In 2025, Vetek Association is a founding partner in organizing several international conferences. In addition to the main longevity event in Israel – the Longevity Nation conference that will take place in Bar-Ilan University, on June 25–26 https://longevitynation.org/ Registration https://longevitynation.org/register-and-donate/
And community meetups in Israel https://www.longevityisrael.org/meetups/.
A cancer therapy that uses genetically engineered immune cells, called CAR T-cells, has kept a person free of a potentially fatal nerve tumour for a record-breaking 18 years. “This is, to my knowledge, the longest-lasting complete remission in a patient who received CAR T-cell therapy,” says Karin Straathof at University College London, who wasn’t involved in the treatment. “This patient is cured,” she says. Doctors use CAR T-cell therapy to treat some kinds of blood cancer, like leukaemia. To do this, they collect a sample of T-cells, which form part of the immune system, from a patient’s blood and genetically engineer them to target and kill cancer cells. They then infuse the modified cells back into the body. In 2022, a follow-up study found that this approach had put two people with leukaemia into remission for around 11 years, a record at the time.
In a study published in Science Advances, Mayo Clinic researchers found a new immunotherapy target called a cryptic antigen that may be key in helping the immune system fight tumors in ovarian cancer.
Cryptic antigens are part of a protein — known as epitopes — that are usually hidden or inaccessible to the immune system and may be present in tumor cells.
“These findings underscore the need to look at alternate sources of target antigens for ovarian cancer,” says Marion R. Curtis, Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic senior associate consultant in immunology and senior author of the study.
Curing Cancer In A Flash — Dr. Bill Loo, Jr., MD, PhD — Professor, Stanford Medicine / Co-Founder, TibaRay Inc
Dr. Billy W. Loo Jr., MD PhD (https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/6839) is a Professor of Radiation Oncology, a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute, the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS), and of Bio-X Interdisciplinary Biosciences Institute. He is a physician-scientist Radiation Oncologist and Bioengineer who directs the Thoracic Radiation Oncology Program and is Principal Investigator of the FLASH Sciences Lab at Stanford (https://med.stanford.edu/loo-lab.html).
Dr. Loo’s clinical specialty is precision targeted radiotherapy for lung/thoracic cancers, including stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR). Dr. Loo is a recognized expert in thoracic cancers serving on multiple national committees (including as writing member or vice-chair) that publish clinical guidelines on the treatment of lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies, particularly the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN).
A new strategy allows scientists to find and make materials that host so-called heavy electrons without requiring rare-earth or actinide elements.
Theoretical work indicates that a realistic model of a one-dimensional quantum magnet has a topologically nontrivial ground state.
British physician and microbiologist Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin nearly 100 years ago, was the first to warn of the dangers of antibiotic resistance.
In his 1945 Nobel Prize speech, 27 years after his breakthrough discovery, Fleming put the world on notice foretelling a potentially dark future for his miracle drug in the event of abuse or overuse of the medication. It was a warning that spelled trouble ahead for a vast segment of the pharmacopeia known as antimicrobial drugs.
Now, microbiologists in Hungary and China are collaborating on ways to predict drug resistance among strains of Staphylococcus aureus when exposed to antibiotics in the drug development pipeline—drugs that have yet to reach the marketplace.
Quantum computers, which operate leveraging quantum mechanics phenomena, could eventually tackle some optimization and computational problems faster and more efficiently than their classical counterparts. Instead of bits, the fundamental units of information in classical computers, quantum computers rely on qubits (quantum bits), which can be in multiple states at once.
Silicon-based quantum dots, semiconductor-based structures that trap individual electrons, have been widely used as qubits, as the spin state of the electrons they confine can be leveraged to encode information. Despite their promise, many quantum computers developed so far are susceptible to decoherence, which entails the disruption of qubit states due to their interaction with the surrounding environment.
Researchers at the University of Rochester recently set out to experimentally realize a so-called nuclear-spin dark state, a condition that has been theorized to improve the performance of quantum computers, suppressing undesirable interactions and thus reducing decoherence. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, demonstrates the potential of this state for reducing decoherence in quantum systems and thus potentially improving control over quantum information processing.
Northwestern University researchers have identified structural features in engineered cell receptors that correlate with variations in receptor function.
Computational protein structure prediction tools were used to analyze a library of synthetic receptors, revealing that specific structural attributes such as ectodomain (ECD) distance and transmembrane domain (TMD) interactions are associated with receptor performance.
Engineered cell therapies rely on synthetic receptors to transduce external signals into intracellular responses. The precise relationship between receptor structure and function remains poorly understood. Advances in protein structure prediction tools, such as AlphaFold and ColabFold, have enabled the modeling of complex proteins, including single-pass transmembrane receptors.
In a leap forward for quantum computing, a Microsoft team led by UC Santa Barbara physicists on Wednesday unveiled an eight-qubit topological quantum processor, the first of its kind. The chip, built as a proof-of-concept for the scientists’ design, opens the door to the development of the long-awaited topological quantum computer.
“We’ve got a bunch of stuff that we’ve been keeping under wraps that we’re dropping all at once now,” said Microsoft Station Q Director Chetan Nayak, a professor of physics at UCSB and a Technical Fellow for Quantum Hardware at Microsoft. The chip was revealed at Station Q’s annual conference in Santa Barbara, and accompanies a paper published in the journal Nature, authored by Station Q, their Microsoft teammates and a host of collaborators that presents the research team’s measurements of these new qubits.
“We have created a new state of matter called a topological superconductor,” Nayak explained. This phase of matter hosts exotic boundaries called Majorana zero modes (MZM) that are useful for quantum computing, he explained. Results of rigorous simulation and testing of their heterostructure devices are consistent with the observation of such states. “It shows that we can do it, do it fast and do it accurately,” he said.
