Google’s verily Launches New Robotic Surgical Company called Verb Surgical by teaming up with Johnson & Johnson.
The company formerly known as Google Life Sciences is one of the firms behind Verb Surgical Inc, which will develop advanced surgical robots. This promises to be just the first of Verily’s medical and academic partnerships.
Last week the FDA announced that they have granted permission for the TAME trial. The Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial is the first human trial specifically looking at an anti-aging drug in humans.
Repurposing An Old Medicine
Metformin is an old drug, first approved in France in 1957, for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). However extracts from the French liliac (Galega officinalis), the plant containing a precursor of metformin, has been used to treat frequent urination, a symptom of diabetes, since the Middle Ages. In 2012 in the US about 60 million prescriptions for metformin were written, making metformin the most used antidiabetic drug. Amazingly, every year about 37,000 metric tons of metformin are produced! Metformin is also a super-cheap drug, costing only cents per dose.
2016 will be the year of VR. Here’s how it will change everything from medicine to the military.
C. elegans roundworm (credit: The Goldstein Lab)
When researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in California administered an antidepressant called mianserin to the Caenorhabditis elegans roundworm in 2007, they discovered the drug increased the lifespan of the “young adulthood” of roundworms by 30–40 per cent.
So, does that mean it will work in humans? Not necessarily. “There are millions of years of evolution between worms and humans,” says TSRI researcher Michael Petrascheck. “We may have done this in worms, but we don’t want people to get the impression they can take the drug we used in our study to extend their own teens or early twenties.”
In a new study, people who believed negative stereotypes about old age had higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
This article is based on my skype conversation with Elizabeth Parrish, founder and CEO of BioViva. BioViva is a biotech company in the Seattle area focused on developing gene therapies to mitigate the diseases of aging. Liz is currently experimenting these therapies on herself. Her research was recently covered in a MIT Technology Review article and she did an AMA on Reddit you may want to check out.
MIT Media Lab graduate Will Patrick has designed a prototype desktop bioreactor that could enable the production of pharmaceutical drugs at home.
The cylinder-shaped Farma kitchen appliance could be used to grow, measure, filter and dry synthetically designed microbes.
(credit: Ericsson ConsumerLab)
Artificial intelligence (AI) interfaces will take over, replacing smartphones in five years, according to a survey of more than 5000 smartphone customers in nine countries by Ericsson ConsumerLab in the fifth edition of its annual trend report, 10 Hot Consumer Trends 2016 (and beyond).
Smartphone users believe AI will take over many common activities, such as searching the net, getting travel guidance, and as personal assistants. The survey found that 44 percent think an AI system would be as good as a teacher and one third would like an AI interface to keep them company. A third would rather trust the fidelity of an AI interface than a human for sensitive matters; and 29 percent agree they would feel more comfortable discussing their medical condition with an AI system.