I missed this one. A Liz lecture with what they do and about regulation questions from the audience.
The fourth speaker at the “Designing New Advances” conference hosted by the Institute of Exponential Sciences in Utrecht. Liz Parrish, CEO BioViva Sciences, talks about her work. Learn more about gene therapies and ageing diseases.
Liviu Babitz is not content waiting around for evolution to improve upon his human form. Like other transhumanists, Babitz believes that science and technology can take a person’s intelligence, physical performance and psychological state to the next level, all in less than the span of a single lifetime.
To that end, he helped develop North Sense, a small silicone gadget that detects magnetic north. This is not a GPS device, nor a tracker. It’s not even connected to the Internet nor any other network. This is a new sensory organ designed to be pierced to a person’s body and vibrate each time the wearer faces magnetic north.
The idea is that over time, the brain will assimilate the vibration into the everyday human experience, enhancing it. That will open a person up to a world that exists beyond his or her own current capabilities.
I got my autosomal DNA analysed for $50 by FTDNA recently. Not a full gene sequence though. You get NGS tests for about $400 now.
The first sequencing of the whole human genome in 2003 cost roughly $2.7 billion, but DNA sequencing giant Illumina has now unveiled a new machine that the company says is “expected one day” to order up your whole genome for less than $100.
Illumina’s CEO Francis deSouza showed off the machine, called the NovaSeq, onstage at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in downtown San Francisco today, telling the crowd the machine’s scanning speed could decipher an entire human genome in less than an hour.
Let that sink in. In less than 15 years we went from what once took billions of dollars and over a decade of research to an hour’s worth of time with the promise of a blip of the cost.
A new way to treat brain cancer with our own immune cells.
Injecting genetically modified immune cells directly into the brain and spinal fluid has had remarkable effects on a deadly brain cancer
Glioblastoma is a particularly virulent form of brain cancer. Around 20,000 people in the United States are diagnosed each year and the disease typically has poor survival rates. In a new case reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, a man has undergone experimental CAR-T therapy to treat the condition. CAR-T therapy is a branch of immunotherapy, the field taking cancer treatment by storm, and involves infusing genetically modified T cells back into a patient to target cancer cells.
A new hope
50-year-old Richard Grady received the treatment in California, and it involved dripping these specialised cells through a narrow tube into the brain. CAR-T therapy (also called chimeric antigen receptor) involves adding novel receptors on the surface of T cells; allowing them to better recognise and destroy any cancer cells they come across. Grady’s therapy began with surgery to remove 3 larger tumours, and then followed with 6 weekly infusions into the brain.
Scientists have created the first synthetic version of a cardiac stem cell, offering therapeutic benefits comparable to those from natural stem cells — but without the risks and limitations, according to researchers from North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University in China.
The newly created synthetic stem cells cannot replicate. That means they could reduce some of the risks associated with natural stem-cell therapies — including tumor growth and immune rejection. The synthetic stem calls would also avoid the fragility of natural stem cells, which require careful storage and a multi-step process of typing and characterization before they can be used.
Senescent cell therapy for treating age-related diseases could also help people after chemotherapy.
Senescent cell removal therapies could help reduce the damaging impact chemotherapy has on patients as well as being used to address one of the aging processes to treat diseases.
#aging #cancer
