Lifeboat Foundation

Europe’s health regulator followed the US and UK in backing the first gene-editing therapy to use Crispr technology, a Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Crispr Therapeutics AG treatment for sickle cell disease.

The European Medicines Agency’s expert panel recommended on Friday authorizing the Vertex and Crispr drug, Casgevy, for people with severe sickle cell disease and another serious hereditary blood disorder, beta-thalassemia, which is traditionally treated with repeated transfusions. Vertex said before the ruling that it had yet to establish a European list price for the one-time therapy, which costs $2.2 million in the US.

The treatment makes precisely targeted changes in patients’ DNA, a months-long process that requires removing bone marrow and a stem cell transplant. In Europe, Vertex said its initial focus will be on countries with the highest numbers of patients, including France, Italy, the UK and Germany.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rtyAv29ID0&si=lGDoxF8ho-fl2Ni

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Dr Robert Sapolsky is a Professor at Stanford University, a world-leading researcher, and an author. Stress is an inevitable part of human life. But what is stress actually doing to the human body when it happens for such a prolonged period of time? And what does science say are the best interventions to defeat it? Expect to learn the crucial difference between short term and long term stress, how stress actually impacts the human system, the neurodevelopmental consequences of stress and poverty, how to detrain your dopamine sensitivity, what everyone doesn’t understand about how hormones work, whether believing in free will is a useful world view, why there is a relationship between belief in free will and obesity and much more…

Targeted drugs aim to pinpoint the exact location in the body where diseased tissue is located and where the medicine is required. The manifold benefits of administering a targeted drug include heightened efficacy, as the drug is meticulously designed for specificity, thereby reducing side effects, and minimizing damage to healthy tissue. Consequently, this approach enhances the patient’s quality of life during treatment.

Oligonucleotides (ONs), specifically designed short chains of DNA or RNA, have emerged as a crucial tool with immense potential in personalized medicine. These therapeutic ONs are already in use for conditions, such as certain types of muscular dystrophy and liver disease, which conventional drugs cannot address.

Depending on the type, ONs can function by, preventing or changing the production of a protein in the cell, particularly beneficial in diseases caused by the overproduction of a specific protein.

“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” — Michio Kaku, PhD.

Since most examples of brain-inspired silicon chips are based on digital electronic principles, their capacity to fully imitate brain function is limited. Self-organizing brain organoids connected to microelectrode arrays (MEAs) can be changed in function to create neural networks. These networks, called organoid neural networks (ONNs), show the capacity for unsupervised learning, which is what artificial intelligence (AI) is based on. These mini-organs, when connected to the right hardware, can even be trained to recognize speech.

This brain-inspired computing hardware, or “Brainoware,” could overcome existing shortcomings in AI technologies, providing natural solutions to challenges regarding time and energy consumption and heat production of current AI hardware. These ONNs may also have the necessary complexity and diversity to mimic a human brain, which could inspire the development of more sophisticated and human-like AI systems.

Bad things can happen when you hallucinate. If you are human, you can end up doing things like putting your underwear in the oven. If you happen to be a chatbot or some other type of artificial intelligence (AI) tool, you can spew out false and misleading information, which—depending on the info—could affect many, many people in a bad-for-your-health-and-well-being type of way. And this latter type of hallucinating has become increasingly common in 2023 with the continuing proliferation of AI. That’s why Dictionary.com has an AI-specific definition of “hallucinate” and has named the word as its 2023 Word of the Year.

Dictionary.com noticed a 46% jump in dictionary lookups for the word “hallucinate” from 2022 to 2023 with a comparable increase in searches for “hallucination” as well. Meanwhile, there was a 62% jump in searches for AI-related words like “chatbot”, “GPT”, “generative AI”, and “LLM.” So the increases in searches for “hallucinate” is likely due more to the following AI-specific definition of the word from Dictionary.com rather than the traditional human definition:

hallucinate [ h uh-loo-s uh-neyt ]-verb-(of artificial i ntelligence) to produce false information contrary to the intent of the user and present it as if true and factual. Example: When chatbots hallucinate, the result is often not just inaccurate but completely fabricated.

Continue reading “Dictionary.com 2023 Word Of The Year ‘Hallucinate’ Is An AI Health Issue” »

Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist who is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University and an author. Dopamine is a key neurotransmitter in our reward pathway. It tells us when to feel pleasure and pain, it can cause depression and anxiety, and it’s being hijacked by the modern world. Phones, video games, porn, food, our world is filled with cheap dopamine, which in turn is making us miserable. Expect to learn how dopamine creates a see-saw balance of pleasure and pain, why cravings to use your phone are driven by dopamine, the truth about dopamine detoxing, how to reset your brain’s dopamine balance, the most successful interventions for changing your relationship to dopamine long term and much more…

A quickie about E5.

Dr. Steve Horvath shares some studies on evaluating whether young plasma fraction affects the epigenetic clock and lifespan in this short video.\
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37875…\
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…\
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37500…\
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2…\

Continue reading “Aging Rewind: What The Studies Show — Can Young Plasma Turn Back the Epigenetic Clock?” »

Developing predictive mechanistic models in biology is challenging. Elektrum uses neural architecture search, kinetic models and transfer learning to discover CRISPR–Cas9 cleavage kinetics, achieving high performance and biophysical interpretability.