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Longevity become hottest object for investments;

Startup founded 5 moths ago just raised $250 million.


The start-up, which launched in September and is headquartered in Warren, N.J., announced Thursday it has raised $250 million in venture capital from global biopharmaceutical company Celgene, biotechnology company United Therapeutics Corporation, biopharmaceutical company Sorrento Therapeutics, DNA sequencing and machine learning company Human Longevity, Inc.

Its biological “Band-Aids” are used to accelerate the treatment of wounds and burns resulting from injury or any manner of reconstructive surgery, and its injectable stem cell products can accelerate the repair of a tissue or organ. These restorative products cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per unit, according to Hariri. Celularity bought its stem cell bandage business earlier in January when it acquired Alliqua BioMedical for $29 million.

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Summary: A new treatment that uses extracellular vesicles filled with exosomes derived from human stem cells could help repair brain damage following stroke, researchers report.

Source: University of Georgia.

A team of researchers at the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center and ArunA Biomedical, a UGA startup company, have developed a new treatment for stroke that reduces brain damage and accelerates the brain’s natural healing tendencies in animal models. They published their findings in the journal Translational Stroke Research.

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A collaborative research team has designed a wearable robot to support a person’s hip joint while walking. The team, led by Minoru Hashimoto, a professor of textile science and technology at Shinshu University in Japan, published the details of their prototype in Smart Materials and Structures, a journal published by the Institute of Physics.

“With a rapidly aging society, an increasing number of elderly people require care after suffering from stroke, and other-age related disabilities. Various technologies, devices, and robots are emerging to aid caretakers,” wrote Hashimoto, noting that several technologies meant to assist a person with walking are often cumbersome to the user. “[In our] current study, [we] sought to develop a lightweight, soft, wearable assist wear for supporting activities of daily life for older people with weakened muscles and those with mobility issues.”

The wearable system consists of plasticized polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel, mesh electrodes, and applied voltage. The mesh electrodes sandwich the gel, and when voltage is applied, the gel flexes and contracts, like a muscle. It’s a wearable actuator, the mechanism that causes movement.

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Today, we would like to highlight a recent study in which researchers show a way to selectively accelerate bone regeneration. They have achieved this by delivering Jagged-1 to injuries instead of the bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) that have been traditionally used.

What is jagged-1?

Jagged-1 is an osteoinductive protein that activates the Notch signaling pathway, which regulates bone healing at the site of injury. Osteoinduction is the process by which osteogenesis is induced.

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The world of an atom is one of random chaos and heat. At room temperatures, a cloud of atoms is a frenzied mess, with atoms zipping past each other and colliding, constantly changing their direction and speed.

Such random motions can be slowed, and even stopped entirely, by drastically the atoms. At a hair above absolute zero, previously frenetic atoms morph into an almost zombie-like state, moving as one wave-like formation, in a quantum form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Since the first Bose-Einstein condensates were successfully produced in 1995 by researchers in Colorado and by Wolfgang Ketterle and colleagues at MIT, scientists have been observing their strange quantum properties in order to gain insight into a number of phenomena, including magnetism and superconductivity. But cooling atoms into condensates is slow and inefficient, and more than 99 percent of the atoms in the original cloud are lost in the process.

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