Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: health – Page 233

EVP, patient advocacy & engagement, national patient advocate foundation.

Gwen Darien is Executive Vice President for Patient Advocacy and Engagement, at the National Patient Advocate Foundation (https://www.npaf.org/), an organization with a mission of bringing patient voices to health system delivery reform, developing and driving initiatives promoting equitable access to affordable quality health care, and prioritizing the patient voice in health system delivery reform to achieve person-centered care. She is also Executive Vice President at their sister organization, Patient Advocate Foundation (https://www.patientadvocate.org/), a national non-profit organization which provides case management services and financial aid to Americans with chronic, life threatening and debilitating illnesses.

Gwen is a longtime patient advocate who has played leadership roles in some of the country’s preeminent nonprofit organizations.

As a three-time cancer survivor herself, Gwen came into cancer advocacy expressly to change the experiences and outcomes for the patients who came after her and to change the public dialogue about cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

In 2,005 Gwen started the first stand-alone advocacy entity in a professional cancer research organization, at the American Association for Cancer Research, launching CR magazine – a magazine for people with cancer and those who care for them. Later, she served as the executive director of the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation; director of The Pathways Project; and executive vice president of programs and services at the Cancer Support Community, where in each role, Gwen championed placing patients at the center of health system change, whether it was for research, public policy or direct services.

Continue reading “Gwen Darien — EVP, Patient Advocacy and Engagement, National Patient Advocate Foundation” | >

Displacing Delta. Expect this to dominate globally in the coming year, if truly 10% more transmissible.

An offshoot of the Delta coronavirus variant which is slowly spreading throughout the UK is expected to be dominant within a matter of months, experts believe.

Known as AY.4.2, the sub-variant is thought to be at least 10 cent more transmissible than its predecessor, with analysis underway to determine what accounts for its increased infectiousness.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said that early tests do not suggest that AY.4.2, which has been labelled a ‘Variant Under Investigation’, has acquired the ability to evade immunity generated by infection or injection.

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“De-Extinction” Biotechnology & Conservation Biology — Ben Novak, Lead Scientist Revive & Restore

Ben Novak is Lead Scientist, at Revive & Restore (https://reviverestore.org/), a California-based non-profit that works to bring biotechnology to conservation biology with the mission to enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct animals (https://reviverestore.org/what-we-do/ted-talk/).

Ben collaboratively pioneers new tools for genetic rescue and de-extinction, helps shape the genetic rescue efforts of Revive & Restore, and leads its flagship project, The Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback, working with collaborators and partners to restore the ecology of the Passenger Pigeon to the eastern North American forests. Ben uses his training in ecology and ancient-DNA lab work to contribute, hands-on, to the sequencing of the extinct Passenger Pigeon genome and to study important aspects of its natural history (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK2UlLsHkus&t=1s).

Ben’s mission in leading the Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback is to set the standard for de-extinction protocols and considerations in the lab and field. His 2018 review article, “De-extinction,” in the journal Genes, helped to define this new term. More recently, his treatment, “Building Ethical De-Extinction Programs—Considerations of Animal Welfare in Genetic Rescue” was published in December 2019 in The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics: 1st Edition.

Ben’s work at Revive & Restore also includes extensive education and outreach, the co-convening of seminal workshops, and helping to develop the Avian and Black-footed Ferret Genetic Rescue programs included in the Revive & Restore Catalyst Science Fund.

Continue reading “Ben Novak, Lead Scientist, Revive & Restore — De-Extinction Biotechnology & Conservation Biology” | >

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by SARS-CoV-2, continues to rage in many countries, straining health systems and economies. Vaccines protect against severe disease and death and are considered central to ending the pandemic. COVID-19 vaccines (and SARS-CoV-2 infection) elicit antibodies that are directed against the viral spike (S) protein and neutralize the virus. However, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants with S protein mutations that confer resistance to neutralization might compromise vaccine efficacy[1]. Furthermore, emerging viral variants with enhanced transmissibility, likely due to altered virus-host cell interactions, might rapidly spread globally. Therefore, it is important to investigate whether emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants exhibit altered host cell interactions and resistance against antibody-mediated neutralization.

Cellular & Molecular Immunology (2021) Cite this article.

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The non-E5 made rats healthier with a small increase in lifespan. The E5 part 2 is still ongoing with rats at 31 months that generally at most live 36 months.

In this video we give a brief update on the parallel experiments being conducted by Dr Katcher and Professor Goya. In these studies they are injecting E5 and young blood plasma into rats in repeatedly to see if the maximum lifespan can be extended.

The newsletter is here.
https://www.ntzplural.com/newsletter.

