Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2331

February 4th, 2019 sees the launch of the Longevity Leaders Conference in St Paul’s, London, which promises to be an interesting event on the conference calendar.

The conference aims to cover both the science of aging research and the business side of the industry, in a similar manner to our own annual conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases, which we host in New York. Mixing the worlds of science and business is a good idea as we move ever closer to the first true rejuvenation technologies arriving.

It is essential to begin forging bonds between the researchers who are making the science a reality and the investors and angels who have the knowledge and expertise to take the science to market.

Read more

An elusive medical advance might finally be within grasp, one that could make some couples’ sex lives a lot more convenient. This week, researchers officially kicked off the first wide-scale clinical trial of a male contraceptive topical gel.

The trial, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), is set to enroll 420 relatively healthy and young couples. The couples will be recruited from nine different study sites in seven countries scattered across the globe, including Chile, England, and Sweden. But the first batch of volunteers will come from sites in the U.S. in Seattle, California, and Kansas.

Read more

Medical physicist Dr. Aswin Hoffmann and his team from the Institute of Radiooncology—OncoRay at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have combined magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with a proton beam, thus demonstrating for the first time that in principle, this commonly used imaging method can work with particle beam cancer treatments. This opens up new opportunities for targeted, healthy tissue-sparing cancer therapy. The researchers have published their results in the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology.

Read more

The introduction of the gene editing tool CRISPR in 2007 was a revolution in medical science and cell biology. But even though the potential is great, the launch of CRISPR has been followed by debate about ethical issues and the technology’s degree of accuracy and side effects.

However, in a new study published in Cell, from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research have described how Cas12a, one of the CRISPR technologies, works at the molecular level. This makes it possible to fine-tune the gene-editing process to achieve specific desired effects.

“If we compare CRISPR to a car engine, what we have done is make a complete 3D map of the engine and thus gained an understanding of how it works. This knowledge will enable us to fine-tune the CRISPR engine and make it work in various ways—as a Formula 1 racer as well as an off-road truck,” says Professor Guillermo Montoya from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research.

Read more

A couple of days ago, news about the first designer babies has shaken the world. A Chinese researcher, Jiankui He, and his team at the Southern University of Science and Technology of China have been recruiting couples in order to create the world’s first babies with artificially increased resilience to HIV. The embryos were modified using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool before being implanted in their mother.

According to the research lead, the twins were born healthy a few weeks ago, and genetic testing performed after they were born confirmed that the editing had actually taken place. While the academic community discusses whether it is acceptable or not to modify human genes, taking into account that the changes made will be inherited by these babies’ offspring and are now added to mankind’s genetic pool, I want to share my own views on designer babies.

Read more