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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,660

A tissue-based soft robot that mimics the biomechanics of a stingray has been developed, which could lead to advances in bio-inspired robotics, regenerative medicine and medical diagnostics.

The simple body design of stingrays, specifically, a flattened body shape and side fins that start at the head and end at the base of their tail, makes them ideal to model bio-electromechanical systems on.

The 10-millimeter long robot is made up of four layers: tissue composed of live heart cells, two distinct types of specialized biomaterials for structural support, and flexible electrodes. Imitating nature, the robotic stingray is even able to “flap” its fins when the electrodes contract the heart cells on the biomaterial scaffold.

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The famed startup incubator Y Combinator put out a call for companies that want to increase human longevity and “health span.”

Who they want: Founders with new ideas for treating old-age diseases like Alzheimer’s, “but we will also consider more radical anti-aging schemes,” YC president Sam Altman told MIT Technology Review.

Why longevity? Efforts to stop old age don’t actually get funded much. “My sense is that economic incentives of drugs companies are screwed up” says Altman. “I don’t think we have enough people saying, How can we make a lot of people a lot heathier?”

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Hundreds of millions of years ago, at a time when back-boned animals were just starting to crawl onto land, one such creature became infected by a virus. It was a retrovirus, capable of smuggling its genes into the DNA of its host. And as sometimes happens, those genes stayed put. They were passed on to the animal’s children and grandchildren. And as these viral genes cascaded through the generations, they changed, transforming from mere stowaways into important parts of their host’s biology.

One such gene is called Arc. It’s active in neurons, and plays a vital role in the brain. A mouse that’s born without Arc can’t learn or form new long-term memories. If it finds some cheese in a maze, it will have completely forgotten the right route the next day. “They can’t seem to respond or adapt to changes in their environment,” says Jason Shepherd from the University of Utah, who has been studying Arc for years. “Arc is really key to transducing the information from those experiences into changes in the brain.”

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Researchers have found that by manipulating a single RNA molecule, they can reverse some aspects of cellular aging and regenerate aged cells.

Old cells resist regeneration

As we grow older, our cells gradually age, leading to the development of various diseases. Therefore, inducing cellular regeneration is one of the approaches that researchers are using to combat the age-related diseases associated with cellular aging. Unfortunately, aged cells are often highly resistant to therapies aimed at inducing regeneration.

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Researchers at Duke University have managed to create functional human muscle tissue using skin cells as the starting point[1]. This research builds on their previous work from 2015, when they grew the first functioning muscle tissue using cells obtained from muscle biopsies[2].

Being able to create muscle cells using non-muscle tissue opens the door for scientists to grow muscle cells in bulk, provides an easier path to genome editing and gene therapies, offers a supply for basic research studies, and could help create personalized models for rare muscle diseases, leading to better patient outcomes.

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Early Bird ends soon!

Have you got your tickets yet? If not, then you just have a few days to do so and save. Early Bird pricing ends on Monday, 11:59 pm CET.

The 2018 Undoing Aging Conference is focused on the cellular and molecular repair of age-related damage as the basis of therapies to bring aging under full medical control.

The conference provides a platform for the existing science community that already works on damage repair and at the same time offers interested scientists and students a first-hand understanding of the current state of this exciting new field of biomedical research.

Speakers will include leading researchers from around the world focused on topics including stem cells, senescent cells, immunotherapies, biomarkers and drug discovery.

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