Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 696

In March 2020, an experiment in science philanthropy was hatched in the span of a five-minute call.

Patrick Collison, the now 34-year-old billionaire CEO of the online payments company Stripe, and economist Tyler Cowen were chewing over a shared concern: Scientific progress seemed to be slowing down. As the first pandemic lockdowns went into effect, researchers were in a holding pattern, waiting to hear if they could redirect their federal grants to COVID-related work. Collison and Cowen worried that the National Institutes of Health wasn’t moving quickly enough, so they launched Fast Grants to get emergency research dollars to virologists, coronavirus experts, and other scientists rapidly.

“We thought: Let’s just do this,” Cowen recalls. “It was a bit like put up or shut up.”

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If you’re fighting cancer, a healthy lifestyle can help you stay well during and after treatment. Research suggests that good nutrition, exercise and other healthy behaviors may improve your quality of life during treatment.

“Taking charge of your health by developing healthy habits empowers you to cope better with your treatment and any side effects you may have,” says Lonny Yarmus, D.O., a board certified interventional pulmonologist at the Lung Cancer Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

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In a recent perspective piece published in the Nature Medicine Journal, researchers discussed the current achievements, challenges, and potential opportunities in using digital technologies, such as remote medicine and wearables in geriatric medicine and care.

Study: Digital health for aging populations. Image Credit: GroundPicture/Shutterstock.com.

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A natural sugar called mannose is a type of hexose that is abundant in many different types of fruits. Recent studies have demonstrated that mannose has been found to be effective in promoting immune tolerance, suppressing inflammatory diseases, and efficient in suppressing tumors by suppressing glycolysis. However, it is not fully understood how mannose exerts its anticancer activity. Now, a study by Sanford Burnham Prebys and the Osaka International Cancer Institute has shed new light on the anticancer properties of mannose and suggests that mannose could be a helpful secondary treatment for cancer.

The findings are published in eLife in an article titled, “Metabolic clogging of mannose triggers dNTP loss and genomic instability in human cancer cells.”

“Mannose has anticancer activity that inhibits cell proliferation and enhances the efficacy of chemotherapy,” wrote the researchers. “How mannose exerts its anticancer activity, however, remains poorly understood. Here, using genetically engineered human cancer cells that permit the precise control of mannose metabolic flux, we demonstrate that the large influx of mannose exceeding its metabolic capacity induced metabolic remodeling, leading to the generation of slow-cycling cells with limited deoxyribonucleoside triphosphates (dNTPs).”

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Patients who come to any Northwestern Medicine location for colonoscopies now have access to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which is improving the way gastroenterologists detect colon polyps and prevent colorectal cancer. According to new research by Northwestern Medicine, physicians who performed colonoscopies assisted by AI achieved a 13% increase in the detection and removal of colorectal polyps.

Computer-aided colonoscopies could reduce future colon cancer diagnoses by up to 39%.

“Most polyps do not become cancerous, but nearly all colorectal cancers begin as polyps,” says Rajesh N. Keswani, MD, MS, director of Endoscopy for Northwestern Memorial Hospital and director of quality for the Northwestern Medicine Digestive Health Center. “We want to detect them in their earliest stages and remove them to prevent future diagnoses of cancer. There’s nothing better than telling a patient that their decision to have a screening colonoscopy may have saved their life.”

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We often discuss clinical trials, research studies that evaluate the efficacy of new medical approaches. Necessary for both improving healthcare and advancing medicine, clinical trials make up a vital part of the medical process. Here, we will begin a series of articles to provide an overview of the clinical trial process, which will help you understand all the exciting studies you read about!

Doctors and researchers use clinical trials to develop new drugs to treat cancer (or other diseases). What may be a surprise is that not all clinical trials aim to cure disease; some work to improve the quality of life for patients living with an illness. Clinical trials can also help us improve screening and diagnostic methods. Additionally, some clinical trials access new approaches for preventing disease.

Arguably the most crucial component of any clinical trial is the volunteers. Clinical trial participants may have the disease in question, but this isn’t always the case because some clinical trials rely on healthy volunteers.

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Amino acids serve as the foundational elements of proteins, vital to the optimal functioning of biological structures. Proteins in all life forms are composed of 20 core amino acids.

<div class=””> <div class=””><br />Amino acids are a set of organic compounds used to build proteins. There are about 500 naturally occurring known amino acids, though only 20 appear in the genetic code. Proteins consist of one or more chains of amino acids called polypeptides. The sequence of the amino acid chain causes the polypeptide to fold into a shape that is biologically active. The amino acid sequences of proteins are encoded in the genes. Nine proteinogenic amino acids are called “essential” for humans because they cannot be produced from other compounds by the human body and so must be taken in as food.<br /></div> </div>

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For many people, when they hear China and genetic engineering in the same sentence, it is often synonymous with scandal, and gene-edited babies may spring to mind.

And, although it is true that nearly five years ago, researcher He Jiankui infamously claimed he had created the first ever gene-edited babies, before going to prison for three years, China has continued to pour a lot of money into genetic engineering research, and aims to become a global leader in the field.

“The accumulative amount of financing in the gene therapy field in China has exceeded $3.3 billion. Also, according to a Frost & Sullivan study, it is estimated that by 2025, gene therapy will reach a scale of nearly $17.89 billion in China,” said Fiona Gao, founding partner of Chinsiders.

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Bryton Shang, CEO, Aquabyte.

We are facing a daunting task. The world will have to feed 10 billion mouths by 2050, but our current methods are unsustainable. Eleven percent of global emissions come from agriculture. Water, land and biodiversity are rapidly declining. And more than 800 million people continue to suffer from hunger.

One of the most exciting technological developments of today is AI. The applications of vertical AI—which is trained to deeply understand a single industry—are limitless. In my earlier career, I harnessed the power of AI for financial markets, then for cancer treatments. In my current work, I think a lot about how AI can help us tackle another complicated behemoth: the food system.

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