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Worldwide, more people die from tuberculosis (TB) than any other infectious disease, even though the vast majority were vaccinated. The vaccine just isn’t that reliable. But a new Nature study finds that simply changing the way the vaccine is administered could dramatically boost its protective power.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) discovered that intravenous TB vaccination is highly protective against the infection in monkeys, compared to the standard injection directly into the skin, which offers minimal protection.

“The effects are amazing,” said senior author JoAnne Flynn, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the Pitt Center for Vaccine Research. “When we compared the lungs of animals given the vaccine intravenously versus the standard route, we saw a 100,000-fold reduction in bacterial burden. Nine out of 10 animals showed no inflammation in their lungs.”

Happy New year everyone! We wanted to give you an inside look as to what happens on our Dr. Joe live calls that take place once a month. Here’s a moment from our last Dr. Joe live call.

⁣ Some of the subjects Dr. Joe may address: latest scientific discoveries; health and wealth; love and relationships; neuroscience and epigenetics; happiness and vitality; the quantum model of reality; how you can make great and lasting changes in yourself and your life!⁣

⁣ With his vast experience and deepening knowledge of how each one of us can unlock unlimited abilities and transform our lives for the better, these classes offer you a unique opportunity to continually learn and interact with Dr. Joe! If you want to take it a step further in the work, Dr. Joe live is a great way to deepen your understanding, keep you plugged into the community and interact with Dr. Joe personally.⁣.

After years of ethical debates and breakthroughs in the lab, CRISPR has finally made its way to clinical trials. Researchers are now looking at whether the DNA-editing tool, as well as more conventional gene therapies, can effectively treat a wide array of heritable disorders and even cancers.

“There’s been a convergence of the science getting better, the manufacturing getting much better, and money being available for these kinds of studies,” says Cynthia Dunbar, a senior investigator at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. “It’s truly come of age.”

CRISPR — formally known as CRISPR-Cas9 — has been touted as an improvement over conventional gene therapy because of its potential precision. CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a genetic code that, contained in a strand of RNA and paired with the enzyme Cas9, acts like molecular scissors that can target and snip out specific genes. Add a template for a healthy gene, and CRISPR’s cut can allow the cell to replace a defective gene with a healthy one.

A group of scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences (ICG SB RAS) and the TSU Biological Institute has established a path through which nanoparticles of viruses and organic and inorganic substances from the environment enter the brain. Additionally, the researchers report a simple and inexpensive way to block their entry. The data obtained by the project could play a large role in medicine and pharmaceuticals, where nanoparticles are increasingly used for the diagnosis and treatment of serious diseases.

“There are a large number of nanoparticles of a wide variety of chemical elements and their compounds in the environment, ranging from harmless to toxic, for example, heavy metal oxides,” says Mikhail Moshkin, director of the Center for Laboratory Animal Genetic Resources of the ICG SB RAS. “Scientists have accumulated data that indicate the adverse effect of nanoparticles, for example, people who live closer than 50 meters to large highways may develop neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and others) due to the accumulation of nanosized particles in the brain.”

The researchers sought to determine how nanoparticles enter the brain. They cannot penetrate through the lungs and blood vessels because the blood-brain barrier blocks them from the brain. Experiments conducted on rodents helped calculate the trajectory of the movement of nanoparticles.

Epigenetic reprogramming. “We are very radical life extensionists, neither healthspan increase no morbidity compression are enough, we would like to add decades if not centuries to the human lifespan.”

Yuri Deigin Founder of Youthereum, speaking at Master Investor’s Investing in the Age of Longevity 2019 event.

Continue reading “Yuri Deigin | Youthereum | Investing in the Age of Longevity 2019” »

A Chinese scientist who helped create the world’s first gene-edited babies has been sentenced to three years in prison.

He Jiankui shocked the world in 2018 when he announced that twin girls Lulu and Nana had been born with modified DNA to make them resistant to HIV, which he had managed using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 before birth.

He, an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, said at the time that he was “proud” of the achievement. He later claimed that a second woman was pregnant as a result of his research.

Glioblastoma is one of the most common and aggressive forms of brain cancer, and it is particularly difficult to treat. Now, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have come up with a new approach to treatment for the disease, by growing organoids based on a patient’s own tumor to find the most effective treatments. Digital Trends spoke to senior author Dr. Donald O’Rourke to learn more.

The technique uses mini-brains — pea-sized organoids grown from stem cells which recreate features of full-scale brains. The mini-brains are similar enough to real brains that they can be used for testing out medical treatments to see how a full-sized brain would respond.

The breakthrough in this research is regarding treatment individualization. One of the challenges of treating a complex disease like brain cancer is that different people respond in different ways to the various treatment options available. After surgery has been performed to remove a tumor, doctors typically begin further treatment using radiation or chemotherapy around one month later. That means there isn’t always time to use perform genetic analysis to see which treatment might be best suited for a particular patient — the doctors need to know what will work and start further treatment as soon as possible.

We might one day combine tardigrade DNA into our own cells.

Talk with an Alzheimer’s researcher and you’ll likely hear the same lament: Finding a treatment or cure is incredibly challenging because scientists are not even certain what exactly causes the neurological disease in the first place.

In fact, researchers speak of a “web of causation” that can lead to Alzheimer’s. In addition to genetics, scientists look to so-called lifestyle elements such as blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Even the bacteria that live in our mouths are being scrutinized for their potential role in Alzheimer’s.

One element that researchers are completely certain about is that people who carry the apolipoprotein E4 gene — known as APOE4 — are at a greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s.