Nice. Personalized Cancer Vaccine showing promise.
A majority of patients in a small clinical trial have been in remission from a deadly type of cancer for more than four years.
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,769
Excellent overview on BMI technology.
Less than a century ago, Hans Berger, a German psychiatrist, was placing silver foil electrodes on his patients’ heads and observing small ripples of continuous electrical voltage emerging from these. These were the first human brain waves to ever be recorded. Since Hans Berger’s first recordings, our knowledge on the brain structure and function has developed considerably. We now have a much clearer understanding of the neuronal sources that generate these electrical signals and the technology that is now available allows us to get a much denser and accurate picture of how these electrical signals change in time and across the human scalp.
The recording and analysis of brain signals has advanced to a level where people are now able to control and interact with devices around them with the use of their brain signals. The field of brain-computer interfaces has in fact garnered huge interest during the past two decades, and the development of low-cost hardware solutions together with the continuously evolving signal analysis techniques, have brought this technology closer to market than ever before.
Research in the field of brain-computer interfaces was primarily propelled by the need of finding novel communication channels for individuals suffering from severe mobility disorders as in the case of patients with locked-in syndrome. People suffering from the condition have a perfectly functioning brain but are trapped inside their body, which no longer responds to the signals being transmitted from their brain.
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Check out the The Longevity Reporter interview with CellAge as they talk about rejuvenation biotechnology.
Innovative new startup Cell Age is using synthetic biology to develop new ways of targeting and removing senescent cells. We caught up with CEO Mantas Matjusaitis for an interview as their first fundraiser goes live on Lifespan.io (find it here)
Could you tell us a little bit about your approach and what makes you different?
We are a synthetic biology company which will use proven proprietary methods to develop tools and therapies to specifically target senescent cells. Early on, we will be focusing on developing novel approaches to identify senescent cells and this will help to screen for new drugs as well as move the field forward in general. Importantly, we will offer our first products for free to researchers from academia, because, in the end, our mission is to help the society and scientific community and we think this is the right way forward. Later on, our tools will be used to make cell-based therapies safer by removing senescent cells before the transplantations. And eventually, we are aiming to help create safe and accurate gene therapies to help fight age-related diseases like osteoarthritis, atherosclerosis and more.
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Excercise is the best low cost activity you can do as part of your personal longevity strategy. Here we see data showing it can improve resistance to oxidative stress.
Researchers digging deeper into the mechanisms by which exercise produces benefits have found that it improves the resistance of blood vessels to oxidative stress. With age the presence of oxidizing molecules and oxidative modification of proteins, preventing correct function, increases for reasons that include damage to mitochondria, the power plants of the cell. Oxidative damage to molecular machinery is somewhere in the middle of the chain of cause and effect that starts with fundamental forms of damage to cells and tissues and spirals down into age-related diseases. Near all of this oxidation is repaired very quickly, the damaged molecules dismantled and recycled, but in most contexts more of it over the long term is worse than less of it.
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Wild.
The expression “once bitten, twice shy” is an illustration of how a bad experience can induce fear and caution. How to effectively reduce the memory of aversive events is a fundamental question in neuroscience. Scientists in China are reporting that by transplanting mouse embryonic interneurons into the brains of mice and combining that procedure with training to lessen fear, they can help to reduce the fear response. The study is being published December 8 in Neuron.
“Anxiety and fear-related disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] cause great suffering and impose high costs to society,” says Yong-Chun Yu, a professor at the Institutes of Brain Science at Fudan University in Shanghai and the study’s senior author. “Pharmacological and behavioral treatments of PTSD can reduce symptoms, but many people tend to relapse. There’s a pressing need for new strategies to treat these refractory cases.”
In the study, the researchers used traditional conditioning to instill fear in the mice. They exposed them to a sound as a neutral stimulus, followed by a mild shock to the foot. To determine the level of fear, they measured the amount of time the mice exhibited freezing behavior–the natural sympathetic fear response in prey animals that is indicated by crouching. They then conducted fear extinction training, in which the mice were exposed to the sound but not the shock. After a few rounds, the freezing response times were significantly reduced.
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Gene therapy techniques were used to insert a peptide into cultures of human cancer cells that blocked their ability to use the enzyme Hypoxia-inducible factor-1, a heterodimeric transcription factor that enables cell survival under low oxygen conditions by altering the transcription of over 300 genes.
Hypoxia inducible factor-1 (HIF-1) is a heterodimeric transcription factor that acts as the master regulator of cellular response to reduced oxygen levels, thus playing a key role in the adaptation, survival, and progression of tumors. There is significant evidence that inhibition of HIF-1 would be beneficial for cancer therapy, since tumor cells must thrive in a microenvironment characterized by lack of oxygen. In previous work, investigators at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom) discovered a cyclic hexapeptide (cyclo-CLLFVY) that inhibited the HIF-1alpha/HIF-1beta protein–protein interaction in vitro and prevented HIF-1-mediated hypoxia-response signaling in cells. This cyclic peptide was identified by screening a library that contained more than 3.2 million compounds.
With a view to demonstrating the potential for encoding the production of a therapeutic agent in response to a disease marker, the investigators engineered human cells with an additional chromosomal control circuit that conditionally encoded the production of the cyclic peptide HIF-1 inhibitor. They then demonstrated the conditional production of the HIF-1 inhibitor in response to hypoxia, and its inhibitory effect on HIF-1 dimerization and downstream hypoxia-response signaling.
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Synthetic Biology Diabetes mellitus affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Blood glucose levels are chronically deregulated in diabetics, and this can lead to many serious disorders, including cardiovascular disease and renal failure. Xie et al. engineered a synthetic circuit into human.
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