A clinical trial is launching in the UK to test a new Breath Biopsy technology with the goal of finding molecular biomarkers in breath samples that can be used to diagnose a variety of different cancers.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2261
Drive an hour north of Google’s headquarters up to Oyster Point, south San Francisco, and you will find the office of Calico Labs. The steel and glass building has none of the showmanship of its sister company, with its colourful, attention-grabbing Googleplex campus.
Its name is an acronym for “California Life Company” but its lifeless exterior makes it easy to imagine it being named after another Calico – an abandoned mining town further down the Pacific Coast. The company, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is now five years old, but its operations remain highly secretive.
University of Arizona biomedical engineering professor Philipp Gutruf is first author on the paper Fully implantable, optoelectronic systems for battery-free, multimodal operation in neuroscience research, published in Nature Electronics.
Optogenetics is a biological technique that uses light to turn specific neuron groups in the brain on or off. For example, researchers might use optogenetic stimulation to restore movement in case of paralysis or, in the future, to turn off the areas of the brain or spine that cause pain, eliminating the need for—and the increasing dependence on—opioids and other painkillers.
“We’re making these tools to understand how different parts of the brain work,” Gutruf said. “The advantage with optogenetics is that you have cell specificity: You can target specific groups of neurons and investigate their function and relation in the context of the whole brain.”
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Dear friends of healthy longevity, yet another year has gone by. Hold back the melancholy though, because in this day and age a passing year can be looked at as a year fewer to wait before rejuvenation biotechnologies are available, rather than a year taken from your healthy lifespan. Busy as we are with all the errands of daily life, it is easy to forget all that’s happened and the progress we’ve made in the field in one year. So while we wait for 2019, let’s take a look back at what 2018 has brought us.
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Scientists at the University of Washington (UW) may have found an unexpected way to tackle persistent indoor air pollution: a common houseplant modified with rabbit DNA.
Researchers wanted to find a way to remove the toxic compounds chloroform and benzene from the home, a UW press release explained. Chloroform enters the air through chlorinated water and benzene comes from gasoline and enters the home through showers, the boiling of hot water and fumes from cars or other vehicles stored in garages attached to the home. Both have been linked to cancer, but not much has been done to try and remove them. Until now.
“People haven’t really been talking about these hazardous organic compounds in homes, and I think that’s because we couldn’t do anything about them,” senior study author and UW civil and environmental engineering department research professor Stuart Strand said in the release. “Now we’ve engineered houseplants to remove these pollutants for us.”
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“Mikhail first approached me nearly 15 years ago with the totally crazy idea that replacing hydrogen with deuterium in bioactive molecules so as to slow down undesirable chemical reactions. Well, if ever there were a proof that some of the craziest ideas are actually right, it is this one. In the years since, Misha and his company Retrotope have taken this concept from chemistry to yeast to mice and all the way to highly promising clinical results for several hitherto untreatable orphan diseases. I’m looking forward to hearing the latest!” says Aubrey de Grey.
https://www.undoing-aging.org/news/dr-mikhail-s-shchepinov-t…aging-2019
#undoingaging #sens #foreverhealthy
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The U.K.’s Telegraph reports that the new treatment, devised by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London, uses implanted immune system cells from strangers to fight tumors, instead of old-school cancer treatments like chemotherapy — a new tack in oncology that the researchers say could boost cancer ten-year cancer survival rates from 50 percent to 75 percent.
Immune System
The scientists behind the project explained it as a “do-it-yourself” approach to cancer treatment in interviews with the Telegraph. Instead of relying on chemicals or radiation outside the body to fight tumors, the transplants aim to help the bodies of cancer patients fight the tumors on their own.
An exciting new study, led by a team of Australian researchers, has uncovered how the immune system can keep cancer cells in a dormant state. It’s hoped the breakthrough insight will offer new pathways for research into immunotherapy techniques that can essentially stop a tumor’s growth for an indefinite period of time.
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