Thanks to a new clinical drug trial, Amanda Thomas’s brain tumor is shrinking.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,296
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Inspired by British billionaire Jim Mellon, chairman of anti-aging upstart biotech venture Juvenescence, Sergey Young unveiled a $100 million fund on Monday to catalyze the development of a comprehensive solution to counteract the damaging consequences of aging.
“I’ve never looked like my age…and with my name, I think it was predetermined that I was going to work in the space (of aging),” Young told Endpoints News. The 47-year-old considers himself a product of Peter Diamandis — the man behind the non-profit XPRIZE and venture capital fund BOLD Capital Partners — and is in charge of all things longevity at both organizations.
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Longevity Investor Network member Sebastian Aguiar discusses the rejuvenation biotechnology industry and bridging the gap between research and development.
Sebastian Aguiar is a Venture Fellow at Apollo Ventures, an aging-focused venture capital fund and company builder that invests across Europe and the United States. He can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianaguiar/ and https://twitter.com/sebastian_gero.
What initially attracted you to aging as a general discipline?
Aging is already a solved problem… for cells. The germ line is immortal. Cancer cells are immortal as well. In fact, cellular immortality has been a solved problem for 3.5 billion years, since the dawn of life on Earth. It’s just that the soma – all the cells other than the reproductive cells – are disposable.
A baby unlike any other is about to celebrate her first birthday.
The reason she’s so unique: she was born from a uterus transplanted into her mother from a deceased donor.
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A New Kind of Doctor’s Office
Posted in biotech/medical, genetics, privacy
Hey New York, meet Forward. A new kind of doctor’s office with unlimited visits & no copays. Ever. Forward has two locations in NoMad & Midtown featuring unlimited access to world-class doctors, biometric body scans, genetic testing and so much more. Learn why The New Yorker called us “the doctor’s office of the future” → https://bit.ly/2sVXtfa
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Despite unbelievable advances in medical science in recent decades, breast cancer kills. Approximately 1 in 8 American women will develop breast cancer cells during the course of their lifetime.
Finding a cure is imperative, and as such, fervent research continues. At the European Breast Cancer Conference in Amsterdam, scientists presented a pair of drugs with an astounding claim: this treatment can eradicate some types of breast cancer in only 11 days, eliminating the need for chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy, whilst an amazing feat of medical-scientific engineering, is known for its uncomfortable and sometimes debilitating side effects. Women undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer treatment may lose their hair, suffer extreme fatigue, and even loss of cognitive function.
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Neural networks have been used to turn words that a human has heard into intelligible, recognizable speech. It could be a step toward technology that can one day decode people’s thoughts.
A challenge: Thanks to fMRI scanning, we’ve known for decades that when people speak, or hear others, it activates specific parts of their brain. However, it’s proved hugely challenging to translate thoughts into words. A team from Columbia University has developed a system that combines deep learning with a speech synthesizer to do just that.
The study: The team temporarily placed electrodes in the brains of five people scheduled to have brain surgery for epilepsy. (People who have this procedure often have implants fitted to learn more about their seizures.) The volunteers were asked to listen to recordings of sentences, and their brain activity was used to train deep-learning-based speech recognition software. Then they listened to 40 numbers being spoken. The AI tried to decode what they had heard on the basis of their brain activity—and then spoke the results out loud in a robotic voice. What the voice synthesizer produced was understandable as the right word 75% of the time, according to volunteers who listened to it. The results were published in Scientific Reports today (and you can listen to the recordings here.)
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