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Category: biotech/medical – Page 67

Are We Entering the Longevity Singularity? | Natasha Vita-More

Could AI and biology trigger a longevity singularity? Dr. Natasha Vita-More maps the AI-biology longevity flywheel and three frontiers reshaping longevity culture: nanorobots, biostasis, and AI prosthetics.

OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
https://www.natashavita-more.com/

As longevity grows from a scientific movement into a global industry and cultural force, Natasha presents her Three Frontiers of Longevity Culture:

• Nanorobots — precision repair, sensing, and therapeutic delivery at the cellular scale.
• Biostasis — preserving cells, tissues, organs, and potentially more complex biological systems.
• AI prosthetics — intelligent, adaptive technologies moving from restored function toward expanded human capability.

We separate what is possible today from what is experimental and what remains a long-term vision. How close are we to medical nanorobots? Could organ banking become the bridge to human biostasis? When does an intelligent prosthetic stop being a tool and begin becoming part of the person?

The conversation also examines the AI–biology longevity flywheel: how artificial intelligence could accelerate biological discovery, diagnostics, drug development, personalized interventions, regenerative medicine, and the broader effort to extend healthy human life.

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Jacob Ward on The Loop, AI, and a World Without Real Choices

I recorded this conversation ten months ago. It has aged into something closer to a warning label.

Jacob Ward wrote The Loop before ChatGPT made his argument obvious. His claim: AI is doing to our decision-making what Google Maps did to our sense of direction. You never notice the skill leaving. You notice, one day, that you cannot get home without the phone.

So I asked him what I thought was a simple question. What is a choice?

Jake’s answer took the rest of the hour, and it starts somewhere uncomfortable. He describes a dinner with addiction scientists, people who study compulsion for a living, hired by consumer app companies. Not to cure anything. To calibrate.

From there we got into the decisions we have already handed over without a vote: hiring, lending, bail, custody, welfare. Hard moral calls outsourced to systems nobody in the room can inspect, because the human version was exhausting and the machine version is fast and cheap.

He is not a doomer, which is why the conversation lands. He thinks the fight for #FreeWill is still winnable, and he pointed to two pieces of evidence I did not expect: teenagers calling AI “clankers,” and the return of film cameras.

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Microbes turn CO₂ into protein and vitamin B9 at commercially viable prices

Researchers are developing biotechnological processes that enable microbes to produce proteins and vitamins for human consumption using basic chemical ingredients, such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen—entirely bypassing livestock farming and agriculture. Because these methods also require energy input, they are popularly called “power-to-protein” and “power-to-vitamin” processes.

Environmental biotechnologist Lars Angenent, of the University of Tübingen’s excellence cluster, Control of Microorganisms to Fight Infections (CMFI), has optimized one such process in the laboratory; it produces proteins as well as vitamin B9, also known as folic acid.

The process is unique in that it comprises two steps, using two different microbes sequentially. Angenent and his team have been working to find out whether it can be scaled up to technically and economically viable industrial production. They have found that a production facility capable of supplying 5.6 million people with the recommended daily dose of vitamin B9 and contributing to their protein intake at market prices would pay for itself after just five years. The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

First-in-class therapy targets ‘undruggable’ protein in hard-to-treat blood cancers

A first-in-class therapy to target MYC, one of the most sought-after and difficult targets in cancer biology, showed promise in hard-to-treat blood cancers, according to a new preclinical study from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center published in Blood.

Researchers led by Michael Andreeff, M.D., Ph.D., professor, and Yuki Nishida, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, both of Leukemia, found that the experimental drug GT19630 interrupts a newly discovered cycle between MYC and GSPT1, resulting in strong anticancer activity in preclinical models of leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma, including treatment-resistant and TP53-mutated disease.

“For decades, scientists have struggled to develop therapies that successfully block MYC, leading many in the field to describe it as undruggable,” Andreeff said. “By identifying a vulnerability in the relationship between MYC and GSPT1, we found a way to eliminate both proteins and disable a pathway many cancers depend on for survival.”

This yeast supplement may boost cancer-fighting immunity

A simple yeast-based food supplement may help restore the immune system’s ability to fight cancer, according to new research in mice. Scientists found that yeast beta-glucan reprogrammed early immune cells in the bone marrow, leading to stronger, longer-lasting cancer-fighting responses against colorectal, skin, and breast cancer cells.

Longevity Day

LONGEVITY DAY — a science-fiction trailer for the Future Vision XPRIZE.

In 2035, an eighty-eight-year-old biologist with cancer and failing memory fights to restart the AI-assisted rejuvenation research that may be her last chance — three years after a catastrophic AI failure nearly convinced the world to abandon frontier research altogether.

A story about making aging optional.

Written, directed and produced by Sergio M.L. Tarrero.
Alianza Futurista • https://alianzafuturista.org.

Submitted to the Future Vision XPRIZE, presented by the XPRIZE Foundation, Google and Range Media Partners.
https://futurevisionxprize.com.

#FutureVisionXPRIZE

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New brain cell formation stalls in adults with depression, study shows

Findings from a new study by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons suggest that the trickle of neurons created in the adult hippocampus could be instrumental in preventing depression. Most of the brain’s 100 billion neurons are created before birth.

Published in the journal Nature Medicine, the study shows for the first time that neurogenesis stalls in the brains of adults with major depressive disorder and identifies the molecular programs that control neurogenesis, which may help researchers develop new therapies.

“Historically, depression was thought to be a disease of neurotransmitter deficiency, especially serotonin, but we now think that depression stems from multiple issues that affect our neurons’ ability to adapt to stress and changing environments,” says Maura Dupont, a professor of psychiatry who led the research.

Super-resolution microscopy reveals how a cancer drug triggers cellular breakdown

Cancer drugs are often designed to block specific molecular targets, but what happens after they enter a cell is not always well understood. A new study published in Biophotonics Discovery demonstrates how advanced imaging technology can help answer that question.

Using super-resolution microscopy, researchers tracked the cancer drug sunitinib inside living cells and observed how it altered several of the cell’s most important structures. The work provides a detailed view of drug behavior at the microscopic level and highlights the growing role of optical imaging in drug development and cellular engineering.

Sunitinib is used to treat several cancers, including kidney cancer. Its therapeutic activity has traditionally been linked to its ability to inhibit enzymes that drive tumor growth. However, researchers have increasingly recognized that where a drug travels inside a cell can also influence its effectiveness and side effects.