Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,579

On February 28, 1953, American molecular biologist James D. Watson and English biophysicist Francis Crick announced to friends that they succeeded to determine the chemical structure of DNA.

Already in the 19th century biochemists were able to isolate DNA and RNA from the cell nuclei mixed together. They later found out that DNA and RNA had to be distinct from each other. The nuclein was identified by Friedrich Miescher in 1869 and he later on isolated the pure DNA from a salmon’s sperm. The term ‘nucleic acid’ was then coined by Richard Altmann and it was only found in the chromosomes. The Lithuanian-American biochemist Phoebus Levene at Rockefeller Institute made further achievements concerning the DNA’s structure, showing that its components, the sugar and phosphate chain were linked in the order phosphate-sugar-base. Each of these was named nucleotide and the scientist assumed that the DNA molecule consisted of a string of nucleotide units, which were linked together through phosphate groups.

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Thousands of years ago, oracles read the future through divine inspiration. Today, we’ve still got Oracle making predictions (along with many other forward-thinking tech firms), but it uses something a little more grounded. Artificial intelligence and its capacity to assess approaching events are pretty awe-inspiring even without the supernatural flair.

Many industries are looking to artificially intelligent software to help make predictions on everything from a customer’s buying decisions to which medical treatments will be most effective for a sick patient. Though we live in a world that still depends on the educated guesses of experts, it is becoming increasingly clear that next generation of prognosticators will be more silicon-based than carbon-based.

AI is a prediction technology at its very essence. With the ability to evaluate data exponentially faster than any person, machine learning programs can assess patterns, make connections, and test hypotheses in less time than it takes their human equivalent to pour a cup of coffee. Thanks to its advanced capabilities, AI’s predictions are already taking shape, with strong implications for retail, health care, and the way we understand the world around us.

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BioViva is a platform to expedite the development of drugs and treatments that affect human healthspan. To achieve this goal BioViva has developed a comprehensive set of biomarkers of aging, which include molecular, physiological, anatomical, clinical, and qualitative markers. BioViva also collaborates with clinicians, biomedical scientists, and statisticians to develop innovative protocols for adaptive clinical trials for gene and cells therapies. Finally, BioViva has built a bioinformatics pipeline to analyze the data generated from the biomarkers of aging in human trials, and validate the treatments that are effective for treating the aging process.

BioViva has recently partnered with a paid-for clinical trial company Integrated Health Systems (IHS). IHS connects doctors with patients who want to take part in paid-for clinical trials. During our collaboration with IHS they will utilize our adaptive clinical trial protocols to conduct gene and cell therapy trials. All patients will undergo pre- and post testing using BioViva’s comprehensive biomarkers of aging platform. Treatment efficacy, and patient well being will be assessed using our bioinformatics pipeline…

The goal of BioViva is to accelerate the development of products that will effectively, and cost-efficiently treat biological aging. Our platform is designed to provide expedited and reliable feedback to our clinical and manufacturing partners, so that they may rapidly iterate their products and services to help patients improve the quality and quantity of life.

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Researchers at MIT have developed an imaging technique that will help study exactly how electrical signals propagate through the brain, in an advance that could help us better understand Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and other brain disorders, as well as how thoughts and feelings are formed.

Brain MRIs offer important insight into how our brains work, but they can only produce crude approximations of the areas that are activated by a given stimulus. In order to unravel the minutiae of how neurons communicate and collaborate to form thoughts and feelings, we would need imaging tools with vastly improved resolutions.

Today, far from being able to tackle the 86 billion neurons in the human brain, neuroscientists must settle for studying simple organisms like worms and fish larvae (with neuron counts in the hundreds), relying on slow and cumbersome methods like implanting electrodes into brain tissue to detect electrical signals.

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Summary: Researchers who just finished a precision cancer treatment trial at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles just reported that three out of four adult and child cancer patients responded favorably to a new precision therapy which targets a gene mutation. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) reports that three-fourths of adults and children with a variety of advanced cancers in different sites of the body responded to a novel therapy called larotrectinib that targets a specific genetic mutation.

The researchers published the results of this phase 1/2 trial on February 22, 2018, in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Summary: A startup wants to develop bioprinted beating hearts using stem cells from a patient’s own body using a special 3D bioprinter. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

A startup called BioLife4D wants to develop bioprinted beating hearts using a patient’s own cells as solution for patients seeking heart transplants.

As first reported on USAToday, Steven Morris, the CEO founding partner and of BioLife4D says that if the bioprinted heart is successful, the company hopes to expand to other organs including the pancreas or the kidneys.

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Summary: Cancer vaccines could prevent around 1,000,000 cancer deaths each year, according to a report by the World Health Organization this month. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

In a Feb 2018 report, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that infectious diseases cause 15% of all cancer deaths, and universal vaccination could prevent around one million cancers annually, saying.

“Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and was responsible for 8.8 million deaths in 2015.” Adding “Globally, nearly 1 in 6 deaths is due to cancer.”

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