Papers mentioned in this video.
The original paper on BioXriv.
Reversing age: dual species measurement of epigenetic age with a single clock.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.07.082917v1
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Continue reading “Prof Goya & Dr Katcher Lifespan Experiment Update Oct 2021 | Modern Healthspan” | >

Dr. Ann Marie Kimball (https://epi.washington.edu/faculty/kimball-ann-marie/) is a physician, epidemiologist and currently holds the roles of Associate Fellow at the international affairs think tank Chatham House, and Vice Chair, COVID 19 task force, at The Rotary Foundation / Rotary International.

Previously, Dr. Kimball served as a strategic advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation, supporting the strengthening and development of strategies for Ebola, post-Ebola, and health crisis response, including planning and guiding the formation of a regional disease surveillance network in collaboration with Connecting Organizations for Regional Disease Surveillance (CORDS).

Before joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Dr. Kimball served as technical and strategic lead for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation surveillance strategy formation.

Prior to Gates, Dr. Kimball served as Professor of Epidemiology for the University of Washington (UW), School of Public Health, with adjunct appointments in Medicine (Bioinformatics and Infectious Diseases) and the Jackson School of Foreign Affairs. During her tenure at UW, Dr. Kimball founded and directed the APEC Emerging Infections Network, and led research and training programs in Surveillance and Informatics in Peru and Thailand.

Dr. Kimball’s research focus on global trade and emerging infections earned her a Fulbright New Century Scholars award and a Guggenheim Scholars award.

Dr. Kimball is also the author of Risky Trade: Infectious Diseases in an Era of Global Trade, which was highly reviewed by NEJM, Emerging Infections and Lancet. She has authored numerous scientific publications, and served on numerous Institute of Medicine panels. She is also a fellow in the American College of Preventive Medicine and member of the National Biosurveillance Advisory group (NBAS) from the Centers for Disease Control.

Continue reading “Dr Ann Marie Kimball, MD — Physician, Epidemiologist, Rotarian — Global Public Service, Saving Lives” | >

Balancing Risk and Cutting Edge Medical Innovation — Dr. Paul Offit, MD, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Paul A. Offit, MD, (https://www.paul-offit.com/) is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of virology and immunology, Co-Inventor of a landmark vaccine for the prevention of Rotavirus gastroenteritis, and holds multiple titles including — Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia (CHOP), Maurice R. Hilleman Chair of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics, Perelmann School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and Adjunct Associate Professor, The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology.

Dr. Offit was a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation and the Foundation for Vaccine Research, a member of the Institute of Medicine, and co-editor of the foremost vaccine text, Vaccines.

Dr. Offit is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, and the Sabin Vaccine Institute Gold Medal.

Dr. Offit has published more than 150 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of a landmark rotavirus vaccine recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC.

Continue reading “Dr Paul A Offit, MD — Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia (CHOP)” | >

An artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology rapidly diagnoses rare disorders in critically ill children with high accuracy, according to a report by scientists from University of Utah Health and Fabric Genomics, collaborators on a study led by Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. The benchmark finding, published in Genomic Medicine, foreshadows the next phase of medicine, where technology helps clinicians quickly determine the root cause of disease so they can give patients the right treatment sooner.

“This study is an exciting milestone demonstrating how rapid insights from AI-powered decision support technologies have the potential to significantly improve patient care,” says Mark Yandell, Ph.D., co-corresponding author on the paper. Yandell is a professor of human genetics and Edna Benning Presidential Endowed Chair at U of U Health, and a founding scientific advisor to Fabric.

Worldwide, about seven million infants are born with serious genetic disorders each year. For these children, life usually begins in intensive care. A handful of NICUs in the U.S., including at U of U Health, are now searching for genetic causes of disease by reading, or sequencing, the three billion DNA letters that make up the human genome. While it takes hours to sequence the whole genome, it can take days or weeks of computational and manual analysis to diagnose the illness.

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Summary: Researchers have linked Fragile X and SHANK3 deletion syndrome, two disorders associated with autism, to specific microscopic walking patterns.

Source: Rutgers.

Rutgers researchers have linked the genetic disorders Fragile X and SHANK3 deletion syndrome – both linked to autism and health problems – to walking patterns by examining the microscopic movements of those wearing motion-sensored sneakers.

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A team of researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Touchstone Diabetes Center have successfully used CRISPR gene editing to turn fat cells normally used for storage into energy-burning cells.

“It’s like flipping a switch. We removed the ‘brake’ on the energy burning pathway in by engineering a mutation that disrupts the interaction between a single pair of proteins,” said study leader Rana Gupta, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine. “Our research demonstrates that releasing this brake in fat cells can potentially help make existing much more effective.”

The research at UT Southwestern, ranked as one of the nation’s top 25 hospitals for diabetes and endocrinology care, is published in Genes and Development and supported by the National Institutes of Health.

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