Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11008

A biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics for disease intersections of arthritis, hypertension, and cancer, today announced that they have entered into a license agreement regarding the Company’s SMARTICLES platform for the delivery of nanoparticles including small molecules, peptides, proteins and biologics…

Marina Biotech, Inc. a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics for disease intersections of arthritis, hypertension, and cancer, today announced that they have entered into a license agreement regarding the Company’s SMARTICLES platform for the delivery of nanoparticles including small molecules, peptides, proteins and biologics. This represents the first time that the Company’s SMARTICLES technologies have been licensed in connection with nanoparticles delivering small molecules, peptides, proteins and biologics. Under terms of the agreement, Marina could receive up to $90MM in success based milestones. Further details of the agreement were not disclosed.

Read more

The French Polynesian government, earlier this year, officially signed an agreement with The Seasteading Institute to cooperate on creating legal framework to allow for the development of The Floating Island Project. The legislation will give the Floating Island Project it’s own “special governing framework” creating an “innovative special economic zone”.

French Polynesia signs agreement for Floating Island Project

Read more

In Brief

  • Researchers were able to increase the weight of tobacco plants by around 14 to 20 percent compared to unmodified plants by adding in genes to improve the process of photosynthesis.
  • If successful with other plants, the method could improve the yields of food crops such as cowpeas, rice, and cassava and decrease world hunger.

In terms of plants, the concept of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) often refers to the insertion of genetic information from one species of plant to another so that the recipient plant gains a desirable trait. This process has been used extensively to improve crop yields. For example, one type of rice has been made waterproof so that yields aren’t affected by heavy floods from typhoons.

Now, a group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, has published a paper in the journal Science that takes a different approach to increasing crop yields. Instead of inserting genetic information from one species of plant into another to change it, these biologists used genetic modification to tweak a mechanism already inherent in plants.

Read more

A new story from Inverse with a quote I gave: https://www.inverse.com/article/11766-how-instant-translatio…nd-listens #future

People can save lives when they speak the same language.

Technology has advanced such that we can instantaneously communicate with people in the farthest reaches of the world without breaking a sweat. Furthermore, we can do so in their own languages without even a single credit hour of exploratory language class. When language tools like Google Translate and Yandex. Translate meet communication apps like Skype and Telegram, the world shrinks in the best way.

Dan Simonson, a computational linguist and Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University, endorses such language technology as a force for good, and it’s not just because he recently had to find the bathroom while visiting Beijing as a novice Mandarin speaker. “Humanitarian relief efforts are often executed by enlisted soldiers who have neither the time nor the resources to learn the language of where they are assigned to provide relief,” he says. “For these people to have access to even poor translation tools in low-resource languages — ones for which there isn’t a lot of data available to create translation tools — could immediately improve the efficiency of such relief efforts, saving thousands of lives as a result.”

Continue reading “Translation Technology Will Put Foreign Languages in Your Ear, Allowing Instant Communication” | >

3D printed bridge in Spain. Could this some day be our answer to reducing costs around US state and county infrastructure costs related to bridges and other structural repairs related to infrastructure?

The pedestrian crossing 3D-printed bridge installed in the urban park of Castilla La Mancha in Madrid, Spain, back in December is now ready to be used.

The 39-foot-long bridge was printed in micro-reinforced concrete at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia.

In addition to the 3D printing, the production process was also environmentally friendly allowing the team to optimize the distribution of materials, minimize the amount of water, and recycle the raw material during manufacture.

Continue reading “World’s First 3D Printed Concrete Pedestrian Bridge Opens in Spain” | >

Nice.

Testing treatments for bone cancer tumors may get easier with new enhancements to sophisticated support structures that mimic their biological environment, according to Rice University scientists.

A team led by Rice bioengineer Antonios Mikos has enhanced its three-dimensional printed scaffold to see how Ewing’s sarcoma (bone cancer) cells respond to stimuli, especially shear stress, the force experienced by tumors as viscous fluid such as blood flows through bone. The researchers determined the structure of a scaffold, natural or not, has a very real effect on how cells express signaling proteins that help cancer grow.

