Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 536

Alzheimer’s drug may save lives through ‘suspended animation’

Could buy patients more time to survive critical injuries and diseases, even when disaster strikes far from a hospital.

Donepezil, an FDA-approved drug to treat Alzheimer’s, has the potential to be repurposed for use in emergency situations to prevent irreversible organ injury, according to researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

Using donepezil (DPN), researchers report that they were able to put tadpoles of Xenopus laevis frogs into a hibernation-like torpor.

This ‘Holy Grail’ Protein Repairs DNA And Could Lead to a Cancer Vaccine

Scientists have discovered a protein that can directly halt DNA damage. Better yet, a new study shows it appears to be ‘plug and play’, theoretically able to slot into any organism, making it a promising candidate for a cancer vaccine.

DNA damage response protein C (DdrC) was found in a hardy little bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans. DdrC seems to be very effective at detecting DNA damage, putting a stop to it and alerting the cell to start the repair process.

But DdrC’s best feature might be that it’s pretty self-contained, doing its job without the help of other proteins.

Finger wrap uses sweat to provide health monitoring at your fingertips

A sweat-powered wearable has the potential to make continuous, personalized health monitoring as effortless as wearing a Band-Aid. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an electronic finger wrap that monitors vital chemical levels—such as glucose, vitamins, and even drugs—present in the same fingertip sweat from which it derives its energy.

The advance was published Sept. 3 in Nature Electronics by the research group of Joseph Wang, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at UC San Diego.

The device, which wraps snugly around the finger, draws power from an unlikely source—the fingertip’s . Fingertips, despite their , are among the body’s most prolific sweat producers, each packed with over a thousand . These glands can produce 100 to 1,000 times more sweat than most other areas of the body, even during rest.

Revolutionizing 3D printing through microwave technology

In the rapidly evolving world of 3D printing, the pursuit of faster, more efficient and versatile production methods is never-ending. Traditional 3D printing techniques, while groundbreaking, are often time-consuming and limited in the kinds of materials they can use as feedstock.

But, through a new process a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) team is calling Microwave Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (MVAM), researchers have introduced an innovative new approach to 3D printing using microwave energy to cure materials, opening the door to a broader range of materials than ever before.

In a recent paper published in Additive Manufacturing Letters, LLNL researchers describe the potential of microwave energy to penetrate a wider range of materials compared to light-based volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM).

Picking up good vibes from a stranger? That might be your neurons aligning

Imagine you’re sitting across from a friend, having a conversation.

I’m a die-hard Beach Boys fan. In one of their most famous songs, they sing about “pickin’ up good vibrations” from a girl. We’ve all felt those “good vibes” when we’re connecting with someone new. I used to think that feeling was a mysterious, mystical experience — something I couldn’t fully explain that bonded me with some friends and strangers more easily than others.

It turns out that “good vibes” aren’t as mysterious as I thought.

Pioneering neuroscientists have begun investigating how the brain works when we are interact ing with others — a technique they call hyperscanning. Neuroscientists have been using existing scanning methods, like MRI and EEG, to monitor the brain activity of two or more people as they do something together: for example, performing music, learning a poem, or having a conversation.

Gene therapy restores sight with up to 10,000-fold vision improvement

This gene therapy treats LCA1, causing early childhood vision loss, affecting under 100,000 people:

“One patient reported for the first time being able to navigate at midnight outdoors only with the light of a bonfire,” said Cideciyan, who is also co-director of the Center for Hereditary Retinal Degenerations.

The clinical trials were co-led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The gene therapy (ATSN-101) is specifically designed to target and correct the genetic mutation in the GUCY2D gene. This gene creates vision-imparting proteins. ATSN-101 is “adapted from the AAV5 microorganism.”

/* */