Lifeboat Foundation

Stanford researchers accidentally discovered that iron nanoparticles invented for anemia treatment have another use: triggering the immune system’s ability to destroy tumor cells. Iron nanoparticles can activate the immune system to attack cancer cells, according to a study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The nanoparticles, which are commercially available as the injectable iron supplement ferumoxytol, are approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat iron deficiency anemia.

The mouse study found that ferumoxytol prompts immune cells called tumor-associated macrophages to destroy cancer cells, suggesting that the nanoparticles could complement existing cancer treatments. The discovery, described in a paper published online Sept. 26 in Nature Nanotechnology, was made by accident while testing whether the nanoparticles could serve as Trojan horses by sneaking chemotherapy into tumors in mice.

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An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth.

This huge leap forward towards creating a universal quantum computer is published today (1 February 2017) in the influential journal Science Advances. It has long been known that such a computer would revolutionise industry, science and commerce on a similar scale as the invention of ordinary computers. But this new work features the actual industrial blueprint to construct such a large-scale machine, more powerful in solving certain problems than any computer ever constructed before.

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This is the future.

As we age the brain loses its flexibility, this in turn affects our ability to learn, to remember things and adapt to new situations. The classic theme is of an older person who is stuck in a rut and unable to change how they think.

This is also a common concern people raise when any discussion of healthy longer lives are mentioned. The concern is that we would have a world of people living more decades and becoming so set in their ways that society would stagnate.

However, many proponents of rejuvenation biotechnology refute this and suggest that mental plasticity could be rejuvenated just the same as cells and tissues could be. The new study we will discuss today offers us a hint of what might be possible, although the focus here is specifically on the visual cortex[1].

Aging. We all face it. Nobody’s immune and we’ve long tried to reverse it, stop it or just even slow it down. While advances have been made, true age-reversal at a cellular level remains difficult to achieve. By taking a different approach, however, researchers at Houston Methodist made a surprising discovery leading to the development of technology with the ability to rejuvenate human cells. And that couldn’t be more important for the small population of children who are aging too quickly — children with progeria.

John P. Cooke, M.D., Ph.D., department chair of cardiovascular sciences at Houston Methodist Research Institute, and his colleagues, describe their findings in a Research Letter titled “Telomerase mRNA Reverses Senescence in Progeria Cells,” appearing online July 31 and in print Aug. 8 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, a leading medical journal in the field of cardiovascular disease.

Cooke studied cells from children with progeria, a rare condition marked by rapid aging that usually robs them of the chance to live beyond their early teens. They focused on progeria, because the condition tells them a lot about aging in general that’s ultimately relevant to all of us.

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It’s one thing to be wowed by Amazon’s Alexa and her ability to turn off Katy Perry, or turn on the lights. But what if the voice-activated artificial intelligence could help control a robotic device designed to help people walk?

That’s the hope of Bionik Laboratories, which announced Tuesday that it has integrated Alexa into its ARKE lower body exoskeleton. The product is in clinical development, and the future goal is for individuals who have suffered a spinal cord injury or are otherwise severely impaired in their lower body to gain mobility such as standing and walking.

Cellular senescence is widely considered by academia to be one of the causes of aging and one that leads to a number of age-related diseases. There has been a high level of interest in recent years in cellular senescence and approaches that seek to remove senescent cells as a route to delaying or even preventing age-related diseases.

Today we have a new study where researchers focus on pulmonary fibrosis and the role of cellular senescence.

Dr. Oliver Medvedik, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, and Dr. Alexandra Stolzing discuss.