Compared with brain organoids grown from ordinary human cells (top), those with a Neanderthal gene variant (bottom) differ in appearance and behavior.
Read more
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,576
The exponential potential of longevity technologies.
Jim Mellon became a billionaire by pouncing on a wide variety of opportunities, from the dawn of business privatization in Russia to uranium mining in Africa and real estate in Germany. But all of that might eventually look small, he says, compared to the money to be made in the next decade or so from biotechnologies that will increase human longevity well past 100.
The British investor is so enthusiastic about these technologies that he co-authored a 2017 book about them, Juvenescence: Investing in the Age of Longevity, and launched a company, Juvenescence Ltd., to capitalize on them. “Juvenescence” is a real word — it’s the state of being youthful. Says Mellon, who is 61: “I’m hoping that this stuff works on me as well as on my portfolio.”
Juvenescence Ltd., which has raised $62.5 million from Mellon and some partners, has invested in or is close to confirming investments in nine biotech companies. He won’t discuss most of them. But one of the deals was an 11 percent stake in Insilico Medicine, a company applying machine-learning techniques to drug discovery. Insilico Medicine and Mellon’s company also formed a joint venture called Juvenescence AI to investigate the therapeutic properties of specific compounds. Mellon is particularly optimistic that this venture can develop a “senolytic” drug that helps the body clear out cells that have stopped dividing and can damage other cells.
Read more
An interview with Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, Harvard University.
We have recently had occasion to have a chat with Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, Professor of Medicine and Director of Redox Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, in Boston, Massachusetts. He is an expert in aging and redox biology and is known for his characterization of the human selenoproteome. His research laboratory focuses on comparative genomics, selenoproteins, redox biology, and, naturally, aging and lifespan control.
Dr. Gladyshev graduated from Moscow State University, in Moscow, Russia; his postdoctoral studies in the 1990s took place at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland. Even when he was young, he was very much interested in chemistry and experimental science: he twice won the regional Olympiad in chemistry and graduated from high school with a gold medal. He also graduated with the highest honors from Moscow State University. This enviable track record is even more impressive considering that Dr. Gladyshev completed music school and high school at the same time and became a chess player equivalent to national master during his college years.
You’ll have a chance to meet Dr. Gladyshev at our upcoming New York City conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases, on July 12; if you can’t attend, you can at least enjoy our interview with Dr. Gladyshev below.
Read more
At least in the developed world, cancer, heart diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases are among the greatest causes of mortality. One emerging and very promising way to prevent or cure these diseases is through bio-nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology is the design, synthesis and application of materials or devices that are on the nanometer scale (one billionth of a meter). Due to the small scale of these devices, they can have many beneficial applications, both in industry and medicine. The use of nanodevices in medicine is called nanomedicine. Here, we will look at some applications of nanomedicine in curing or preventing the diseases that are most likely to kill us.
Read more
Today we will be taking a look at some of the stories people tell themselves to help them pretend aging is not a problem.
If you ask most people what they think about aging, they will shrug their shoulders and say that it is a natural process. With complete tranquility on their faces, they will agree that, yes, in old age, we are haunted by many diseases, but nothing can be done about it, so it makes no sense to worry about it while you are young and healthy. Just live your life.
Then, the conversation will turn towards an even stranger direction: they will start looking for something good about aging – for example, that it ensures a change of generations, prevents society from becoming stuck in obsolete ideas, and, in general, is the engine of evolution. They’ll explain that the notion of death gives meaning to life and makes us accomplish as much as possible in the little time we have.
Here’s the intriguing part. If you ask the same people what they felt when they first encountered the concept of aging and death from old age, they remember that they were frightened. They were not happy with the answers to “Mom, are you gonna get old and die?” and “Will I die too?” Many people remember that they cried bitterly after this conversation and were filled with sorrow for several days.
Read more
- There has been a 14X increase in the number of active AI startups since 2000. Crunchbase, VentureSource, and Sand Hill Econometrics were also used for completing this analysis with AI startups in Crunchbase cross-referenced to venture-backed companies in the VentureSource database. Any venture-backed companies from the Crunchbase list that were identified in the VentureSource database were included.
