Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,581

Replacing potatoes or rice with pulses can lower your blood glucose levels by more than 20 per cent, according to a first-ever University of Guelph study.

Prof. Alison Duncan, Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences, and Dan Ramdath of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, found that swapping out half of a portion of these starchy side dishes for can significantly improve your body’s response to the carbohydrates.

Replacing half a serving of rice with lentils caused to drop by up to 20 per cent. Replacing potatoes with lentils led to a 35-per-cent drop.

Read more

Really excited to announce our new initiative to make early-stage rejuvenation therapies more accessible.

Our mission is to enable people to vastly extend their healthy lifespan and be part of the first generation to cure aging.

We support the development of rejuvenation therapies that undo the damage of aging by funding basic research, bringing together the world’s leading scientists at our annual Undoing Aging conference and helping startups that work on actual therapies for human use.

In addition, we are developing our ‘Personal Longevity Strategy’ which harnesses the enormous wealth of the world’s cutting-edge medical knowledge to empower people to make informed decisions about extending their healthy lifespan right now.

Read more

We were interested to learn that Juvenescence Limited, a biotech and development company involved in the development of therapies that target the aging processes, has successfully raised $50 million in a series A financing round.

Jim Mellon, the chairman of Juvenescence Limited, said, “We are delighted with the progress we have made and the faith that investors have placed in us to build a world-class company, one that we hope will lead the field in longevity science for the benefit of humanity as well as yield superb returns for our shareholders. Our company ethos is to advance the science that will add years of healthy life to every human being, and that is exactly what we are executing on at record speed.”

Juvenescence has raised $63 million from various international investors since its creation in October 2016 and is now moving forward with a number of key projects. The company is comprised of a number of industry leaders in business as well as a solid scientific team led by Dr. Declan Doogan and Dr. Annalisa Jenkins.

Read more

Two recently published studies are raising new concerns that the breakthrough CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system could potentially trigger an increased cancer risk in cells edited using the technique. With human trials using the gene-editing technique set to commence this year, the scientists behind these new studies urge researchers to be aware of this newly discovered and dangerous cancer-driving mechanism.

It has been less than a decade since the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique was discovered, allowing scientists an unprecedented way to accurately edit DNA. For the most part, the technique has proved promising, safe and effective. Last year, a controversial study was published claiming the technique could introduce unintended, off-target mutations, but after a flurry of criticism attacking the veracity of the work it was ultimately retracted.

These two new studies raise entirely new concerns regarding the technique’s potential for triggering cancer in edited cells. One study comes from a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the Karolinska Institutet, while the other is led by a team of researchers at pharmaceutical company Novartis.

Read more

Eventually all petroleum-based material in food packaging will have to be replaced with bio-based material. Research done at Karlstad University shows that a mixture of starch and other polymers forms an equally effective protective barrier.

“Food packaging has to protect and extend the of food, and should also work during transport,” says Asif Javed, doctor in Chemical Engineering at Karlstad University. “To meet these demands, a protective barrier is needed in paper-based packing such as those used for juice or dairy.”

Read more

Today we are going to take a look at the emerging theory that inflammaging, a chronic, age-related background of inflammation, is caused by alterations to the populations of intestinal microbes.

What is inflammaging?

Inflammaging is a term coined to describe the chronic, smoldering background of inflammation that accompanies the aging process. It is constant, low-grade inflammation that interferes with stem cell mobility, cellular communication, and the immune system’s ability to operate correctly.

Read more

Because diabetics often have both nerve damage and poor circulation, they will often not notice when they receive skin wounds, which proceed to heal very slowly. Those wounds can thus become chronic, sometimes even leading to amputations. A new regenerative bandage, however, could help keep this from happening.

Led by Prof. Guillermo Ameer, a team from Illinois’ Northwestern University started with a protein known as laminin. Found in the skin and most of the body’s other tissues, it communicates with cells, prompting them to differentiate, migrate and adhere to one another.

