Lifeboat Foundation

Welcome back to Virtual Reality James! In this exciting video, we delve into the groundbreaking topic of Japan’s Anti-Aging Vaccine and explore the future of longevity. Join us as we uncover the latest scientific advancements and reveal how this revolutionary vaccine could potentially transform the way we age.

Discover the secrets behind this cutting-edge technology that aims to slow down the aging process and enhance our quality of life. We’ll explore the science behind the vaccine, its potential benefits, and the implications it may have on society as a whole.

Continue reading “Japan’s Anti-Aging Vaccine: The Future of Longevity Revealed” »

Through Broad’s Scientists in the Classroom program, Broad researchers visit every 8th grade classroom in Cambridge each year to talk about genetics and evolution.

Every summer, 18 high school students spend six weeks at Broad working side-by-side with mentors on cutting-edge research.

In November 2022, Broad’s Genomics Platform sequenced its 500,000th whole human genome, a mere four years after sequencing its 100,000th.

When US biochemist Jennifer Doudna discovered the key for editing DNA, she opened scientific frontiers full of promise – and peril.

The field of aging research has made significant progress over the last three decades, reaching a stage where we now understand the underlying mechanisms of the aging process. Moreover, the knowledge has broadened to include techniques that quantify aging, decelerate its process, as well as sometimes reverse aging.

To date, twelve hallmarks of aging have been identified; these include reduced mitochondrial function, loss of stem cells, increased cellular senescence, telomere shortening, and impaired protein and energy homeostasis. Biomarkers of aging help to understand age-related changes, track the physiological aging process and predict age-related diseases [1].

Longevity. Technology: Biological information is stored in two main ways, the genomes consisting of nucleic acids, and the epigenome, consisting of chemical modifications to the DNA as well as histone proteins. However, biological information can be lost over time as well as disrupted due to cell damage. How can this loss be overcome? In the 1940s, American mathematician and communications engineer Claude Shannon came up with a neat solution to prevent the loss of information in communications, introducing an ‘observer’ that would help to ensure that the original information survives and is transmitted [2]. Can these ideas be applied to aging?

New breakthrough research shows that a simple blood test can flag symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease up to 15 years in advance.

Surgically removing tumors from sensitive areas, such as the head and neck, poses significant challenges. The goal during surgery is to take out the cancerous tissue while saving as much healthy tissue as possible. This balance is crucial because leaving behind too much cancerous tissue can lead to the cancer’s return or spread. Doing a resection that has precise margins—specifically, a 5mm margin of healthy tissue—is essential but difficult. This margin, roughly the size of a pencil eraser, ensures that all cancerous cells are removed while minimizing damage. Tumors often have clear horizontal edges but unclear vertical boundaries, making depth assessment challenging despite careful pre-surgical planning. Surgeons can mark the horizontal borders but have limited ability to determine the appropriate depth for removal due to the inability to see beyond the surface. Additionally, surgeons face obstacles like fatigue and visual limitations, which can affect their performance. Now, a new robotic system has been designed to perform tumor removal from the tongue with precision levels that could match or surpass those of human surgeons.

The Autonomous System for Tumor Resection (ASTR) designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, MD, USA) translates human guidance into robotic precision. This system builds upon the technology from their Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), which previously conducted the first fully autonomous laparoscopic surgery to connect the two intestinal ends. ASTR, an advanced dual-arm, vision-guided robotic system, is specifically designed for tissue removal in contrast to STAR’s focus on tissue connection. In tests using pig tongue tissue, the team demonstrated ASTR’s ability to accurately remove a tumor and the required 5mm of surrounding healthy tissue. After focusing on tongue tumors due to their accessibility and relevance to experimental surgery, the team now plans to extend ASTR’s application to internal organs like the kidney, which are more challenging to access.

Researchers at UCL and UCLH have successfully completed the first trial of a therapy designed to restore hearing loss. The REGAIN trial, the results of which were published in Nature Communications, was the first study of a treatment aimed at restoring lost hearing, focusing on a drug with the technical name gamma-secretase inhibitor LY3056480.

The researchers found that while the therapy did not restore hearing across the group of adults with mild to moderate hearing loss, a deeper analysis of the data showed changes in various hearing tests in some patients, suggesting the drug has some activity in the inner ear.

These so-called efficacy signals call for further development of LY3056480—using the learnings from this trial.

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240320/Study-highlights-…idism.aspx Frontiers

In a recent study published in Frontiers in Nutrition, researchers explored the association between the microbial community of the gut and hypothyroidism.

Study: Cross-talk between the gut microbiota and hypothyroidism: a bidirectional two-sample Mendelian randomization study. Image Credit: sdecoret/Shutterstock.com.

Continue reading “Study highlights causal associations between gut microbes and hypothyroidism” »

New research presented early ahead of this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2024, Barcelona, 27–30 April) from a team of researchers in the Netherlands shows how the latest CRISPR-Cas gene editing technology can be used to eliminate all traces of the HIV virus from infected cells in the laboratory, raising hopes of a cure.