- The share of jobs requiring AI skills has grown 4.5X since 2013., The growth of the share of US jobs requiring AI skills on the Indeed.com platform was calculated by first identifying AI-related jobs using titles and keywords in descriptions. Job growth is a calculated as a multiple of the share of jobs on the Indeed platform that required AI skills in the U.S. starting in January 2013. The study also calculated the growth of the share of jobs requiring AI skills on the Indeed.com platform, by country. Despite the rapid growth of the Canada and UK. AI job markets, Indeed.com reports they are respectively still 5% and 27% of the absolute size of the US AI job market.
- Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are the three most in-demand skills on Monster.com. Just two years ago NLP had been predicted to be the most in-demand skill for application developers creating new AI apps. In addition to skills creating AI apps, machine learning techniques, Python, Java, C++, experience with open source development environments, Spark, MATLAB, and Hadoop are the most in-demand skills. Based on an analysis of Monster.com entries as of today, the median salary is $127,000 in the U.S. for Data Scientists, Senior Data Scientists, Artificial Intelligence Consultants and Machine Learning Managers.
- Error rates for image labeling have fallen from 28.5% to below 2.5% since 2010. AI’s inflection point for Object Detection task of the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (LSVRC) Competition occurred in 2014. On this specific test, AI is now more accurate than human These findings are from the competition data from the leaderboards for each LSVRC competition hosted on the ImageNet website.
- Internationally, robot imports have risen from around 100,000 in 2000 to around 250,000 in 2015. The data displayed is the number of industrial robots imported each year into North America and Internationally. Industrial robots are defined by the ISO 8373:2012 standard. International Data Corporation (IDC) expects robotics spending to accelerate over the five-year forecast period, reaching $230.7B in 2021, attaining a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.8%.
- Global revenues from AI for enterprise applications is projected to grow from $1.62B in 2018 to $31.2B in 2025 attaining a 52.59% CAGR in the forecast period. Image recognition and tagging, patient data processing, localization and mapping, predictive maintenance, use of algorithms and machine learning to predict and thwart security threats, intelligent recruitment, and HR systems are a few of the many enterprise application use cases predicted to fuel the projected rapid growth of AI in the enterprise. Source: Statista.
- 84% of enterprises believe investing in AI will lead to greater competitive advantages. 75% believe that AI will open up new businesses while also providing competitors new ways to gain access to their markets. 63% believe the pressure to reduce costs will require the use of AI. Source: Statista.
- 87% of current AI adopters said they were using or considering using AI for sales forecasting and for improving e-mail marketing. 61% of all respondents said that they currently used or were planning to use AI for sales forecasting. The following graphic compares adoption rates of current AI adopters versus all respondents. Source: Statista.
Read more
An international team of researchers has discovered evidence of 27 previously unknown viruses in bees. The finding could help scientists design strategies to prevent the spread of viral pathogens among these important pollinators.
“Populations of bees around the world are declining, and viruses are known to contribute to these declines,” said David Galbraith, research scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb and a recent Penn State graduate. “Despite the importance of bees as pollinators of flowering plants in agricultural and natural landscapes and the importance of viruses to bee health, our understanding of bee viruses is surprisingly limited.”
To investigate viruses in bees, the team collected samples of DNA and RNA, which is responsible for the synthesis of proteins, from 12 bee species in nine countries across the world. Next, they developed a novel high-throughput sequencing technique that efficiently detected both previously identified and 27 never-seen-before viruses belonging to at least six new families in a single experiment. The results appear in the June 11, 2018, issue of Scientific Reports.
Read more
An interaction between aggregate alpha synuclein and ATP synthase implicated in Parkinson’s Disease.
An open-access paper published in Nature Communications sheds light on how an accumulation of α-synuclein protein in brain cells contributes to causing Parkinson’s disease. In particular, the researchers discovered how clumps of the protein damage important proteins on mitochondrial surfaces, leading to impaired energy production, swelling and bursting of the mitochondria themselves, and, ultimately, cell death [1].
Study abstract
Read more