THIS week we learnt red meat can give you cancer from the World Health Organisation, but is your diet linked to illness?
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2838
Intestinal worms that can reduce inflammation. Could we GMO a probiotic worm to help reduce aging?
Intestinal worms have an incredibly bad reputation. The thought of them sneaking around inside our bodies and eating us from the inside is pretty unpleasant. But for decades, results coming out of lab after lab have shown that some kinds of helminths can be extremely beneficial to their host, and aren’t parasites at all.
Just 100 years ago, before toilets and running water were commonplace, everybody had regular exposure to intestinal worms. Thanks in part to modern plumbing, people in the industrialized world have now lost almost all of their worms, with the exception of occasional pinworms in some children.
Intestinal worms are properly called “helminths,” which most dictionaries will tell you are parasites. Exploiting their hosts, draining resources, sucking the life out of the body – that’s what parasites do, by definition. Indeed, many helminths, including the porcine tapeworm and the human hookworm, are known to cause disease and even death in the human population. Parasitic worms are still a big problem in some parts of the world.
Large amounts of precious resources are being spent on encouraging weight loss and healthy living. While the intention of trying to reinforce healthy living is laudable, the evidence is that our resources are being wasted on minimal benefits.
Society considers obesity a big threat that needs to be overcome, but being thin is seen as a panacea
The diseases caused by biological aging carry on incessantly taking the lives of 100 000 people every day. While age 87 is the most common age of death for people in the western world, little progress has occurred during the past decades.
Cellphone Microscope, UCLA
Posted in biotech/medical, health, mobile phones
Aydogan Ozcan is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute. Follow him around UCLA’s campus as he discusses wireless health and demonstrates detecting malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases with a cell phone!
Meanwhile there is something important going on in the fight against baldness.
As in the majority of tissues, the hair follicle has stem cells. There are two types of stem cells that are responsible for the continuous renewal of the follicles. The first type is called active stem cells and they start dividing quite easily. Stem cells of the second type are called quiescent and in case of the new hair growth they don’t start dividing as easily. At the same time, the new hair is based primarily on quiescent cells, which attracted close attention of researchers to these cells. At first people thought that baldness was due to this type of cells.
However, recent studies showed that bald men did have those quiescent cells in their follicles. The problem was that they didn’t divide at all and didn’t contribute to forming new hairs.
This means that even a bald person still has the potential to grow new hair, but because of lack of some regulatory factors quiescent cells can’t start replicating.
Elaine Fuchs was able to identify these regulatory factors in her study published in Cell. Apparently, it’s all about the transit-amplifying cells that are the progeny of the active stem cells.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced on Oct. 27 that it has approved, for the first time, an oncolytic (cancer-killing) viral therapy in the United States. The drug was approved for use against late-stage melanoma, a deadly skin cancer that can be difficult to treat.
The approval came as the result of a recent Phase III study, which showed that more patients with late-stage melanoma, treated with a herpes cold sore virus designed to kill tumor cells, had a better response when compared to a different treatment. Robert Andtbacka, M.D., from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah and Howard L. Kaufman, M.D., from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, led the multisite study, published May 26 online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
According to Andtbacka, “The goal of this targeted therapy is to treat late stage patients more effectively and with fewer side effects.”
These people have got a leg — or an arm — up on the future.
Thanks to the latest advancements in medical science, amputees are becoming part robot, with awe-inspiring artificial limbs that would make Luke Skywalker jealous.
These new limbs come armed with microprocessors and electrodes that sense muscle movement. Others can be controlled by a smartphone app. People missing limbs often tried to hide their prosthetics, but these New Yorkers are showing them off with pride.
Rebekah Marine.
Rebekah Marine had the modeling bug from a young age, playing dress-up as a kid and getting her mom to take her to try out for modeling agencies in New York.
The one problem? She was born without part of her right arm.
“I was just kind of quickly denied from [agencies] based on my quote-unquote disability,” the 28-year-old says.
The “Age” Age
Posted in biotech/medical, life extension
A very interesting article about the state of funding for aging research and about Buck and ex Geron Mike West.
As I mentioned in last week’s letter, I traveled to San Francisco last Monday with my friend Patrick Cox, who writes our Transformational Technology Alert newsletter. We had dinner with Dr. Mike West of Biotime and then spent the next morning at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Pat and I decided we would jointly report on what we learned. He has already written his part, which was published last week. I am going to reproduce portions of that letter, which highlight the conversation with Brian Kennedy and his team at the Buck Institute, and then add my own thoughts about our conversation with Mike West the previous night.
(Note that I am excerpting Patrick’s paid letter, which includes comments on companies in his portfolio, rather than his free weekly Transformational Technologies Tech Digest service. We agreed that it was important to do so in this one case, given the huge significance of the research involved and the Buck Institute’s relationship to it.)
Essentially, we looked at two aspects of aging. The Buck Institute is focused on how to slow down the aging process and reduce the symptoms (such as chronic diseases) that come with aging. Dr. Mike West and his colleagues, as well as a few other firms and researchers, are focused on using our own pluripotent stem cells in ways that would allow us to repair organs in our bodies, thus giving us the opportunity to “grow younger” again. (It’s not quite that simple, as I’ll try to explain later.)
Current medical treatment boils down to six words: Have disease, take pill, kill something. But physician Siddhartha Mukherjee points to a future of medicine that will transform the way we heal.
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This is our chance to make a real difference to how ageing research progresses and how people view ageing.
We need fifty people to make a real change in funding policy so we can work towards healthy longevity.
https://www.facebook.com/…/draft-zero-gsap-ageing-and-healt… (please make sure to complete the 6 first lines at least before sending to the email indicated there).
WHO GSAP draft, healthy longevity and biomedical aging research.