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“I believe gene therapy will become a mainstay in treating, and maybe curing, many of our most devastating and intractable illnesses,” said FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb after Luxturna’s approval.

As innovative gene and cell therapies continue to make the transition from the laboratory to the clinic, they are bringing with them the promise of truly personalised medicine. The last few years have seen the regulatory approval of the first gene therapies that take a patient’s own immune cells and genetically engineer them to target cancer cells more effectively.

These chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies now represent a rapidly growing field, with Novartis’s Kymriah, the first CAR-T therapy approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in August 2017 for the treatment of a rare blood cancer, seen as the tip of the iceberg for this treatment class’ potential. Approval of Kite Pharma’s Yescarta, a CAR-T treatment for certain forms of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, followed just a few months later.

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The advantages of flow batteries include easy scalability and long cycle life. Among its disadvantages are relatively low energy density and high component cost.

Form Energy’s use of sulfur, which is both cheap and abundant, lowers those costs dramatically.

As described in PV-Magazine, the battery uses sulfur in the anode and aerated liquid salt in the cathode. Oxygen flowing in and out of the cathode makes the battery discharge and charge.

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The next phase of a NASA sponsored mission to 3D print human organs and tissues in space will launch in February 2019. A 3D BioFabrication Facility (BFF) developed by nScrypt and Techshot and destined for the International Space Station (ISS) will form part of the cargo of SpaceX CRS-17.

3D printing in zero gravity

nScrypt is based in Orlando, Florida and is a manufacturer of industrial micro-dispensing and 3D printing systems. The company is spin out of Sciperio Inc who, under a DARPA contact, developed an award winning bioprinter in 2003.

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Why on Earth would you ever want to be less than completely healthy?


Recently, Reason of Fight Aging! pointed out psychological research revealing a certain conservatism in terms of what people consider to be the “ideal” levels of happiness, intelligence, longevity, and even health.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that significant numbers of people in the studies weren’t too keen on the idea of living much longer than the average (around 90 years), and even under the assumption of eternal youth, their preference didn’t go past 120 on average; after all, LEAF wouldn’t be in business if the idea of healthy life extension wasn’t so inexplicably frowned upon. What’s really flabbergasting, though, is that even health—health!—is apparently something you can have too much of; on a scale from 0 (“completely unhealthy”) to 100 (“completely healthy”), the average preference gravitated somewhere between 80 and 90. These results provide us with an occasion for reflection.

(Il)logical conclusions

It’s uncertain whether the respondents in these studies realized the bizarre yet inevitable implications of their statements. If 100 means “completely healthy” and your “ideal” level of health is only, say, 85, does that mean that, should you ever perceive that you’re about “90” healthy, you’d deliberately start looking into ways of harming your own health to get back to your ideal level? How, exactly, would being “90” healthy be too much? What would you dislike about not being a little more sick? How would you benefit from being less than completely healthy? Has there ever been, at any point in your life, a moment when you thought, “Blimey, I’m far too healthy for my own good. Time to get sick”? Do you think a point will ever come when, while sick, you’ll think, “Perfect timing—I was just concerned that I was healthier than my ideal level”?

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A new interview I did is out at the 2b AHEAD Future Congress event I spoke at in Germany (audio and written): https://www.future.consulting/…/full-interview-with-zoltan…/ #transhumanist


2b AHEAD: So we would like to start an interview with Zoltan Istvan, the presidential candidate for the transhumanist party and leading a figure in the transhumanist movement. Also the best-selling author of “The Transhumanist Wager.” Welcome, glad that you could make it. I hope you’ve been enjoying…

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