Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 3,010

“What makes organ chips potentially so effective in drug testing is that they create not just the biochemical environment necessary for the cells to thrive but also the physical one…This use of stem cells in organ chips raises the possibility of a device that represents an individual patient—a patient-on-a-chip, if you like. In this case all the tiny organs would be derived from a single person: tests could then be carried out on the device to find what combinations of drugs and dosages work best for that patient.” Read more

I have mentioned mTOR as one of the main aging genes on multiple occasions. It’s about time I tell you what it is, what it does and why it is so important in aging.

mTOR has a little m in front of TOR, which means I am speaking about mammals. It technically means «mechanistic» TOR, but think of it as the molecule that mice and all of us have, whereas in worms is it just TOR.

mTOR gene produces one mTOR protein that can act in two pretty different ways. mTOR does so, because it forms two complexes with other molecules. These complexes are called mTORC1 and mTORC2. Yeah, I know, it’s a lot of letters, but C1 and C2 stand for «complex 1» and «complex 2», so it kinda makes sense.

So, how are these complexes different? For starters, they have different proteins that are part of the complexes, and these differences define the drastic variance in functions.

mTOR is one of the most studied genes that the scientists have known about for decades, however we still don’t know much about how those complexes react to different signals in the cells, especially mTORC2. We know much more about what the first complex does, but not really a lot about the second complex. This is not good, because both of them play a huge, enormous role in aging and in age-related disease like cancer and metabolic disorders like diabetes.

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“The Biological Technologies Office (BTO), which opened in April 2014, aims to support extremely ambitious — some say fantastical — technologies ranging from powered exoskeletons for soldiers to brain implants that can control mental disorders. DARPA’s plan for tackling such projects is being carried out in the same frenetic style that has defined the agency’s research in other fields.” Read more

Three different DNA nanostructures assembled at room temperature in water-free glycholine (left) and in 75 percent glycholine-water mixture (center and right). The structures are (from left to right) a tall rectangle two-dimensional DNA origami, a triangle made of single-stranded tails, and a six-helix bundle three-dimensional DNA origami (credit: Isaac Gállego).

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