A team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco Health has successfully treated a patient with severe depression by targeting the specific brain circuit involved in depressive brain patterns and resetting them thanks to a new proof-of-concept intervention.
Even though it centers around one patient, the groundbreaking study, which has now been published in Nature Medicine, is an important step toward bringing neuroscience advances and the treatment of psychiatric disorders, potentially helping millions of people who suffer from depression.
Based on Transformers, our new architecture advances genetic research by improving the ability to predict how DNA sequence influences gene expression.
When the Human Genome Project succeeded in mapping the DNA sequence of the human genome, the international research community were excited by the opportunity to better understand the genetic instructions that influence human health and development. DNA carries the genetic information that determines everything from eye colour to susceptibility to certain diseases and disorders. The roughly 20,000 sections of DNA in the human body known as genes contain instructions about the amino acid sequence of proteins, which perform numerous essential functions in our cells. Yet these genes make up less than 2% of the genome. The remaining base pairs — which account for 98% of the 3 billion “letters” in the genome — are called “non-coding” and contain less well-understood instructions about when and where genes should be produced or expressed in the human body.
Human Factors, Ethical Artificial Intelligence, And Healthy Aging — Dr. Arathi Sethumadhavan, PhD, Head of User Research, AI, Ethics & Society, Microsoft Cloud+AI.
Dr. Arathi Sethumadhavan, Ph.D. is Head of User Research for AI, Ethics & Society, at Microsoft’s Cloud+AI organization, where she works at the intersection of user research, ethics, and product experience.
In her current role, Dr. Sethumadhavan is focused on the Microsoft AI ethical principles (privacy and consent, fairness, inclusion, accountability, and transparency) as it relates to various Microsoft AI experiences.
Dr. Sethumadhavan is a seasoned research leader, with two decades of experience studying human-technology interaction, and during the course of her career, she has led user research for several novel and complex applications (e.g., Microsoft’s custom neural voice, facial recognition), as well as at Medtronic, where she provided human factors leadership to multiple products in the Cardiac Rhythm and Heart Failure portfolio, including the world’s smallest pacemaker. She has also spent several years investigating the implications of automation on air traffic controller performance and situation awareness.
Dr. Sethumadhavan is also a Fellow at the World Economic Forum, where she is working on unlocking opportunities for positive impact with AI to address the needs of the aging population.
“In the preliminary data … there is a suspicion of an increased risk of heart inflammation, when vaccinated with Moderna,” the Danish Health Authority said in a statement.
It referred to data from a yet unpublished Nordic study, which would now be sent to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for further assessment. Final data was expected within a month, it added.
Sweden and Denmark said they now recommended the Comirnaty vaccine, from Pfizer/BioNTech (PFE.N), 0 instead.
Microsoft has confirmed that its financial services-focused industry cloud will be officially available on November 1 2021.
The news comes eight months after the company revealed it was launching three new industry clouds this year — for manufacturing, not-for-profits, and financial services. Today’s announcement means the financial-focused cloud is the first of the three to receive an official launch date, though Microsoft has previously introduced an industry cloud for health care and its retail-focused incarnation currently sits in public preview.
Driving this revolution has been a new breed and wave of founders and startups that merge the worlds of technology and bio — importantly, not just the old world of biotech (or a narrow definition of tech in bio as only “digital health”), but something much broader, bigger, and blending both worlds. In short, biology — enabled by technology — is eating the world. This has not only changed how we diagnose, treat, and manage disease, but has been changing the way we access, pay for, and deliver care in the healthcare system. It is now entering into manufacturing, food, and several other industries as well. Bio is becoming a part of everything.
This new era of industrialized bio — enabled by AI as well as an ongoing, foundational shift in biology from empirical science to more engineered approaches — will be the next industrial revolution in human history. And propelling it forward is an enormous new driving force, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, its ever-evolving strains, and the resulting COVID-19 disease pandemic and response — which I believe is analogous to our generation’s World War II (WW2). In other words: a massive global upheaval, but that later led to unprecedented innovation and significant new players.
As a result, we will now see the emergence of bio’s version of GAFA — playing off the “Google Amazon Facebook Apple” of the leading companies in computing, social, mobile — but for bio. And with it, a post-WW2/ post-Covid “Industrial Bio Complex”.
Sickle-cell disease is incurable and affects 15,000 people in the UK.
And the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence said the hope of reducing health inequalities for black people, who are predominantly affected and often have poorer health to start with, made the drug worth recommending.
It called it “an innovative treatment”.
The hope of reducing health inequalities for black people made it worth recommending, the regulator says.
Image-guided radiation therapy has evolved to include the ability to track tumors in real time during treatment. It’s improving cure rates and limiting side effects for a growing number of cancer patients.
Think of it like radio making way for television. For more than a century, radiation therapy has been effective in treating cancer. From the first X-rays, to today’s computed tomography (CT) scans, physicians have relied on various imaging techniques to locate tumors and guide their treatment. Enter real-time tumor tracking.
“Magnetic Resonance-guided therapy is really a new paradigm,” said Dr. Rodney Ellis, chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. He notes the leading-edge technology merges MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) with a linear accelerator, making it possible to reshape radiation dosage based on daily changes in a tumor’s shape, size and position and its surrounding healthy anatomy.
Efforts to study the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic have received help from a surprising source. A biologist in the United States has ‘excavated’ partial SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from the beginnings of the pandemic’s probable epicentre in Wuhan, China, that were deposited — but later removed — from a US government database.
The partial genome sequences address an evolutionary conundrum about the early genetic diversity of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, although scientists emphasize that they do not shed light on its origins. Nor is it fully clear why researchers at Wuhan University asked for the sequences to be removed from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), a repository for raw sequencing data maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Partial SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early outbreaks in Wuhan were removed from a US government database by the scientists who deposited them.
Stimulating STEM Innovation & Securing U.S. High-Tech Economy — Kimberly A. Reed, Fmr President and Chairman Export-Import Bank of the United States.
Kimberly A. Reed just finished up a 2-year term as President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM — https://www.exim.gov). She was the first woman to lead EXIM in the agency’s 87-year history, was the first recipient of EXIM’s highest honor, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Award, and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2019 on a strong bi-partisan basis.
EXIM provides loans, guarantees, and export credit insurance for the export of U.S. goods and services from enterprises ranging from Fortune 100 companies to small businesses in a multitude of sectors including infrastructure, power, agriculture, transportation/aviation, health care, commodities, industrial, and technology.
Ms. Reed was recognized for successfully navigating Congress to re-open EXIM after four years of dormancy and transforming the mission and impact of the 515-person independent federal agency.
Ms. Reed also spearheaded EXIM’s historic, longest-ever Congressional re-authorization of seven years and a significant new mandate, the Program on China and Transformational Exports, which focuses on industries including biomedical sciences, biotechnology, wireless communication (5G), renewable energy, financial technologies, artificial intelligence, and the space industry.
