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Category: biotech/medical – Page 385

The following is an interview with CRISPR co-discoverer and Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Jennifer Doudna.

Describe the “eureka moment” around CRISPR — the moment when you realized that this technology was not only possible but actually worked. How did you feel? Has your feeling changed since that eureka moment? If so, how?

There’s one moment that stands out in my mind, right at the time we realized what CRISPR could do and that we could “reprogram” it to edit specific sequences of DNA. I was cooking dinner and thinking about it, and I burst out laughing. My son was in the kitchen and he asked why I was laughing. So I explained it to him with a little drawing of a car zooming around, grabbing onto viruses, and chopping them up. I think my drawing did the trick, because he started laughing too.

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Cyrus Brodén, orthopedic physician and researcher at Uppsala University Hospital and Uppsala University.

Administrative tasks take up a large share of a doctor’s working hours, reducing the time for patient contact and contributing to a stressful work situation. Researchers at Uppsala University Hospital and Uppsala University, in collaboration with Danderyd Hospital and the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland, have shown in a new study that the AI model ChatGPT can write administrative medical notes up to ten times faster than doctors without compromising quality.

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OpenAI on Friday revealed a voice-cloning tool it plans to keep tightly controlled until safeguards are in place to thwart audio fakes meant to dupe listeners.

A model called “Voice Engine” can essentially duplicate someone’s speech based on a 15-second audio sample, according to an OpenAI blog post sharing results of a small-scale test of the tool.

“We recognize that generating speech that resembles people’s voices has serious risks, which are especially top of mind in an election year,” the San Francisco-based company said.

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The effects of aging on the immune system

The aging immune system is associated with reduced lymphopoiesis, increased inflammation, and myeloid diseases due to alterations in self-renewing HSCs. During childhood, bal-HSCs predominate, thereby facilitating lymphopoiesis and adaptive immune responses.

Age increases my-HSCs, which reduces lymphopoiesis and enhances myelopoiesis. Myeloid-HSC origin and possible interconversions are unclear; however, removing my-HSCs in aged mice may reverse the aging phenotype.

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Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, affecting an estimated 6.7 million people in the US. Researchers seeking an effective treatment for the affliction have, over the last 30 years, focused their efforts on a protein known as amyloid beta (A-beta), which form clumps in the brain.

These clumps of A-beta proteins attack nerve cells, resulting initially in short-term memory impairment and later in the loss of judgment, language and thought processes.

Other researchers have previously developed an antibody which can identify and attach itself to A-beta proteins and delay the progression of Alzheimer’s in patients with early-to-mild cognitive impairment by up to 36%.

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In a Leicester study that looked at whether artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to predict whether a person was at risk of a lethal heart rhythm, an AI tool correctly identified the condition 80 per cent of the time.

The findings of the study, led by Dr Joseph Barker working with Professor Andre Ng, Professor of Cardiac Electrophysiology and Head of Department of Cardiovascular Sciences at the University of Leicester and Consultant Cardiologist at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, have been published in the European Heart Journal-Digital Health.

Ventricular arrhythmia (VA) is a heart rhythm disturbance originating from the bottom chambers (ventricles) where the heart beats so fast that blood pressure drops which can rapidly lead to loss of consciousness and sudden death if not treated immediately.

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