Short, toxic RNAs kill brain cells and may allow Alzheimer’s to develop.
Cedars-Sinai Cancer investigators have used a unique precision medicine and artificial intelligence (AI) tool called the Molecular Twin Precision Oncology Platform to identify biomarkers that outperform the standard test for predicting pancreatic cancer survival. Their study, published in Nature Cancer, demonstrates the viability of a tool that could one day guide and improve treatment for all cancer patients.
“Molecular Twin, which we developed at Cedars-Sinai, can be used to study any tumor type, including pancreatic cancer, which is notoriously difficult to treat,” said Dan Theodorescu, MD, Ph.D., director of Cedars-Sinai Cancer and the PHASE ONE Foundation Distinguished Chair, and senior author of the study. “Using our Molecular Twin technology, we anticipate creating tests that can be used even in locations that lack access to advanced resources and technology, pairing patients with the most effective therapies and expanding the availability of precision medicine.”
Investigators used the Molecular Twin platform to analyze blood and tissue samples from 74 patients with the most common and most aggressive pancreatic cancer type, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. The disease begins in the cells lining ducts that carry digestive enzymes from the pancreas to the small intestine.
Confounding and confusing.
As measurements of distant stars and galaxies become more precise, cosmologists are struggling to make sense of sparring values.
Stanislaw Lem’s forgotten masterwork Summa Technologiae, now in English half a century after publication, is a heady mix of prescience, philosophy and irony.
By Simon Ings
Summa Technologiae
Posted in biotech/medical, futurism
„Summa Technologie is a „mother-essay from which most of Lem’s later essayistic books stem. It was written in times when most of the discussed issues – today sometimes quite obvious ones – belonged to the world of fantasy. The ambition behind this project still amazes, especially if we take into consideration that Lem tried to set up a secular edifice of knowledge, competing in its universalism with Saint Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologica.
At the same time the book rivals world futurology — in the domain of foreseeing future ways of science and technology. Current generation, interested in biotechnology and informatics, shall find in Lem’s “Summa” the project and prophecy of todays’ successes of these disciplines.
The English translation (University Of Minnesota Press, 2013) is the work of Joanna Zylinska, professor of new media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Nobel prizewinner Jim Peebles, who helped create our model of how the universe evolved, discusses dark matter, the value of iconoclastic ideas and the astronomical anomalies to keep your eye on.
PRESS RELEASE — It is hard to imagine our lives without networks such as the internet or mobile phone networks. In the future, similar networks are planned for quantum technologies that will enable the tap-proof transmission of messages using quantum cryptography and make it possible to connect quantum computers to each other.
Like their conventional counterparts, such quantum networks require memory elements in which information can be temporarily stored and routed as needed. A team of researchers at the University of Basel led by Professor Philipp Treutlein has now developed such a memory element, which can be micro-fabricated and is, therefore, suitable for mass production. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.