The scientists were able to identify a specific segment of the protein, which plays a key role in the wound-healing process. That segment is made up of just 12 amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), and it’s called A5G81. Because A5G81 is so much smaller and simpler than the entire laminin protein, it’s much cheaper and easier to synthesize in the lab.

Read more

Blind Man

I was going blind which is not a good thing when you need to see to run a growing nonprofit. Luckily, it is 2018 and technology is advancing at an exponential rate so I had some options. Following is my story which is relevant for many reasons including that we virtually all develop eye problems over time and the state of the art available is constantly changing.

MY STORY

I finally couldn’t read text at normal resolution on my 60″ monitor which is about 4 feet from my face (and normally at 1600×900 resolution to make the text bigger) so it was time to go to the optician again. The optician considerably upgraded my prescription to −17.25 diopters on my left eye and −12.25 diopters on my right eye but warned me that this might not improve my vision much due to the beginning of cataracts in my eyes. So unlike in the past where I bought my glasses from outside the country due to restrictions on being able to purchase thin lenses in the U.S. that were implemented during the Nixon administration, I ordered glasses locally so I could speed up the process.

I was unable to see well with the new glasses so it was time to visit an ophthalmologist that my optician recommended. The ophthalmologist had the following assessment:

Dry Eye Syndrome of Bilateral Lacrimal Glands
Combined Forms of Age-related Cataract, Bilateral
Lattice Degeneration of Retina, Bilateral
Other Vitreous Opacities, Right Eye
Hemorrhage in Optic Nerve Sheath, Right Eye
Myopia, Bilateral

There were parts of both eyes that should have retina but didn’t because the eyes were so stretched. (This isn’t affecting my vision.)

The lattice degeneration of the retina concerned my ophthalmologist so he then sent me to a retinologist where he expected the retinologist to operate on me before the ophthalmologist could operate. Luckily, the retinologist said he didn’t need to operate on me so I went from needing 4 surgeries to needing 2 surgeries.

For those who don’t know, cataract surgery replaces the broken biological lens of your eye with an artificial lens called an intraocular lens (IOL). This surgery usually uses a femtosecond laser.

Before my first surgery, the ophthalmologist’s assistants ran multiple tests on my eyes so they could determine what size lens would fit in them. This was tricky because my eyes are extra long (31 mm left and 30 mm right) and machines have a problem with eyes that long. A few days after my tests were done, the ophthalmologist’s office called me to say the doctor was unsatisfied with the tests so I was called in to have more tests done.

His best assistant redid many of the tests which included ultrasound with a liquid on my eyeballs and then did a new test which used ultrasound with a gel on my eyeballs. Finally the tests were done and the doctor was able to schedule the operations which included him having to order a special lens for my left eye that was only created by one manufacturer in the world due to my extreme prescription. The doctor ordered the lens in four different sizes so he could find the perfect fit once my old biological lens was removed.

To show how this procedure is not without risk, the doctor’s first comment after the left eye surgery was, “can you see through the eye?”. I could see quite well immediately and was able to see every pixel on my monitor within a day. It was crazy seeing for a while with one good eye and one bad eye as my extreme prescription in the bad eye made things smaller so I couldn’t line objects up between the two eyes. I often just closed my bad eye as a solution.

Three weeks later, my right eye went well also. Note that even though my right eye was much less nearsighted than my left eye, the doctor couldn’t get the astigmatism in my right eye fixed with a Toric IOL because they don’t make it for my prescription. Instead, he made incisions in my cornea during cataract surgery — a procedure called limbal relaxing incisions (LRI). The incisions were made with a laser, of course.

It is worth noting that I did some research before the operation and found many people had run into problems with this procedure, including one of our larger donors. So it is worth spending time to find some very experienced doctors before allowing them to work on your eyes. My ophthalmologist had done over 30,000 surgeries and my retinologist also had tons of experience. A poor surgery can usually not be fixed!