The pharmaceuticals firm GSK has struck a five-year partnership with King’s College London to use artificial intelligence to develop personalised treatments for cancer by investigating the role played by genetics in the disease.
The tie-up, which involves 10 of the drug maker’s artificial intelligence experts working with 10 oncology specialists from King’s across their labs, will use computing to “play chess with cancer”, working out why only a fifth of patients respond well to immuno-oncology treatments.
CRISPR technology offers the promise to cure any human genetic disease with gene editing; which one will be the first?
CRISPR-Cas9 was first used as a gene-editing tool in 2012. In just a few years, the technology has exploded in popularity thanks to its promise of making gene editing much faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before.
CRISPR is short for ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.’ The term makes reference to a series of repetitive patterns found in the DNA of bacteria that form the basis of a primitive immune system, defending them from viral invaders by cutting their DNA.
Ancient DNA extracted from human bones has rewritten early Japanese history by underlining that modern day populations in Japan have a tripartite genetic origin—a finding that refines previously accepted views of a dual genomic ancestry.
Twelve newly sequenced ancient Japanese genomes show that modern day populations do indeed show the genetic signatures of early indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherer-fishers and immigrant Yayoi farmers—but also add a third genetic component that is linked to the Kofun peoples, whose culture spread in Japan between the 3rd and 7th centuries.
He explored the possibility of using gene therapy or gene editing—technologies that were dominating headlines for their ability to tackle other rare genetic disorders. But scientists told him those approaches would be difficult to implement for Dravet. Instead, a newfangled idea called transfer RNA (tRNA) therapy seemed like it might be the answer.
Drug Discovery tRNA therapies could help restore proteins lost in translation.
A new class of therapies based on transfer RNA could treat forms of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, genetic epilepsies, and more by.
This is the video of Harold Katcher’s presentation to the London Futurists. It was a great discussion, be sure to check it out.
#haroldkatcher #antiaging #rejuvenation #futurism
It has been known for some time that young blood plasma can confer beneficial effects on various organs in mice, although the mechanisms and implications remained unclear. A recent breakthrough experiment is attracting more attention to this area of research: rats treated with a blood plasma mixture known as E5 subsequently had their effective biological age measured by epigenetic clocks, involving 593 tissue samples. The result was a halving of the epigenetic ages of blood, heart, and liver tissue, and a lesser reduction (still statistically significant) in the epigenetic age of the hypothalamus. This has been heralded as the single most dramatic age-reversal experiment in mammals to date.
A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.
The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1 A and C = 0).
To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.
“You may hit the tipping point when you’re 50; it may happen when you’re 80; it may never happen,” Schindler said. “But once you pass the tipping point, you’re going to accumulate high levels of amyloid that are likely to cause dementia. If we know how much amyloid someone has right now, we can calculate how long ago they hit the tipping point and estimate how much longer it will be until they are likely to develop symptoms.”
Summary: A new algorithm uses neuroimaging data of amyloid levels in the brain and takes into account a person’s age to determine when a person with genetic Alzheimer’s risk factors, and with no signs of cognitive decline, will develop the disease.
Source; WUSTL
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed an approach to estimating when a person who is likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, but has no cognitive symptoms, will start showing signs of Alzheimer’s dementia.
Replacing or editing disease-causing mutations holds great promise for treating many human diseases. Yet, delivering therapeutic genetic modifiers to specific cells in vivo has been challenging, particularly in large, anatomically distributed tissues such as skeletal muscle. Here, we establish an in vivo strategy to evolve and stringently select capsid variants of adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) that enable potent delivery to desired tissues. Using this method, we identify a class of RGD motif-containing capsids that transduces muscle with superior efficiency and selectivity after intravenous injection in mice and non-human primates. We demonstrate substantially enhanced potency and therapeutic efficacy of these engineered vectors compared to naturally occurring AAV capsids in two mouse models of genetic muscle disease. The top capsid variants from our selection approach show conserved potency for delivery across a variety of inbred mouse strains, and in cynomolgus macaques and human primary myotubes, with transduction dependent on target cell expressed integrin heterodimers.
The label on RecA together with fluorescent markers on the DNA allows the researchers to follow every step of the process accurately; for example, they conclude that the whole repair is finished in 15 minutes, on average, and that the template is located in about nine. Using microscopy, Elf and his team investigate the fate of the break site and its homologous copy in real-time. They also find that the cell responds by rearranging RecA to form thin filaments that span the length of the cell.
How the cell can mend broken DNA
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).
The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy or spirituality. It’s a matter of hard science. It’s a matter of understanding the brain and the mind — a pattern structure made out of information. It’s also a matter of engineering. If we can understand the functionality of the brain, its neural code, then we can build the same functionality into our computer systems. There’s no consensus on what produces consciousness, but everyone regardless of metaphysical views can agree what it is like to be conscious. Given that consciousness is subjectivity, what consciousness is like is what consciousness is.
‘Mind’ and ‘Consciousness’ are two different but somewhat overlapping terms related to the phenomenality of our experiential reality. Different species have a variety of their biological information processors which unsurprisingly results in qualia diversity. All species live in their own unique sensory universes. There is “something it is like to be” an organism. The human brain, our biological “wetware,” has a fractal structure on many genetic and abstract cognitive levels. Information is “modus operandi” of consciousness.
If we are to reason for the non-dual picture of the world then quantum physics is directly linked to consciousness. The human brain is a physical organ that transmits and interprets electrochemical signals. Its biochemistry is certainly governed by quantum physical laws, and consciousness — which is clearly related to the functioning of the brain — must therefore be related to the quantum physical processes going on within the brain and in the cosmos at large. Research has shown that consciousness is non-local, a scientific way of alluding to a connection within a higher dimensional order. Matter has also been shown to be non-local, which hints that matter might be an expression of consciousness, emerging from the ‘Unified Field’ — the quantum layer of pure potentiality — the code layer beneath all dimensions where time and space are information.
