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Pesquisadores da Human Longevity, Inc. Publicou documentos detalhando resultados do sequenciamento profundo de 10.545 genomas humanos.

Documento descreve 150 milhões de variantes raras ou desconhecidas; cerca de 8.500 novas variantes por genoma.

Companhia também anuncia novo motor de pesquisa do genoma, HLI Open Search, para testes beta.

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Customised immunotherapy for treating cancer is part of the new generation of biotech solutions to diseases.


UC San Francisco scientists have engineered human immune cells that can precisely locate diseased cells anywhere in the body and execute a wide range of customizable responses, including the delivery of drugs or other therapeutic payloads directly to tumors or other unhealthy tissues. In experiments with mice, these immune cells, called synNotch T cells, efficiently homed in on tumors and released a specialized antibody therapy, eradicating the cancer without attacking normal cells.

As reported in the Sept. 29, 2016, online edition of Cell, in addition to delivering therapeutic agents, synNotch can be programmed to kill cancer cells in a variety of other ways. But synNotch cells can also carry out instructions that suppress the immune response, offering the possibility that these cells could be used to treat autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes or to locally suppress immune system rejection of transplanted organs.

“SynNotch is a universal molecular sensor that allows us to program as if they were microscopic robots,” said Wendell Lim, PhD, chair and professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UCSF, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. “They can be customized with different features and functions, and when they detect the appropriate signals in a diseased tissue, they can be triggered to deploy diverse therapeutic weapons.”

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Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world’s first commercial astronaut.

The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world’s largest governments had done before.

Peter Diamandis was the son of hardworking immigrants who wanted their science prodigy to make the family proud and become a doctor. But from the age of eight, when he watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon, his singular goal was to get to space. When he realized NASA was winding down manned space flight, Diamandis set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. If the government wouldn’t send him to space, he would create a private space flight industry himself.

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Most people will be familiar with Moore’s Law which states that the number of transistors it’s possible to get on a microprocessor doubles every 18 months. If this holds true it means that some time in the 2020s we’ll be measuring these circuits on an atomic scale.

You might think that that’s where everything comes to a juddering halt. But the next step from this is the creation of quantum computers which use the properties of atoms and molecules to perform processing and memory tasks.

If this all sounds a bit sci-fi, it’s because practical quantum computers are still some way in the future. However, scientists have already succeeded in building basic quantum computers that can perform certain calculations. And when practical quantum computing does arrive it has the potential to bring about a change as great as that delivered by the microchip.

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Check this out.


Engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are leading a research team that is developing a new type of nanodevice for computer microprocessors that can mimic the functioning of a biological synapse—the place where a signal passes from one nerve cell to another in the body. The work is featured in the advance online publication of Nature Materials.

Such neuromorphic computing in which microprocessors are configured more like human brains is one of the most promising transformative computing technologies currently under study.

J. Joshua Yang and Qiangfei Xia are professors in the electrical and computer engineering department in the UMass Amherst College of Engineering. Yang describes the research as part of collaborative work on a new type of memristive device.

UK researchers from five major universities close in on a cure for HIV by reprogramming immune cells to recognize the virus and destroy it.


A British man could become the first person in the world to be cured of HIV using a new therapy designed by a team of scientists from five UK universities.

The 44-year-old is one of 50 people currently trialling a treatment which targets the disease even in its dormant state.

Scientists told The Sunday Times that presently the virus is completely undetectable in the man’s blood, although that could be a result of regular drugs. However if the dormant cells are also cleared out it could represent the first complete cure. Trial results are expected to be published in 2018.