Lifeboat Foundation

Startup Emrod is building a system to wirelessly beam power over long distances and plans to test the system with New Zealand’s second largest utility.

Most efforts to combat the coronavirus have focused on public health measures and the race to develop a vaccine. However, a team from Columbia University, Cornell University, and others has developed something new: a nasal spray that attacks the virus directly. In a newly released study, the concoction was effective at deactivating the novel coronavirus before it could infect cells.

Like all viruses, SARS-CoV-2 (the causative agent of COVID-19) needs to enter a cell to reproduce. The virus injects its RNA genome and hijacks cellular machinery to make copies of itself, eventually killing the cell and spreading new virus particles to infect other cells. Gaining access to a cell requires a “key” that fits into a protein lock on the cell surface. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, we call that the spike protein, and that’s where the new nasal spray blocker attacks.

The spike protein “unzips” when it meets up with a cell, exposing two chains of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins). The spray contains a lipoprotein, which has a complementary strand of amino acids linked with a cholesterol particle. The lipoprotein inserts itself into the spike protein, sticking to one of the chains that would otherwise bind to a receptor and allow the virus to infect the cell. With that lipoprotein in the way, the virus is inactivated.

Circa 2019 o,.o.

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Superconductors – materials in which electricity flows without any resistance whatsoever – could be extremely useful for future electronics. Now, engineers at the University of Tokyo have managed to create a superconductor out of a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) for the first time ever.

Sometimes called the fifth state of matter, behind the more commonly known solids, liquids, gases and plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates are what happens when you cool a gas of bosons right down to almost the coldest temperature possible. Experiments have shown that at this point, quantum phenomena can be observed at the macro scale. Scientists have used BECs as a starting point to create exotic states of matter like supersolids, excitonium, quantum ball lightning, and fluids exhibiting negative mass.

“A BEC is a unique state of matter as it is not made from particles, but rather waves,” says Kozo Okazaki, lead author of the study. “As they cool down to near absolute zero, the atoms of certain materials become smeared out over space. This smearing increases until the atoms – now more like waves than particles – overlap, becoming indistinguishable from one another. The resulting matter behaves like it’s one single entity with new properties the preceding solid, liquid or gas states lacked.”

A group of five companies including the Japanese unit of IBM Corp are currently developing an artificial intelligence suitcase to assist visually impaired people in traveling independently, with a pilot test of a prototype conducted at an airport in Japan earlier this month.

The small navigation robot, which is able to plan an optimal route to a destination based on the user’s location and map data, uses multiple sensors to assess its surroundings and AI functionality to avoid bumping into obstacles, according to the companies.

At the pilot experiment held on Nov 2, the AI suitcase was able to successfully navigate itself to an All Nippon Airways departure counter after receiving a command from Chieko Asakawa, a visually impaired fellow IBM overseeing the product’s development.

IPSC are derived from skin or blood cells that have been reprogrammed back into an embryonic-like pluripotent state that enables the development of an unlimited source of any type of human cell needed for therapeutic purposes. For example, iPSC can be prodded into becoming beta islet cells to treat diabetes, blood cells to create new blood free of cancer cells for a leukemia patient, or neurons to treat neurological disorders.

In late 2007, a BSCRC team of faculty, Drs. Kathrin Plath, William Lowry, Amander Clark, and April Pyle were among the first in the world to create human iPSC. At that time, science had long understood that tissue specific cells, such as skin cells or blood cells, could only create other like cells. With this groundbreaking discovery, iPSC research has quickly become the foundation for a new regenerative medicine.

Using iPSC technology our faculty have reprogrammed skin cells into active motor neurons, egg and sperm precursors, liver cells, bone precursors, and blood cells. In addition, patients with untreatable diseases such as, ALS, Rett Syndrome, Lesch-Nyhan Disease, and Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy donate skin cells to BSCRC scientists for iPSC reprogramming research. The generous participation of patients and their families in this research enables BSCRC scientists to study these diseases in the laboratory in the hope of developing new treatment technologies.

Canadian scientists have achieved a first in the study of telomerase, an essential enzyme implicated in aging and cancer.

In today’s edition of the prestigious journal Molecular Cell, scientists from Université de Montréal used advanced microscopy techniques to see single molecules of telomerase in living cells.

A flaw in the replication of chromosomes means that they get shorter with each cell division. If nothing is done to correct this error, replication stops and cells go into a state called senescence, a hallmark of aging. Normally, telomerase adds extra DNA to the ends of chromosomes to prevent this problem, but as we age our bodies produce fewer of them.

Circa 2019

There is hope for the world’s largest carnivorous marsupials whose numbers have been ravaged by disease.

Circa 2019

In the past decade, remarkable progress has been made in reprogramming terminally differentiated somatic cells and cancer cells into induced pluripotent cells and cancer cells with benign phenotypes. Recent studies have explored various approaches to induce reprogramming from one cell type to another, including lineage-specific transcription factors-, combinatorial small molecules-, microRNAs- and embryonic microenvironment-derived exosome-mediated reprogramming. These reprogramming approaches have been proven to be technically feasible and versatile to enable re-activation of sequestered epigenetic regions, thus driving fate decisions of differentiated cells. One of the significant utilities of cancer cell reprogramming is the therapeutic potential of retrieving normal cell functions from various malignancies. However, there are several major obstacles to overcome in cancer cell reprogramming before clinical translation, including characterization of reprogramming mechanisms, improvement of reprogramming efficiency and safety, and development of delivery methods. Recently, several insights in reprogramming mechanism have been proposed, and determining progress has been achieved to promote reprogramming efficiency and feasibility, allowing it to emerge as a promising therapy against cancer in the near future. This review aims to discuss recent applications in cancer cell reprogramming, with a focus on the clinical significance and limitations of different reprogramming approaches, while summarizing vital roles played by transcription factors, small molecules, microRNAs and exosomes during the reprogramming process.