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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,826

Treating Osteoarthritis

New research in multiple mouse types and human cell lines shows senolytics helps mitigate osteoarthritis.

The removal of senescent cells has shown further potential for the treatment of osteoarthritis in this recent publication where the researchers reduce the impact of post injury osteoarthritis by clearing senescent cells[1]. As we have discussed many times in our publications, senescent cells are a key player in the aging process, if you are new to the subject and want to know what senescent cells are here is a quick primer.

What are senescent cells?

Cellular senescence is a hallmark of aging and is one of the various processes that cause you to age. As you grow older an increasing number of your cells enter into a state known as senescence. These senescent cells no longer divide or support the tissue they are part of, instead they send out a cocktail of harmful chemical signals that cause inflammation and drive the aging process. This proinflammatory collection of proteins, cytokines and signals are known as the senescence associated secretory phenotype (SASP). The SASP blocks various important cellular processes, prevents stem cells from repairing damaged tissue efficiently, and is implicated in the development of age-related diseases[2–3].

Zoltan Istvan

I’m giving a speech this morning in San Diego on #transhumanism. If you’re at this medical device conference, please come listen and say hello after the talk:

The 10x Medical Device Conference is an annual, in-person reuinion for the Medical Devices Group, the world’s largest medical device community.

“Exercise-in-a-pill” boosts athletic endurance

The push to find exercise memetics continues.

Every week, there seems to be another story about the health benefits of running. That’s great—but what if you can’t run? For the elderly, obese or otherwise mobility-limited, the rewards of aerobic exercise have long been out of reach.

Salk Institute scientists, building on earlier work that identified a gene pathway triggered by running, have discovered how to fully activate that pathway in sedentary mice with a chemical compound, mimicking the beneficial effects of exercise, including increased fat burning and stamina.

CellAge announces a seed fundraising round

The CellAge project hosted last year with Lifespan.io has now joined up with Michael Greve and Kizoo to develop this technology. Community support for the project has helped move the project foward and will hopefully speed up progress as a result.

April 2017, Edinburgh. CellAge Limited (“CellAge”) has raised a seed round backed by Michael Greve´s Kizoo Technology Capital and a group of angel investors.

CellAge, a privately held synthetic biology start-up aiming to develop tools and therapies for age-related diseases, has successfully completed a seed fundraising round. In this round Kizoo Technology Capital and a number of angel investors have joined the effort to develop synthetic promoters which will make senescent cells identification and removal safer and more efficient. To achieve this, CellAge is planning to analyze transcriptional profiles of a wide range of senescent cell types using proprietary algorithm and construct novel promoters from candidate regulatory elements identified in this screen. The joint expertise in senescence, synthetic biology and bioinformatics gives CellAge a unique angle on improving ways how gene therapies could be targeted to senescent cells.

This Artificial Womb Just Successfully Grew a Sheep, Humans Could Be Next

Researchers have developed an artificial womb to sustain the life of premature babies. That womb just proved successful in animal testing for the first time. This advance could radically transform the lives of millions of premature infants around the world.

The wombs look like nothing too spectacular. They appear more like oversized plastic bags with tubes and fluids rather than the Huxleyan tube babies of science fiction. However, eight of these external womb Biobags held a fetal lamb. During the growth, the lambs developed as their brain, lungs, and other vital organs grew. They grew wool. They even moved about and twitched. A few of the lambs have now grown into adulthood.

Could Artificial Intelligence Really Be Used to Attain Human Immortality?

AI vs aging the ultimate showdown is in the making.

There are several scientists that are now convinced upon the idea that while aging is a natural occurrence that happens in all creatures, it is, in fact, a disease that can be treated or cured. In that regards, there are some scientists out there looking to slow down the process of aging, while others are looking to stop it all together.

This Transhumanist Politician Wants to be Governor of California

A nice new write-up on my governor run: https://humanityplus.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/this-transhuma…alifornia/ #transhumanism

It’s a good time to be a transhumanist politician. As faith in the political establishment declines, new technologies, from gene editing to artificial intelligence, are transforming our lives faster than ever. The transhumanist author and politician Zoltan Istvan agrees. He thinks the time is ripe for pro-science and technology governance, and for leaders who will embrace the technologies that could fundamentally transform our conceptions of what it means to be human.

Istvan is a maverick who appears to thrive in an ‘outsider’ role. He self-published a sci-fi novel, The Transhumanist Wager, in 2013, which became a surprise bestseller on Amazon. In 2016, he made an unlikely run for US president as the leader of the Transhumanist Party. Now, he’s making a bid for Governor of California in the 2018 election under a Libertarian Party ticket.

As a libertarian, Istvan believes in promoting “maximum freedom and personal accountability,” a sentiment that gels well with his championing of human enhancement technologies and robot and cyborg rights.

Like all transhumanists, Istvan believes in using science and technology to enhance human capabilities and transcend current biological limits. He wants to be smarter, live longer, and eventually merge with advanced technologies to become a posthuman being—one that is impervious, or at least resilient, to aging, and most mortal risks.

China Is Racing Ahead of the US in the Quest to Cure Cancer With CRISPR

While China does this, the people in the USA who use cancer to pay for their third homes and quarterly trips to Tahiti write papers saying CRISPR is a WMD and needs to be made illegal LOL.

Here’s hoping China is able to pull it off.

On Friday, a team of Chinese scientists used the cutting-edge gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9 on humans for the second time in history, injecting a cancer patient with modified human genes in hopes of vanquishing the disease.

Investors backed an AI startup that puts a doctor on your smartphone with $60 million

UK artificial intelligence (AI) startup Babylon has raised $60 million (£47 million) for its smartphone app which aims to put a doctor in your pocket.

The latest funding round, which comes just over a year after the startup’s last fundraise, means that the three-year-old London startup now has a valuation in excess of $200 million (£156 million), according to The Financial Times.

Babylon’s app has been downloaded over a million times and it allows people in UK, Ireland, and Rwanda to ask a chatbot a series of questions about their condition without having to visit a GP.