Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 3,446

Fighting cancer with the power of immunity

Combination therapy to kick cancer to the curb!

Harnessing the body’s own immune system to destroy tumors is a tantalizing prospect that has yet to realize its full potential. However, a new advance from MIT may bring this strategy, known as cancer immunotherapy, closer to becoming reality.

In the new study, the researchers used a combination of four different therapies to activate both of the immune system’s two branches, producing a coordinated attack that led to the complete disappearance of large, in mice.

“We have shown that with the right combination of signals, the endogenous immune system can routinely overcome large immunosuppressive tumors, which was an unanswered question,” says Darrell Irvine, a professor of biological engineering and of materials science and engineering, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Newly-developed ‘gene therapy in a box’ could save millions of lives

Gene therapy in a box could reduce costs and save lives.

unnamed-1Gene therapy — the process of genetically altering cells to treat disease — is a highly promising process being studied as a way to cure devastating conditions like genetic disorders, HIV, and even cancer.

But despite the great need for medical advances in these areas, gene therapy can only be performed at a handful of high-tech clinics around the world and require highly trained staff, meaning that it may never be accessible to the millions of people whose lives it could save.

Enter “gene therapy in a box,” a table-top device developed at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center in Seattle, which could provide gene therapy treatments without the expensive and rare medical infrastructure currently needed. My hope is that this technology… could open the door to saving millions of lives.

Cartilage from nose is used to repair bum knees

Using cells from the cartilage in patients’ noses, Swiss doctors have successfully made patches to treat 10 adults whose knee cartilage was damaged by injury.

Two years after the transplants, most of the patients grew new cartilage in their knees and reported improvements in pain, knee function and quality of life.

“We have developed a new, promising approach to the treatment of articular cartilage injuries,” said lead researcher Ivan Martin, a professor of tissue engineering at the University of Basel. The articular cartilage is the tissue that covers and protects the ends of the knee bones, and injuries to it can lead to degenerative joint conditions like osteoarthritis.

Associations between Periodontal Microbiota and Death Rates

Brushing your teeth has never been so important.

It is conceived that specific combinations of periodontal bacteria are associated with risk for the various forms of periodontitis. We hypothesized that such specificity is also related to human cause-specific death rates. We tested this hypothesis in a representative sample of the US population followed for a mean duration of 11 years and found that two specific patterns of 21 serum antibodies against periodontal bacteria were significantly associated with increased all-cause and/or diabetes-related mortalities. These data suggested that specific combinations of periodontal bacteria, even without inducing clinically significant periodontitis, may have a significant impact on human cause-specific death rates. Our findings implied that increased disease and mortality risk could be transmittable via the transfer of oral microbiota, and that developing personalized strategies and maintaining healthy oral microbiota beyond protection against periodontitis would be important to manage the risk.

Can DNA Hard Drives Solve Our Looming Data Storage Crisis?

The idea of storing digital data in DNA seems like science fiction. At first glance, it might not seem obvious that a molecule can store data. The term “data storage” conjures up images of physical artifacts like CDs and data centers, not a microscopic molecule like DNA. But there are a number of reasons why DNA is an exciting option for information storage.

The status quo

We’re in the midst of a data explosion. We create vast amounts of information via our estimated 17 billion internet-connected devices: smartphones, cars, health trackers, and all other devices. As we continue to add sensors and network connectivity to physical devices we will produce more and more data. Similarly, as we bring online the 4.2 billion people who are currently offline, we will produce more and more data.

Withholding amino acid depletes blood stem cells, researchers say

Rebooting the immune system just got a bit easier. This could potentially be used to treat autoimmune diseases and just as exciting some of the aging processes.

A dietary approach to depleting blood stem cells may make it possible to conduct bone marrow transplantations without the use of chemotherapy or radiation therapy, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The discovery, made in collaboration with researchers at the University of Tokyo, may also become a new way to treat certain cancers without chemo or radiation, which can cause severe side effects.

The researchers showed that a diet deficient in the essential amino acid valine could effectively deplete the population of in mice and allow them to be successfully transplanted with blood stem cells from other mice. The researchers also showed that human blood stem cells in the laboratory were affected by a lack of access to valine, suggesting that the same therapeutic approach may work in humans.

Bryan Johnson invests $100 million in Kernel to unlock the power of the human brain

Earlier this year, former Braintree founder Bryan Johnson publicly announced his plans to forge Kernel, a company with the sole purpose of building hardware and software to augment human intelligence. Today, Johnson is investing $100 million of his own money into the concept, looking to rapidly double the size of his team, shore up a portfolio of intellectual property and prepare for animal and human testing trials for a forthcoming device aimed at reducing cognitive deficiencies for sufferers of conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Kernel is still very much in the planning stages, but the idea is rooted in the research of Theodore Berger, the company’s chief science officer. The futuristic device, which Johnson says might actually not need to be implanted beneath the skull at all, is designed to facilitate communication between brain cells by hacking the “neural code” that enables our brain to store and recall key information. With proper implementation, such a device could correct faulty signals to mend a cognitive impairment.

“We have done this before with biology and genomics,” said Johnson in an interview. “We can program yeast to do a specific function. We can expect the same path with neural code.”

/* */