papers argue the deadly spread of Alzheimer’s goes way beyond what we used to think.

Now, scientists are saying they’ve got one of the most definitive leads yet for a bacterial culprit behind Alzheimer’s, and it comes from a somewhat unexpected quarter: gum disease.

Continue reading “The Cause of Alzheimer’s Could Be Coming From Inside Your Mouth, Study Claims” | >

Trying to streamline an operation that spends more than $5 billion a year on developing new drugs, Novartis dispatched teams to jetmaker Boeing Co. and Swissgrid AG, a power company, to observe how they use technology-laden crisis centers to prevent failures and blackouts. That led to the design of something that looks like the pharma version of NASA’s Mission Control: a global surveillance hub where supercomputers map and chart Novartis’s network of 500 drug studies in 70 countries, trying to predict potential problems on a minute-by-minute basis.

A third of development costs comes from clinical trials. Novartis wants to make them cheaper and faster.

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Buried deep within the DNA of Asian individuals is a genetic clue pointing to the existence of an unknown human ancestor. Remarkably, it wasn’t a human who reached this startling conjecture, but rather an artificially intelligent algorithm. Welcome to archaeology in the 21st century.

New research published last week in Nature Communications suggests a yet-to-be discovered hominid interbred with modern humans tens of thousands of years ago. This mystery species eventually went extinct, but an AI developed by researchers from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) and several other European institutions found traces of its existence in the DNA of present-day people with Asian ancestry. A press release issued by the Centre for Genomic Regulation said it’s the first time deep learning has been used to explain human history, “paving the way for this technology to be applied in other questions in biology, genomics and evolution.”

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