Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,702

Could this finally help suppress and maybe even eliminate MS, Dystonia, Parkinson and other central nervous system disfunctions?

Last year, a team of Harvard University researchers revealed that they created a wire mesh doctors can inject into the brain to help treat Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases. They already successfully tested it on live mice, but now that technology is ready for the next stage: human testing. The mesh made of gold and polymers is so thin, it can coil inside a syringe’s needle and doesn’t need extensive surgery to insert. Once it’s inside your head, it merges with your brain, since the mesh has spaces where neurons can pass through.

A part of it needs to stick out through a small hole in your skull so it can be connected a computer. That connection is necessary to be able to monitor your brain activity and to deliver targeted electric jolts that can prevent neurons from dying off. By preventing the death of neurons, which triggers spasms and tremors, the device can be used to combat Parkinson’s and similar diseases. Eventually, the wire mesh could come with an implantable power supply and controls, eliminating the need to be linked to a computer.

The team believes their creation also has a future in mental health, since it can deliver a more targeted treatment for conditions like depression and schizophrenia than medications can. They’ll definitely find out more once human trials begin, and it sounds like it could take place in the near future. According to MIT’s Technology Review, the researchers have begun working with doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital and will soon perform experiments on patients with epilepsy.

Continue reading “Brain-fixing injectable wires will soon be tested on humans” | >

This week in San Diego, Singularity University hosted its annual Exponential Medicine conference. The conference aims to connect the dots between healthcare disciplines and cutting-edge tech by convening medical practitioners, technologists, entrepreneurs, and over 80 expert speakers from the field.

It’s easy to say “healthcare is broken” and call it a day, but a quote from brilliant thinker Maria Popova reminds us of the power of optimism to create change:

Read more

Nice.

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with Harvard University and the University of Cambridge has successfully improved the accuracy of a synthetic clock known as a repressilator. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes the steps they took to reduce the amount of noise in the biological system and how well it worked. Xiaojing Gao and Michael Elowitz with the California Institute of Technology offer a News & Views piece on the work done by the team and explain how their results could improve understanding of natural gene circuits.

Scientists have noted the high precision that some living cells demonstrate in keeping track of time, such as those that are part of the circadian clock, and have tried to duplicate the process. Sixteen years ago, Michael Elowitz and Stanislas Leibler developed what is now known as the repressilator—a synthetic oscillating genetic circuit. Their results demonstrated that it was possible for genetic circuits to be designed and built in the lab. The resulting circuit functioned, but was noisy, and therefore much less accurate than natural cell clocks. In this new effort, the researchers improved several of the design of the repressilator, each greatly reducing the amount of noise, and in so doing, increased the precision.

The repressilator was made using repressor proteins that would bind to DNA sequences that were adjacent to a gene to be targeted for inhibition. Three repressors were created such that each one represented the expression of the next cycle—when the protein in one repressor increased, it caused a decrease in the expression of the second, which in turn caused an increase in expression of the third, and so on, resulting in oscillations—the actions were monitored by reporters. Unfortunately, each was bothered by random fluctuations known as noise. To reduce the noise, the researchers integrated the reporters into the repressilator, engineered the repressor proteins to degrade in order to reduce the number of copies made, and increased the binding threshold between one of the repressors and the DNA sequence.

Continue reading “Researchers improve accuracy of synthetic clock” | >

The nerves we feel before a stressful event—like speaking in public, for example—are normally kept in check by a complex system of circuits in our brain. Now, scientists at Rockefeller University have identified a key molecule within this circuitry that is responsible for relieving anxiety. Intriguingly, it doesn’t appear to reduce anxiety in female mice, only in males.

“This is unusual, because the particular cell type involved here is the same in the male and female brain—same in number, same in appearance,” says Nathaniel Heintz, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “It’s a rare case where a single cell type is activated by the same stimulus but yields two different behaviors in each gender.”

Read more

We are seeing lot of inventions being made prior to the upcoming Mars missions. However, you don’t have to be into science-fiction to understand that NASA still needs to get a grip on many technical hurdles before our astronauts can put their boots on the red planet safely.

Yes, [Mark Watney](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3659388/) has become quite a Martian but real humans need more to survive and especially have to consider the *less obvious* things like how to deal with injuries that far away from mother Earth. That can be overlooked, but certainly is important.

As there’s only so much space on a trip to Mars, there will be limited access to medical care due to supply restrictions. Expertise to manage complex medical conditions might also be hard to come by.

Read more

Researchers have made the breakthrough of couch potatoes’ dreams with a new drug that mimics some of the most important effects of exercise. Scientists from Deakin University in Melbourne published their findings in Cell Reports earlier this week, showing that overweight mice who were given the drug no longer showed signs of cardiovascular disease.

Read more

A rare group of children is immune to AIDS, scientists believe.

The 170 boys and girls in South Africa are known as ‘non-progressors’.

They were all born with HIV, after being infected in the womb, and still have extremely high levels of the disease in their blood.

But they are completely healthy.

Continue reading “Rare group of children are IMMUNE to AIDS, scientists reveal” | >

The first of 50 patients to complete a trial for a new HIV treatment in the UK is showing no signs of the virus in his blood.

The initial signs are very promising, but it’s too soon to say it’s a cure just yet: the HIV may return, doctors warn, and the presence of anti-HIV drugs in the man’s body mean it’s difficult to tell whether traces of the virus are actually gone for good.

That said, the team behind the trial – run by five British universities and the UK’s National Health Service – says we could be on the brink of defeating HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) for real.

Read more

There are two kinds of people in Washington, DC, says entrepreneur Dean Kamen. There are the policy experts, whom he calls cynics. And there are the scientists, whom he deems optimists.

Kamen, speaking at the White House Frontiers Conference at the University of Pittsburgh, places himself in the latter camp. Unlike policy wonks and politicians who see diseases like Alzheimer’s or ALS as unstoppable scourges, Kamen points out that previously terrifying diseases were all toppled by medical innovation. The plague, polio, smallpox — all were civilization-threatening epidemics until experimental scientists discovered new ways to combat them.

If that sounds like the kind of disruption that the tech industry has unleashed across the rest of the world, that’s no accident. Kamen, the founder of DEKA, a medical R&D company, says that the same trends that have empowered our computers and phones and communication networks will soon power a revolution in health care. He says that medical innovation follows a predictable cycle. First we feel powerless before a disease. Then we seek ways of treating it. Then we attempt to cure it.

Read more