Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of scientists, led by University of Helsinki reported that vitamin B3, niacin, has therapeutic effects in progressive muscle disease. Niacin delayed disease progression in patients with mitochondrial myopathy, a progressive disease with no previous curative treatments.

Vitamin B3 forms have recently emerged as potent boosters of energy metabolism in rodents. These vitamins are precursors for NAD⁺, a molecular switch of metabolism between fasting and growth modes.

As fasting has been shown promote health and longevity in for example mice, a variety of “NAD boosters” are being developed. However, whether actual NAD⁺ deficiency exists in human disease, and whether NAD⁺ boosters could have curative effects in patients with degenerative diseases, has remained elusive.

Science’s dream of creating perfect custom organs on demand as soon as a patient needs one is still a long way off. But tiny versions are already serving as useful research tools and stepping stones toward full-fledged replacements.

The Lowdown

Continue reading “Lab-Grown Mini Kidneys Are Bringing Science Closer to Custom Organs” »

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EXCLUSIVE — A California-based biopharmaceutical company claims to have discovered an antibody that could shield the human body from the coronavirus and flush it out of a person’s system within four days, Fox News has exclusively learned.

Later Friday, Sorrento Therapeutics will announce their discovery of the STI-1499 antibody, which the San Diego company said can provide “100% inhibition” of COVID-19, adding that a treatment could be available months before a vaccine hits the market.

New findings suggest past infections may offer some protection against the novel coronavirus.

People, bicycles, cars or road, sky, grass: Which pixels of an image represent distinct foreground persons or objects in front of a self-driving car, and which pixels represent background classes?

This task, known as panoptic segmentation, is a fundamental problem that has applications in numerous fields such as self-driving cars, robotics, augmented reality and even in biomedical image analysis.

At the Department of Computer Science at the University of Freiburg Dr. Abhinav Valada, Assistant Professor for Robot Learning and member of BrainLinks-BrainTools focuses on this research question. Valada and his team have developed the state-of-the-art “EfficientPS” artificial intelligence (AI) model that enables coherent recognition of visual scenes more quickly and effectively.

This new paper argues that continued economic growth on Earth will hit a thermodynamic limit within the third millenium, if economic activities and energy consumption cannot be decoupled. The maximum size would be up to 7000 times the current one. An in-space economy would offer a way out.

“Energy Limits to the Gross Domestic Product on Earth” https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.05244

(Image: Wikipedia — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_mile_tower.jpg)

MONDAY, May 11, 2020 (HealthDay News) — An experimental vaccine seems to give monkeys extended protection from an HIV-like infection — by “waking up” an arm of the immune system that vaccines normally do not.

Experts cautioned that animal research often does not pan out in humans. The decades of work toward an HIV vaccine has been a clear example. But, researchers said, this vaccine works differently, targeting two “arms” of the immune system.

And they think the work potentially has broader lessons for vaccines being developed for other viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

There may be hope yet for a universal flu vaccine — one powerful dose of immunisation that can provide long-lasting protection for multiple influenza strains, all in a single shot.

A discovery like that would be a holy grail for public health, and after more than a decade of careful research, a specific version called FLU-v is now moving into the last rounds of clinical testing.

So far, researchers say the results have been “very encouraging”, and the vaccine has successfully passed phase I and phase II clinical trials. Although trials in these phases are limited to assessing the safety of the vaccine, there’s also evidence it might be effective.

O,.o!

An international consortium found a remarkable global spread of strains of a multi-resistant bacterium that can cause severe infections—Stenotrophomonas maltophilia. The study, published under the supervision of the Research Center Borstel Leibniz Lung Center (FZB), provides for the first time a systematic understanding of the global phylogeny of S. maltophilia strains and shows ways to efficiently monitor the pathogen using a genomic classification system. DZIF scientists from Lübeck, Borstel and Braunschweig are involved in the study.

S. maltophilia strains occur in several natural and human associated ecosystems. The bacterium was long regarded as relatively unproblematic but is now considered to be one of the most feared hospital pathogens, as it frequently causes infections and is resistant to a number of antibiotics. This can be particularly dangerous for immune-compromised patients or for patients with underlying inflammatory lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis. Although almost any organ can be affected, infections of the respiratory tract, bacteraemia or catheter-related infections of the bloodstream are the most common. In view of the increasing importance of this pathogen and the often-severe clinical consequences of an infection, knowledge about the virulence factors and about the local and global transmission of S. maltophilia bacteria is urgently needed.

Continue reading “Global spread of the multi-resistant pathogen Stenotrophomonas maltophilia” »