Lifeboat Foundation

“These findings reveal how the immune system goes awry during coronavirus infections, leading to severe disease, and point to potential therapeutic targets,” said Bali Pulendran, Ph.D., professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology and the senior author of the study, which will be published Aug. 11 in Science.

Lead authorship is shared by Stanford postdoctoral scholars Prabhu Arnunachalam, Ph.D., and Florian Wimmers, Ph.D.; and Chris Ka Pun Mok, Ph.D., and Mahen Perera, Ph.D., both assistant professors of public health laboratory sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

A Stanford study shows that in severely ill COVID-19 patients, “first-responder” immune cells, which should react immediately to signs of viruses or bacteria in the body, instead respond sluggishly.

Continue reading “Study reveals immune-system paralysis in severe COVID-19 cases” »

Circa 2014

A Silicon Valley startup run by old-school technologists has invented an energy storage device that could take an entire neighborhood off the grid.

What would it take to build this state-of-the-art space habitat?

Instead of recruiting whole phages into phage therapy armies, antibacterial campaigns may simply requisition the organisms’ battle-tested cell-wall-breaching enzymes.

It was 1917 when Felix d’Herelle, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, first proposed using bacteriophages (or phages)—viruses that infect bacteria—as a therapy for human bacterial infections. Although used for decades in parts of Europe, notably Russia, Poland, and the Republic of Georgia, phage therapy is only permitted in the United States under the “compassionate use” umbrella—when there is nothing else available.

The rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria that defy traditional antibiotics has forced clinicians to seek alternative measures to curb deadly infections. Two cases made headlines in recent years. In 2016, the life of Thomas Patterson, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, was saved by phage therapy after he developed a deadly Acinetobacter baumannii infection. (The story is recounted in The Perfect Predator, the book that Patterson co-authored with his wife, epidemiologist Steffanie A. Strathdee, PhD.) Last year, the life of an English teenager was saved after she developed an infection following a lung transplant for cystic fibrosis.

Continue reading “Lysins Unlimited: Phages’ Secret Weapon” »

Our mindset is everything: what one person sees as a crisis, another person sees as opportunity.

The magnitude of economic and social disruption caused by COVID-19 (25% of small businesses have closed, bankruptcies are up 26%) means that many existing business models are being upended. In some cases, entire industries.

As an entrepreneur, you should be asking yourself: What challenges or problems can I solve? What are new digital business models I want to experiment with?

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The YSPH-developed test, called SalivaDirect, has been used as part of an NBA testing program and will now be available to more diagnostic laboratories.

This video explains in detail about the post transcriptional modifications on histone proteins, epigenetics, methylation, phosphorylation, acetylation, ubiquitylation and sumoylation.