Memories are priceless, and the plight of dementia patients highlights how important they are to forming what makes us, well us. Now a new study has provided hope we may one day be able to restore lost memories.
Clearing the mist
A paper from researchers at MIT has demonstrated the reactivation of memories in amnesia patients with optogenetics — in which cell activity is controlled by bursts of light.
Opening up the blood-brain barrier to deliver drugs (credit: Focused Ultrasound Foundation)
The blood-brain barrier has been non-invasively opened in a human patient for the first time. A team at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto used focused ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier (BBB), allowing for effective delivery of chemotherapy into a patient’s malignant brain tumor.
The team infused the chemotherapy agent doxorubicin, along with tiny gas-filled bubbles, into the bloodstream of a patient with a brain tumor. They then applied focused ultrasound to areas in the tumor and surrounding brain, causing the bubbles to vibrate, loosening the tight junctions of the cells comprising the BBB, and allowing high concentrations of the chemotherapy to enter targeted tissues.
Resetting Your Biological Clock: New Enzyme Found To Repair Telomeres.
The telomere caps on the end of your chromosomes unravel bit by bit with every cell division, and if they’re not repaired division eventually stops altogether. Cells like stem cells express special enzymes to lengthen these caps, and we’ve now found another one that does the job.
A key player in aging?
Many factors drive aging, but telomeres play a key role in allowing cells to divide at all and are therefore a major potential anti-aging target. Aging is a murder mystery case involving a range of perpetrators, but telomere shortening has been connected to multiple age-related diseases and many scientists believe we’ll have to find ways to repair telomeres if we want to live longer.
I had read about Singapore in genetic engineering way back in the 90’s. I think they were 1st or 2nd in making immortal skin cells at the time.
Singapore scientists have unravelled a mystery that could pave the way for turning back the clock on ageing.
A recent study led by Dr Ng Shyh Chang of the Genome Institute of Singapore at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) has found a gene in human egg cells that suppresses an enzyme causing cells to age.
This is the Tcl1 gene, and by increasing the protein it produces, the researchers found they could suppress the enzyme that causes mitochondria — the cells’ batteries — to age over time.
Biotech company Editas Medicine is planning to start human trials to genetically edit genes and reverse blindness.
This animation depicts the CRISPR-Cas9 method for genome editing – a powerful new technology with many applications in biomedical research, including the potential to treat human genetic disease. Feng Zhang, a leader in the development of this technology, is a faculty member at MIT, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and a core member of the Broad Institute. Further information can be found on Prof. Zhang’s website at http://zlab.mit.edu.
Images and footage courtesy of Sputnik Animation, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Justin Knight and pond5.
Treating the brain often requires invasive surgery, but a new technique involving ultrasound and air bubbles has now shown promise at delivering drugs through the blood-brain barrier.
One of the biggest challenges of medicating brain tumours is actually getting drugs into the organ. Your brain is well protected from invasion by untoward substances or life forms, and this protection limits what will enter from the bloodstream. There have been previous efforts to open up the barrier, but they often involve a surgical approach that is far from ideal.
New article for Vice Motherboard on why society should support legalization of all drugs–and a short video of the Immortality Bus in Arkansas talking to marijuana supporters (a state where it’s totally illegal):
The “Mount Rushmore of the Drug War” featuring founding prohibitionists Harry Anslinger, Billie Holiday, and Arnold Rothstein. Image: Donkey Hotey/Flickr
I’m from San Francisco. Doing drugs—especially smoking pot—seems second nature to me. I’ve made a point of trying nearly all drugs, and I’m unabashedly proud of that fact. I consider Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception one of the most important books I read in my youth, and I’ve often wondered if it should be mandatory that everyone try a hallucinogenic drug at least once in their lives.
Almost all transhumanists welcome and endorse mind-altering substances. We thrive off change, experimentation, and new experiences, including wild drug trips with friends. For transhumanists, trying drugs is not just about having fun, but about self-amelioration and becoming the best, most enlightened versions of ourselves.
I’m driving a bus across the country to deliver a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol. One of those rights will certainly include language that advocates for citizens being able to take any drugs they want, so long as the taking of it doesn’t directly hurt someone else.
Posted in biotech/medical
Sugars may taste divine, but they’re also highly reactive molecules that progressively stiffen your body in a process called glycation. Scientists have now synthesised the primary molecule formed in glycation for the first time, leading to hope that drugs can be designed to break them apart.
What is glycation?
In our bodies sugars continuously react with proteins in an unregulated manner in a process known as glycation. This leads to the formation of abnormal chemical modifications of the protein which may impair its normal function. These sugar-modifications are collectively known as advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and can be subdivided in two main categories. First are the modifications that affect a single amino acid. The second category consists of modifications that link two amino acids together in a structure called a crosslink.
