Lifeboat Foundation

New Device Brings ‘Dead’ Hearts Back to Life.

“Heart transplants only come from brain-dead donors whose hearts are cut away while their bodies are still healthy. Without a device such as this, hearts from dead donors are considered by surgeons as too damaged to use. With the device, the heart gets the essential infusion of blood to restore its energy.”

Video Credit: TransMedics.

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Heales, The Healthy Life Extension Society, is dedicated to promoting and informing the public about life extension and longevity breakthroughs. In this spirit, Heales has announced a Short Film Competition with a grand prize of €3.000. Heales wants you to capture why living longer, healthier lives will be something to celebrate, not fear.

We caught up with Didier Cournelle, director of the society, to find out more about the competition:

Why do you think there are so few positive portrayals of longevity and life extension in the media? In general, the press prefers bad news to good news. Good news concerning longevity is difficult to describe because it is often made of small, incremental progress. Another aspect is that the idea of radical life extension looks fringe to many people. Last aspect: to speak about longevity is to speak about death and unconsciously, we tend to avoid what reminds us of our own death.

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A consortium of top tech companies, laboratories, and universities is partnering with the Department of Defense to improve the manufacturing of flexible electronics, which could one day end up in aircraft, health monitors, military tools, or consumer electronics like wearables. The department is awarding the consortium, known as the FlexTech Alliance, $75 million over five years, with other sources, including universities, non-profits, and state and local governments, contributing an additional $96 million.

The consortium is composed of well over 100 organizations, with key partners including Apple, Boeing, GE, GM, Lockheed Martin, Motorola Mobility, and Qualcomm, among many others. Partnering universities include Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, and MIT, also among many others.

Continue reading “Apple, Boeing, MIT, and more partner with Pentagon to improve flexible electronics” »

The circadian rhythm is a subject of many studies, yet it remains a mystery in many ways. While scientists have identified many of the cell proteins involved in circadian rhythm and several genes that contribute to a healthy rhythm, the ‘master clock’ gene remained elusive. However, a recent chronobiology study on rats indicates that the Zfhx3, or Zinc Finger Homeobox 3, gene may be the master gene that dictates this important biological rhythm.

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Most cancer-busting strategies focus on removing cancerous cells. While this approach has proved extremely effective on many patients, most treatments have unpleasant side effects and there are many strains which prove extremely challenging to remove. An alternative model to this is to alter instead of remove — fixing cancerous behaviour by ‘reprogramming’ cells that go rogue; essentially swiss finishing school for cellular miscreants. A study published in Nature Cell Biology now provides hope that this tactic could in fact work in many cancers.

Researchers from Mayo Clinic’s Florida campus have found that adhesion proteins, which act like a glue sticking cells together, actually interact with a cell’s ‘microprocessor’. This processor creates molecules called miRNAs, which regulate multiple genes and essentially activate or de-activate different behavioural programs (like commands in computer programming). When healthy cells bump into a neighbour and begin to glue together, these adhesion proteins normally influence both cells — tuning down growth pathways. In cancer, the lab found this adhesion is perturbed; de-regulating miRNA production and enabling rampant growth. When scientists corrected these miRNA levels, the growth was arrested.

Continue reading “Can We Reprogram Cancer Cells Back To Normal?” »

Stem cells are a daily feature of science news nowadays and related fields are creating an astonishing array of advancements within regenerative medicine. Unfortunately unlesss you have a scientific background the differences between types can be terribly confusing. We are here to help.

The term stem cell can encompass:

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As regenerative medicine expands, our ability to engineer organs is growing with it. Researchers can now grow a number of so called ‘organoids’ — mini-organs which can teach us more about developmental biology and enable vastly improved testing. In the latest addition to the bunch, a team from Ohio State University has successfully engineered the most complete model yet of a human brain, with a similar maturity to a 5 week old fetus.

Containing 99% of the genes present in the human fetal brain, and about the size of an eraser, the organoid was developed from transformed adult human skin. This method could allow more ethical and precise clinical trials, both speeding up and enabling more rigorous, personalized testing. As animal testing frequently fails to predict varied human responses, these organoid models offer an alternative approach which could revolutionize clinical trial methodology.

“It not only looks like the developing brain, its diverse cell types express nearly all genes like a brain. We’ve struggled for a long time trying to solve complex brain disease problems that cause tremendous pain and suffering. The power of this brain model bodes very well for human health because it gives us better and more relevant options to test and develop therapeutics other than rodents.”

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Checkout the latest Longevity Reporter Newsletter (22nd August, 2015), covering this week’s top news in health, aging, longevity.

This week: An Entire Nervous System Captured On Film; 10 Enduring Health Myths, Debunked By Science; Peto’s Paradox: Why Don’t Larger Animals Get Cancer More Often?; Antioxidants: Separating Myth From Reality; And more.

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A medication called modafinil is commonly used to treat people who experience narcolepsy, but it’s suspected that the vast majority of those who use the drug are taking it for another purpose that isn’t medically authorised: as a general cognitive enhancer for tasks such as studying or meeting a deadline.

Now a comprehensive review of the medication has looked at this ‘off licence’ use of the drug by healthy, non-sleep-deprived subjects to determine whether modafinil is safe – and to confirm whether the belief that it acts as a general-purpose ‘smart drug’ is grounded in reality.

According to researchers from the University of Oxford in the UK and Harvard Medical School in the US, modafinil delivers on both counts, constituting what’s thought to be the first safe smart drug that can provide demonstrable cognitive and concentration benefits. Brainpower in a pill, in other words.

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