Sarcoma Cells on a scaffold

Sarcoma (bone cancer) cells proliferate on the surface of a 3D printed scaffold created at Rice University. Experiments at Rice showed that the size of pores in the scaffold, which mimics the extracellular matrix in bone, and the pores’ orientation make a difference in how cells proliferate in the presence of a flowing fluid, like blood. (Image: Mikos Research Group/Rice University)

Read more

SWARM still only restricts itself to sample sets/ group representation of the population. And, when we place AI in this mix; I get concerned still where daily lives are impacted by decisions coming out from this model. For example, I would hate to see laws and policies rely on SWARM data reasoning as Laws and Policies often have special exceptions that Judges and Policy makers must still have the ability to call not AI with SWARM.

US intelligence is investing millions of dollars in a global research effort to boost analytical thinking by unlocking the reason in crowds.

Read more

Interesting read on recent Gastric Cancer research. I do a lot of work with the National Esophageal Cancer (EC) Awareness Association; I can tell you that this disease is truly a killer as gastric related cancers are horrible to detect early enough and have a horrible record of reoccurring. Survival rates are some of the worst and today the rates of EC have skyrocketed especially in the younger age groups such as 25 to 35 year olds.

When you work for these foundations, read the stories from patients and their families looking for answers and help with everything from help on what types of food can their love eat and hopefully keep down for nutrition, to how can they get help with transportation to simply go to work or the doctor as meds restrictions on driving, to knowing the end is near and how to prepare, etc. The worst ones are the 27 to 36 yr old fathers and mothers whose love one is saying good bye to the person they married only recently married the year before or spent 7 years with. This is why I work for my foundations as every small step does in the end create a larger impact in the end and hopefully helps us finally beat this disease.

STING (stimulator of interferon genes) has recently been found to play an important role in host defenses against virus and intracellular bacteria via the regulation of type-I IFN signaling and innate immunity. Chronic infection with Helicobacter pylori is identified as the strongest risk factor for gastric cancer. Thus, we aim to explore the function of STING signaling in the development of gastric cancer. Immunohistochemistry was used to detect STING expression in 217 gastric cancer patients who underwent surgical resection. STING protein expression was remarkably decreased in tumor tissues compared to non-tumor tissues, and low STING staining intensity was positively correlated with tumor size, tumor invasion depth, lymph mode metastasis, TNM stage, and reduced patients’ survival. Multivariate analysis identified STING as an independent prognostic factor, which could improve the predictive accuracy for overall survival when incorporated into TNM staging system. In vitro studies revealed that knock-down of STING promoted colony formation, viability, migration and invasion of gastric cancer cells, and also led to a defect in cytosolic DNA sensing. Besides, chronic H. pylori infection up-regulated STING expression and activated STING signaling in mice. In conclusion, STING was proposed as a novel independent prognostic factor and potential immunotherapeutic target for gastric cancer.

Read more

Need to share this with a few folks researching glaucoma disease and treatment/ mutation reversal.

Elderly are frequently hospitalized due to their age-associated organ degeneration, the presence of co-morbidities, and their susceptibility to adverse insults. Alterations in functional status often occur during hospitalization, and the degree of functional decline can parallel the severity of illnesses. For older persons, gauging their pre-morbid and in-hospital functional status facilitates treatment planning and potentially functional restoration1,2,3. While the identification of risk factors or markers of poor pre-morbid and in-hospital functional status may help facilitate this process, this area remains under-researched to date. Factors associated with functional decline in the hospitalized elderly include the types of morbidities and the reasons for their admission. Indeed, elderly with chronic kidney disease (CKD) are more likely to exhibit functional decline, beginning from the earlier stage of CKD to end-stage renal disease (ESRD)4,5; functional dependency also predisposes individuals with CKD and ESRD to recurrent hospitalization and higher mortality.

Albuminuria and proteinuria, as the staging criteria for CKD in the most recent version of Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) CKD guidelines, are both well-established predictors of subsequent renal function decline. There is increasing awareness that albuminuria and proteinuria have an independent role in the prediction of adverse outcomes apart from the baseline renal function. As explained above, although CKD is associated with poor functional status, it is still unclear whether proteinuria alone exhibits similar association with functional status regardless of CKD. No reports focus on this association using the severity of proteinuria among geriatric patients with acute medical illnesses.

We hypothesized that elderly with proteinuria on admission, regardless of the presence of CKD, are more likely to have poor functional status, and that a dose-responsive relationship between the severity of proteinuria and that of functional impairment exists. Therefore, we conducted a cross-sectional study to evaluate this theory.

Continue reading “Unusual life cycle and impact on microfibril assembly of ADAMTS17, a secreted metalloprotease mutated in genetic eye disease” | >