Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical

Steve Williams couldn’t breathe. The former athlete had cardiomyopathy, which occasionally choked his lungs with fluid, making him gasp for air. But this felt different; Williams felt like he was dying. He was raced to an Orange County hospital, and shortly after checking in, his heart stopped. For 30 minutes, ER workers compressed his chest in an attempt to revive him. At one point, his wife Mary remembers being called into his room to say goodbye to her husband of 24 years. It seemed Williams was a dead man.

Incredibly, doctors rebooted Williams’ heart — but for three days, he was in an induced coma, his body packed in ice to minimize brain damage. When he woke up, his mental facilities were intact, but his body was ravaged. His liver was congested, fluid reappeared in his lungs, and his heart’s right and left ventricles were practically destroyed, making it hard for blood to circulate throughout his body. Without a heart transplant, he would soon die.

Read more

Researchers just identified part of the epigenetic pathways responsible for limb regeneration in the two-spotted cricket Gryllus bimaculatus.

Cut off the leg of an insect, and not only will the insect survive, but the leg will also grow back after some time. Cut off the leg of a human, and they’ll bleed out without proper medical attention (alas for us). Ultimately, insects are able to accomplish this amazing feat because they retain the biological pathways required for cells to differentiate and reorganize at a wound site, which is required in order to regenerate entire limbs.

The processes involve the dedifferentiation and redifferentiation of cells; however, the exact nature of the process is largely a mystery. Fortunately, some light has recently been shed on the matter, as researchers at Okayama University identified key genes involved in the regenerative process of the two-spotted cricket, Gryllus bimaculatus.

Read more

Stem-cell scientists have upended current thinking on the way human blood is produced inside the body, opening the way for new studies and new treatments. The findings of principal investigator John Dick and his team from the University of Toronto in Canada challenge ideas that have been in place since the 1960s.

Essentially, the new research suggests that blood is formed in fewer steps than previously believed: earlier evidence indicated stem cells went through several intermediate steps before becoming white or red adult cells, like branches coming out from a tree trunk. Dick and his team think the process is much quicker and simpler, though their findings have yet to be confirmed by independent researchers.

“The whole classic ‘textbook’ view we thought we knew doesn’t actually even exist,” said Dick. “Instead, through a series of experiments we have been able to finally resolve how different kinds of blood cells form quickly from the stem cell – the most potent blood cell in the system – and not further downstream as has been traditionally thought.”

Read more

According to the Mayo Clinic, the Nerve regeneration is a complex process, because of its complexity, regrowth of nerves after injury or disease is extremely rare. Nerve damages more often than not are incurable and cause permanent disability, but now the scientist has proved that Advanced 3D printing methods could hold a possible cure for such patients.

To prove the proof of concept, a physically disabled rat was chosen as a test subject. The scientist used a specially designed 3D scanners and 3D Printers to create a custom silicone guide, 3D-printed chemical cues were added to the guide to promote both motor and sensory nerve regeneration. This was then implanted into the rat with surgically grafting it to the cut ends of the nerve. The operation was a extremely successful and the rat showed tremendous improvement in the way it walked within 10 to 12 weeks.

The Lead researcher of this medical breakthrough, Michael McAlpine, a mechanical engineering professor from the University of Minnesota said “This represents an important proof of concept of the 3D printing of custom nerve guides for the regeneration of complex nerve injuries,”

Read more

Interested in being an astronaut? NASA now hiring.

Have you ever dreamed of becoming an astronaut? Well, this could be your chance.

NASA revealed on Wednesday that it will begin accepting applications for the next class of astronaut candidates starting on Dec. 14.

The agency is seeking pilots, engineers, scientists and medical doctors, among others to continue work on the International Space Station and to conduct deep space exploration.

Read more

Could an interactive swarm of flying “3D pixels” (voxels) allow users to explore virtual 3D information by interacting with physical self-levitating building blocks? (credit: Roel Vertegaal)

We’ll find out Monday, Nov. 9, when Canadian Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab professor Roel Vertegaal and his students will unleash their “BitDrones” at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Programmable matter

Vertegaal believes his BitDrones invention is the first step towards creating interactive self-levitating programmable matter — materials capable of changing their 3D shape in a programmable fashion, using swarms of tiny quadcopters. Possible applications: real-reality 3D modeling, gaming, molecular modeling, medical imaging, robotics, and online information visualization.

Continue reading “Bitdrones: Interactive quadcopters allow for ‘programmable matter’ explorations” | >

Researchers from Beijing and Philadelphia develop a method to 3D print embryonic stem cells in highly uniform blocks.

Researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and Drexel University in the US have developed an extrusion-based 3D printing method to produce highly uniform “blocks” of embryonic stem cells. These blocks are a grid-like 3D structure that was able to demonstrate cell viability and rapid self-renewal while maintaining high pluripotency. Lead author Wei Sun says, “It was really exciting to see that we could grow embryoid body in such a controlled manner. The grown embryoid body is uniform and homogenous, and serves as much better starting point for further tissue growth.”

Other common methods of printing stem cells are either done in 2D or with the “suspension” method, but these methods do not produce cells with the same cell uniformity and homogenous proliferation as that of the 3D method. This new method would enable researchers to perform experiments on tissue regeneration. Another author on the paper, Rui Yao, adds, “Our next step is to find out more about how we can vary the size of the embryoid body by changing the printing and structural parameters, and how the varying the embryoid body size leads to “manufacture” of different cell types.”

Read more