Lifeboat Foundation

Cheap paper and pencil-based medical wearables could one day replace expensive health monitors.

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It’s not yet clear why some people infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, get really sick, while others have only mild symptoms. There’s some evidence that chronic health conditions—such as hypertension and diabetes can play a role, and scientists know that people’s genes can influence how their bodies react to other viruses. In a preprint posted to medRxiv on June 2, researchers describe a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of from 1,610 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and 2,205 healthy controls. The authors identified variants in two regions—the locus that encodes blood type and a multi-gene cluster on chromosome 3—that were linked to respiratory failure during SARS-CoV-2 infection.

In a genome-wide association study, variants in both the ABO blood group locus and a cluster of genes on human chromosome 3 are more common among COVID-19 patients with respiratory failure than in the general population.

Continue reading “Two Genetic Regions Linked with Severe COVID-19” »

One day, people could monitor their own health conditions by simply picking up a pencil and drawing a bioelectronic device on their skin. In a new study, University of Missouri engineers demonstrated that the simple combination of pencils and paper could be used to create devices that might be used to monitor personal health.

Their findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Zheng Yan, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering, said many existing commercial on-skin biomedical devices often contain two major components—a biomedical tracking component and a surrounding flexible material, such as plastic, to provide a supportive structure for the component to maintain an on-skin connection with a person’s body.

Very true.

And as in most applications of #MachineLearning, healthcare #AI systems are extremely data-hungry.

Fortunately, a slew of new sensors and data acquisition methods — including over 302 million wearables shipped in 2019 — are bursting onto the scene to meet the massive demand for medical data.

Continue reading “And as in most applications of #MachineLearning, healthcare #AI systems are extremely data-hungry” »

This my sleep was about the same as the previous week. I had great energy throughout the week when going through my exercise routines.

Sunday-6/28- Biked 48 km. 1 hour Yin Yoga. Stem Cell Neurotherapy 1 hour. 7 hours of sleep.

Continue reading “Week 5 (6/28-7/4) Using Stem Cell Neurotherapy” »

Canada’s highest court has issued a ruling today upholding a federal law preventing third parties, such as employers and insurance companies, from demanding genetic information from individuals.

In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada has decided the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act is a constitutional exercise of federal powers.

The human colon is home to a complex microbial ecosystem (microbiota), composed mostly of anaerobic organisms. Recent data suggest that gut microbes and their metabolites can affect human health through multiple mechanisms including altering the immune response , changing host cell metabolic states , and even affecting the response to immunotherapies.

The potential causative role of gut microbiota in health and disease is one of the most extraordinary findings of the past decade. Yet we are only starting to understand the multitude of mechanisms by which microbes promote changes in intestinal physiology, and how changes in the symbiotic relationship between the host and the resident microbiota contribute to the pathogenesis of both infectious and noninfectious diseases.

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An analysis of more than 17 million people in England — the largest study of its kind, according to its authors — has pinpointed a bevy of factors that can raise a person’s chances of dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The paper, published Wednesday in Nature, echoes reports from other countries that identify older people, men, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with underlying health conditions among the more vulnerable populations.

“This highlights a lot of what we already know about COVID-19,” said Uchechi Mitchell, a public health expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in the study. “But a lot of science is about repetition. The size of the study alone is a strength, and there is a need to continue documenting disparities.”

Antibiotic resistance is on the rise and is recognized by both the CDC¹ and the U.S. Military² as a current – and formidable – global health threat. The U.S Department of Defense (DoD) has long documented the warfighter’s outsized risk of exposure to infectious disease, including the increasing number of multi-drug resistant (MDR) organisms that have challenged military wound care in Iraq and Afghanistan³. Despite this looming crisis, there has been a notable exodus of pharmaceutical companies from the antibiotic space, as well as several high-profile failures of biotechnology companies focused on antibiotic development⁴. Current therapeutics to combat microbial infections, including MDR microbes and bacterial biothreats, are insufficient to meet the growing need, and existing methods to develop new treatments are too slow and/or costly to combat emerging drug resistance in pathogenic microorganisms.

DARPA’s Harnessing Enzymatic Activity for Lifesaving Remedies (HEALR) program aims to utilize a new therapeutic design toolkit and novel strategies/modalities to effectively treat microbial infections. Specifically, HEALR seeks to develop new medical countermeasures (MCMs) by recruiting native cellular machinery to recognize and clear disease-related targets for treating these infections. These advances could result in host-driven degradation or deactivation of pathogen targets, which may not only inhibit but could stop the pathogen in its tracks.

“HEALR presents the opportunity to identify drugs that are safer, more effective, and better address drug resistance and bacterial infections than existing therapeutic modalities,” noted Seth M. Cohen, Ph.D., program manager for the DARPA HEALR program. “By harnessing innate cellular processes, such as those exploited by proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTACs) and similar approaches, HEALR intends to achieve superior outcomes over existing therapies.”