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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,805

For the first time since the advent of stem cell therapy, a team of scientists from the North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, was able to implant synthetic cardiac stem cells which effectively repaired muscle tissue that got damaged by a heart attack. Typically, heart muscles that get scarred from a heart attack will either stay as is or get worse, but not improve. With the synthetic stem cell implant done, however, the result was a remarkable contradiction. Details about this new technique that is supposedly less risky than traditional stem cell procedures were recently published in the ‘Nature Communications’ journal.

Stem cell therapy works by helping damaged tissue repair itself. Although this type of treatment can be effective, it comes with certain types of risks, most notably, immune system rejection and cancerous growths. And, the process itself is very delicate because natural stem cells are quite fragile, have to be stored carefully, and must undergo a series of typing and matching prior to being used.

It is these limitations that have prompted scientists to come up with a different approach to make stem cell therapy work better. And what they developed was a procedure involving synthetic stem cells.

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New version of this out: https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2017/01/02/americas-r…-cold-war/ #transhumanism #biohacking

Unlike other epic scientific advances…the immediate effect of genetic editing technology is not dangerous. Yet, it stands to be just as divisive to humans as the 70-year proliferation of nuclear weaponry.

The playing field of geopolitics is pretty simple: If China or another country vows to increase its children’s intelligence via genetic editing, and America chooses to remain “au naturel” because they insist that’s how God made them, a conflict species-deep will quickly arise.

This type of idea takes racism and immigration to a whole new level. Will America close off its borders, its jobs, its schools, and its general openness to the world to stay pure, old-fashioned human?

In short, will genetic editing start a new cold war? One that bears much finger pointing and verbal reprimands, including the use of derogatory terms like mutants, cyborgs, and transhumanists.

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In a breakthrough for regenerative medicine, scientists have grown intestinal tissues with functional nerves in a laboratory setup using human pluripotent stem cells. The synthesized tissue was used to study Hirschsprung’s disease, a congenital condition where nerve cells are missing from the colon, causing complications in passing stool. The research is detailed in Nature Medicine.

A pluripotent stem cell is a precursor cell to all the other types of cells in the body. In a petri dish, the stem cells were treated in a biochemical bath that triggered the formation into intestinal tissue. The novel part of the study was the construction of a nervous system on the intestinal organoid. The researchers manipulated neural crest cells to grow a system of nerves. By putting together the neural crest cells and the intestinal tissue at the exact time, they successfully grew together into a complex functional system.

The tissues were transplanted into mice. They worked successfully and showed a structure “remarkably similar” to that of a natural human intestine.

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Scientists at Karolinska Institutet and the University of Gothenburg have generated a web-based software, Green Listed, which can facilitate the use of the CRISPR methodology. The software is published in the journal Bioinformatics and is freely available through greenlisted.cmm.ki.se where also information texts and films are available.

Cells are very small and builds up an organism. A human has about 100 times as many in its body as there are people on earth. Inside a vast majority of these cells are long chains of DNA. These DNA chains affects how different cells look and behave. CRISPR is a research method that can be used to rapidly study how different portions of the DNA directly affect cells. Using this method, researchers can gain insights to the cause of diseases and give suggestions for how they can be treated.

“We use the CRISPR methodology to study both and . The goal is to develop new treatments for patients with diseases related to the immune system, such as arthritis, as well as cancer”, says Fredrik Wermeling at the Center for Molecular Medicine (CMM), Department of Medicine, Karolinska Institutet.

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Struggling with your diet? Your microbiota could be to blame.

Your microbiota may not be on your side as you try improving your diet this New Year’s. In a study published December 29 in Cell Host & Microbe, researchers explore why mice that switch from an unrestricted American diet to a healthy, calorie-restricted, plant-based diet don’t have an immediate response to their new program. They found that certain human gut bacteria need to be lost for a diet plan to be successful.

“If we are to prescribe a to improve someone’s health, it’s important that we understand what help control those beneficial effects,” says Jeffrey Gordon, Director of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University in St. Louis and senior author of the paper. “And we’ve found a way to mine the gut microbial communities of different humans to identify the organisms that help promote the effects of a particular diet in ways that might be beneficial.”

In order to study how human dietary practices influence the and how a microbiota conditioned with one dietary lifestyle responds to a new prescribed diet, Gordon and his collaborators first took fecal samples from people who followed a calorie-restricted, plant-rich diet and samples from people who followed a typical, unrestricted American diet. The researchers found that people who followed the restricted, plant-rich diet had a more diverse microbiota.

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For a few lucky patients, 2016 was the year when gene therapy turned from promises to cures. The technology, long contemplated as a way to erase disease by revising people’s DNA, made big advances and began turning into a real business offering some of the world’s most expensive and revolutionary medicines.

So what is gene therapy, anyway? The US Food and Drug Administration says it’s any treatment in which a replacement gene is added to a person’s body or a disease-causing one is inactivated. That’s usually done by adding­­­­­­ new instructions to cells via billions of viruses stuffed with correct DNA strands.

It sounds complicated, and it is. Gene therapy was first tested in a person in 1990, but scary side effects turned the gene-fix idea into a scientific backwater. And the field hasn’t conquered all its problems. We started the year with the tale of Glybera, heralded as the first gene treatment ever approved that sought to correct an inherited gene error. Yet the drug came with an eye-popping price tag of $1 million and, dogged by questions over how well it works, has turned into a medical and commercial flop.

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Researchers have discovered a technique that could block the effects of a powerful gene-editing tool to protect adjacent genes against accidental alteration. The breakthrough could be the beginning of a major step forward for genetic engineering.

Scientists at the University of California (UC) in San Francisco researchers have discovered how to switch off the effects of the CRISPR gene editing system. CRISPR has been a major advance for gene editing, but there are difficulties in limiting its effects on adjacent genes. So far this has militated against its use in research, most obviously, into the human genome.

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The Sino-Israeli Robotics Institute (SIRI) was inaugurated in mid-December when a delegation of nine Israeli companies — led by Ariel University Prof. Zvi Shiller, chair of the Israeli Robotics Association, and Technion Prof. Moshe Shoham, founder of Mazor Robotics and a world leader in medical robotics — participated in the second Sino-Israeli Robotics Innovation Conference in Guangzhou, China.

Intended as “home base” for Israeli robotics companies entering the Chinese market, SIRI is located at the Guangzhou International Robotics Center (ROBOHUB), a government-supported, 4,800-square-meter robotics incubator and demonstration center including a large exhibition and demo area, innovation lab, training center, and corporate offices.

“This is an exciting time for the Israeli robotics industry,” Shiller said. “We are committed to establishing a true partnership with SIRI and ROBOHUB, and we look forward to broadening this strategic cooperation, which will serve as a fast track for transforming ideas into products and for moving products into the Chinese market.”

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