Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,678

Well before the family came in to the Batson Children’s Specialty Clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, they knew something was wrong. Their child was born with multiple birth defects, and didn’t look like any of its kin. A couple of tests for genetic syndromes came back negative, but Omar Abdul-Rahman, Chief of Medical Genetics at the University of Mississippi, had a strong hunch that the child had Mowat-Wilson syndrome, a rare disease associated with challenging life-long symptoms like speech impediments and seizures.

So he pulled out one of his most prized physicians’ tools: his cell phone.

Using an app called Face2Gene, Abdul-Rahman snapped a quick photo of the child’s face. Within a matter of seconds, the app generated a list of potential diagnoses — and corroborated his hunch. “Sure enough, Mowat-Wilson syndrome came up on the list,” Abdul-Rahman recalls.

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PanARMENIAN.Net — In the future, getting customized cancer treatments might just be a matter of injecting virtually invisible discs into your body, Engadget said.

University of Michigan scientists have had early success testing 10nm “nanodiscs” that teach your body to kill cancer cells. Each disc is full of neoantigens, or tumor-specific mutations, that tell your immune system’s T-cells to recognize those neoantigens and kill them. When you pair them up with immune checkpoint inhibitors (which boost the T-cells’ responses), they can not only wipe out existing tumors, but prevent them from reemerging later.

This testing has been limited to mice so far, but it’s promising. The nanodiscs took 10 days to eliminate tumors, and they shut down identical tumors when they were reinserted 70 days later. For the researchers, the big challenge right now is scaling the tests to see if they still hold up with larger animals. If the approach proves successful with humans, the days of generic cancer solutions might be limited — so long as doctors could get a sample of your cancer, they’d stand a realistic chance of eliminating the disease, Engadget said.

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(Photo courtesy of Clarius Mobile Health)

The ultrasound market currently stands as a $6 billion global industry.

Contrary to popular perception, the use of ultrasounds for women’s health and pregnancy follow-ups only represents less than 20% of the overall use for healthcare. For example, a diagnostic ultrasound is routinely used to diagnose an assortment of healthcare conditions such as cancer, gall stones, and cardiovascular diseases.

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The gene drive is quickly becoming one of the most controversial technologies of our time. Its possibilities are at once spectacular and alarming: by using genetic engineering to override natural selection during reproduction, a gene drive could allow scientists to alter the genetic makeup of an entire species. This could be used to eliminate diseases and protect natural habitats —but could also go horribly wrong in the wrong hands.

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In Brief

  • A study of 36 patients with brainstem lesions revealed that the majority of those in comas had damage in a specific area of the brainstem, while most conscious patients did not.
  • The identification of the areas of the brain responsible for consciousness could lead to new treatment options for patients in comas or vegetative states.

Human consciousness has been defined as awareness, sentience, a person’s ability to experience and feel, but despite the important role it plays in our lives and making us who we are, we actually know very little about how consciousness works.

Scientists currently believe that consciousness is composed of two components: arousal and awareness. The first is regulated by the brainstem, but the physical origins of the latter were always a mystery. Now, a team of researchers at Harvard think they may have discovered the regions of the brain that work with the brainstem to maintain consciousness.

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Speculation on 3D printed tissue coming to humans sooner than we think is backed by new pre-clinical findings from 3D bioprinting company Organovo (NASDAQ: ONVO). Though it will still be 3 – 5 years before the U.S. based Organovo apply for clearance of their liver tissue, that is still sooner than perhaps even the FDA had in mind.

Pre-clinical trial data shows that 3D bioprinted liver tissue has been successfully planted into lab-bred mice. The human liver-cell tissue shows regular functionality and, at this stage, is being explored as a suitable patch for the organ.

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A device was just invented by researchers, which can make out up to 17 different diseases just by analyzing the chemical makeup of a persons breath.

This is the worlds first singular device that can make an authenticated reading of a persons breath and the first to accurately check for a wide array of afflictions with just the one sample already mentioned including but not limited to Parkinsons disease and kidney cancer even.

The team of researchers led by Hossam Haick from the Technion-Israel Institute of technology told foreign media, “Since antiquity (~400 BC), physicians learned to evaluate their patients by exhaled volatile organic compounds (VOCs), among other means, that are linked to diseases. For example, the stools and urine of infant noblemen were smelt daily by their physicians.”

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Excellent read on the brain’s inhibitory circuits v. excitatory circuits when involving the processing of smells.

Summary: Inhibitory neurons form neural networks that become broader as they mature, a new study reports.

Source: Baylor College of Medicine.

Scientists have discovered that networks of inhibitory brain cells or neurons develop through a mechanism opposite to the one followed by excitatory networks. Excitatory neurons sculpt and refine maps of the external world throughout development and experience, while inhibitory neurons form maps that become broader with maturation. This discovery adds a new piece to the puzzle of how the brain organizes and processes information. Knowing how the normal brain works is an important step toward understanding the nature of neurological conditions and opens the possibility of finding treatments in the future. The results appear in Nature Neuroscience.

“The brain represents the external world as specific maps of activity created by networks of neurons,” said senior author Dr. Benjamin Arenkiel, associate professor of molecular and human genetics and of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, who studies neural maps in the olfactory system of the laboratory mouse. “Most of these maps have been studied in the excitatory circuits of the brain because excitatory neurons in the cortex outnumber inhibitory neurons.”

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