Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,335

There have been a number of efforts to increase genome diversity. In 2010, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wellcome Trust in London launched the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) initiative, which supports Africa-led genome research. And last year, the NIH started enrolment for the All of Us research programme, which plans to collect DNA and health data from hundreds of thousands of people of varying ethnicities in the United States.

Researchers from under-represented groups are making genomics more inclusive by working with communities that have been overlooked or abused.

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Dangerous airborne viruses are rendered harmless on-the-fly when exposed to energetic, charged fragments of air molecules, University of Michigan researchers have shown.

They hope to one day harness this capability to replace a century-old device: the surgical mask.

The U-M engineers have measured the virus-killing speed and effectiveness of nonthermal plasmas—the ionized, or charged, particles that form around electrical discharges such as sparks. A nonthermal plasma reactor was able to inactivate or remove from the airstream 99.9% of a test virus, with the vast majority due to inactivation.

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Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have discovered that gene mutations that once helped humans survive may increase the possibility for diseases, including cancer.

The findings were recently the cover story in the journal Research.

The team of researchers from BGU’s National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev (NIBN) set out to look for mutations in the genome of the , a part of every cell responsible for energy production that is passed exclusively from mothers to their children. The mitochondria are essential to every cell’s survival and our ability to perform the functions of living.

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News-Medical speaks to David Dambman from Biosero about the emerging importance of automation in scientific research and how a centralized scheduling software is an essential first step for any laboratory looking to automate their workflow.

Why has automation become so critical to advancing scientific research?

There are many reasons why automation is useful in scientific research. First and foremost, automation is about being able to walk away from your experiments and spend time analyzing your results, rather than carrying out mundane tasks such as transferring liquids from one plate to another.

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Chemotherapy helps two out of three patients achieve remission. And recently, drug developers designed a new attack, one intended to target the patient’s malfunctioning genes, reclaim their hijacked cells, and halt growth. But this kind of drug development can result in more errors in trials, and can take years to get from lab to patient.

Now, in a paper published in Nature Chemical Biology, Harvard University Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Brian Liau reveals why certain AML drugs only work some of the time. With his new technique, Liau and team expose more intimate details about the drug-body relationship and, in the process, disprove previous assumptions about how AML drugs work.

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  • In the future, going to the doctor’s office might start to feel different, with you or your insurer paying a monthly fee for routine access to your doctor without paying a copay.
  • It’s the model for Iora Health, a startup that works with “sponsors” — mainly employers or private health plans for the elderly (known as Medicare Advantage) — that cover the monthly fee. Iora also built out care teams of nurses and other health professionals that can help the doctors within the practice.
  • We spoke with Iora’s CEO Rushika Fernandopulle about how he built a company that’s raised more than $250 million with plans to grow to 50 practices around the US by the end of 2019.
  • Fernandopulle is one of Business Insider’s 10 people transforming healthcare.
  • Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

Fifteen years ago, Rushika Fernandopulle had a radical idea.

A primary care doctor by training, he had been treating patients in the standard, insurance-backed way. But he started to realize that wasn’t working, and insurance wasn’t covering what he wanted to do for patients.

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