Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 3,086

Building a Better Human With Science? The Public Says, No Thanks

The public was unenthusiastic on all counts, even about protecting babies from disease.

Americans aren’t very enthusiastic about using science to enhance the human species. Instead, many find it rather creepy.

A new survey by the Pew Research Center shows a profound distrust of scientists, a suspicion about claims of progress and a real discomfort with the idea of meddling with human abilities. The survey also opens a window into the public’s views on what it means to be a human being and what values are important.

Pew asked about three techniques that might emerge in the future but that are not even close to ready now: using gene editing to protect babies from disease, implanting chips in the brain to improve people’s ability to think, and transfusing synthetic blood that would enhance performance by increasing speed, strength and endurance.

A robotic dinner plate with a human-like arm is revolutionizing the lives of the differently abled

Golf, offshore powerboat racing, sky diving: David Hare had led an active lifestyle. Then, in February 2011, he was diagnosed with ALS, a neurological disease that leads to rapid progressive degeneration of nerve cells, the loss of the ability to control muscle movement, and eventually death. The 56-year-old Michigan resident, who was told by doctors that he had less than five years to live, found a new lease of life last year with Obi, a robot that helps the differently abled feed themselves.

Healthy livers grown from rejected donor organs in transplant breakthrough

Healthy livers are being grown from rejected donor organs after British scientists discovered how to combat diseased tissue.

Researchers at the Royal Free in London have shown it is possible to strip away the damaged parts of donor livers and use the underlying structure as natural scaffold to rebuild a working organ.

The team are hoping that in the future stem cells from a transplant patient can be taken and used on the scaffold to grow a new liver which would not be rejected by the body.

Dolly the sheep’s siblings ‘healthy’

But the new study, which tracked four sheep cloned from the same ewe as Dolly, found they had aged normally.

Some of the animals did show mild — and in one case moderate — signs of osteoarthritis. But the researchers say that it was not sufficiently severe that any of the animals required treatment.

Dolly the sheep’s “siblings” are generally healthy, a study has shown, providing hope that cloning can yield animals free from degenerative illness.

The first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell — Dolly — died at the relatively young age of 6.5 years, having suffered from osteoarthritis.

This raised concerns that cloned animals might age more quickly.

Genomics maverick Craig Venter’s plan to unlock DNA’s connection to disease

Awesome! Just imagine all the benefits that we will see through this research. Not only will we figure out more on the root cause of gene mutations, and cures including CRISPR; but also we will be more effective in mimicking the human system in synthetic systems, synthetic cell or gene circuitry, humanoids, synthetic immune systems, combat aging more effectively, etc.

With more data, a pioneer of gene sequencing hopes to unlock the connections between DNA and illness.

Project|21 SENS Research Foundation | Building the Bridge to Human Clinical Trials for Rejuvenation Biotechnologies

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — July 11, 2016 — SENS Research Foundation today announced its Project|21 campaign to secure $50 million in private support from individual donors, foundations, and corporations. The goal of Project|21 is for SRF to partner with a new generation of visionary philanthropists, build the Rejuvenation Biotechnology industry, and bridge the most challenging gulf between research and treatment by enabling human clinical trials by 2021.

Aubrey de Grey, founder and chief science officer of SENS Research Foundation said, “Ending aging will require large-scale investment to flow into a globally-recognized industry for rejuvenation biotechnology. Since we began in 2009, SENS Research Foundation has been putting all the pieces in place — core research groups, key players, shared knowledge, underlying tools — for the creation of this industry. The key programs funded by Project|21 can create an environment where the first damage repair interventions addressing specific age-related diseases will be brought to human clinical trials within five years.”

The programs funded under Project|21 focus on three major barriers to the development of truly effective rejuvenation therapies. First, funding to convert promising basic research programs into solid investment candidates remains far too scarce. Second, there are too few opportunities for dynamic collaborations with mainstream regenerative medicine. Finally, there is little understanding of the regulatory pathways and clinical infrastructure these technologies will require. Project|21 addresses these three areas by creating a $15 million bridge fund to support promising early stage technologies; a center of excellence to deliver better opportunities for collaborative development of early stage programs; and a Rejuvenation Biotechnology Alliance Program to address challenges in regulation, manufacturing, and investment.

The first donation received for Project|21 is a commitment from German internet entrepreneur Michael Greve’s Forever Healthy Foundation for $5 million in philanthropic support over the next five years. In addition Michael Greve’s company KIZOO Technology Ventures will be committing seed investments of $5 million in startups focused on bringing rejuvenation biotechnology treatments to market.

For more information on the SENS Research Foundation visit www.sens.org. For information on Project|21 visit www.SENSProject21.org. For information on Michael Greve visit www.kizoo.com and www.forever-healthy.org.

Companion Press Release: “Internet Entrepreneur Michael Greve Commits $10 Million to SENS Related Research and Startups including a $5 Million Donation Over 5 Years to SENS Research Foundation.”

Biggest Little Self-Assembling Protein Nanostructures Created

A research team at the University of Washington has harnessed complex computational methods to design customized proteins that can self-assemble into 120-subunit “icosahedral” structures inside living cells—the biggest, self-booting, intracellular protein nanocages ever made. The breakthrough offers a potential solution to a pressing scientific challenge: how to safely and efficiently deliver to cells new and emerging biomedical treatments such as DNA vaccines and therapeutic interfering particles.

The work, funded by DARPA in a lead-up to the new INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, “opens the door to a new generation of genetically programmable protein-based molecular machines,” the researchers report in this week’s issue of the journal Science. The research paper is available here: http://ow.ly/LW8F302tOp3

Anyone familiar with the role-playing games Dungeons and Dragons and Munchkin need only picture the 20-sided die to understand what an organic, icosahedral cargo container looks like—symmetrical, triangle-shaped panels folded evenly on each side. Unlike a die that can be held in your hand, however, these creations are the size of small viruses and are designed to interact with cells in the same way viruses might—that is, by delivering their caged contents into a cell, albeit in this case with positive, customizable outcomes. Also, whereas dice are produced in molds on a factory assembly line, these nanocages build themselves inside cells, following with atomic precision instructions written in genetic code.

Engineered bacteria deliver an anti cancer tumor toxin in mice before self-destructing

I never get tired of hearing more information on this research.

A synthetic genetic circuit programmed into an attenuated Salmonella enterica subspecies can be used to systemically deliver an anti-tumor toxin into mice with cancer. The circuit allows the bacterial cells inside a tumor to synchronously self-destruct by lysis, releasing the toxin directly in the tumor.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with a strategy for using synthetic biology in therapeutics. The approach enables continual production and release of drugs at disease sites in mice while simultaneously limiting the size, over time, of the populations of bacteria engineered to produce the drugs.

“This impressive study represents a big step towards one of the great dreams of synthetic biology: rationally programming cells, in this case bacteria, to exhibit complex, dynamic, and beneficial behaviors in a host organism,” Michael Elowitz, whose Caltech lab builds synthetic genetic circuits and who was not involved in the work, wrote in an email to The Scientist.

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