Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have discovered a new link between impaired brain energy metabolism and delirium—a disorienting and distressing disorder particularly common in the elderly and one that is currently occurring in a large proportion of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 [15th of July 2020].

While much of the research was conducted in mice, additional work suggests overlapping mechanisms are at play in humans because cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) collected from patients suffering from delirium also contained tell-tale markers of altered brain glucose .

Collectively, the research, which has just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that therapies focusing on brain energy metabolism may offer new routes to mitigating delirium.

Continue reading “Scientists find new link between delirium and brain energy disruption” | >

No industry will be spared.

The pharmaceutical business is perhaps the only industry on the planet, where to get the product from idea to market the company needs to spend about a decade, several billion dollars, and there is about 90% chance of failure. It is very different from the IT business, where only the paranoid survive but a business where executives need to plan decades ahead and execute. So when the revolution in artificial intelligence fueled by credible advances in deep learning hit in 2013–2014, the pharmaceutical industry executives got interested but did not immediately jump on the bandwagon. Many pharmaceutical companies started investing heavily in internal data science R&D but without a coordinated strategy it looked more like re-branding exercise with the many heads of data science, digital, and AI in one organization and often in one department. And while some of the pharmaceutical companies invested in AI startups no sizable acquisitions were made to date. Most discussions with AI startups started with “show me a clinical asset in Phase III where you identified a target and generated a molecule using AI?” or “how are you different from a myriad of other AI startups?” often coming from the newly-minted heads of data science strategy who, in theory, need to know the market.

However, some of the pharmaceutical companies managed to demonstrate very impressive results in the individual segments of drug discovery and development. For example, around 2018 AstraZeneca started publishing in generative chemistry and by 2019 published several impressive papers that were noticed by the community. Several other pharmaceutical companies demonstrated impressive internal modules and Eli Lilly built an impressive AI-powered robotics lab in cooperation with a startup.

However, it was not possible to get a comprehensive overview and comparison of the major pharmaceutical companies that claimed to be doing AI research and utilizing big data in preclinical and clinical development until now. On June 15th, one article titled “The upside of being a digital pharma player” got accepted and quietly went online in a reputable peer-reviewed industry journal Drug Discovery Today. I got notified about the article by Google Scholar because it referenced several of our papers. I was about to discard the article as just another industry perspective but then I looked at the author list and saw a group of heavy-hitting academics, industry executives, and consultants: Alexander Schuhmacher from Reutlingen University, Alexander Gatto from Sony, Markus Hinder from Novartis, Michael Kuss from PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Oliver Gassmann from University of St. Gallen.

Continue reading “Deep Dive Into Big Pharma AI Productivity: One Study Shaking The Pharmaceutical Industry” | >

For the first time, scientists have determined the complete sequence of a human chromosome, namely the X chromosome, from ‘telomere to telomere’. This is truly a complete sequencing of a human chromosome, with no gaps in the base pair read and at an unprecedented level of accuracy.

A step closer towards the complete blueprint of a human being

The Human Genome Project was a 13-year-long, publicly funded project initiated in 1990 with the objective of determining the DNA sequence of the entire human genome.

Continue reading “Geneticists sequence the complete human X chromosome for the first time” | >

A new study, published this week in The Lancet, concludes that the global population is likely to peak in 2064 at 9.7 billion and fall to 8.8 billion by century’s end. The report foresees major shifts in geopolitical power – producing a more multi-polar world – with 23 countries seeing their populations shrink by more than half as a result of declining fertility rates. Liberal immigration policies could help to maintain population sizes and economic growth, the authors suggest.

Japanese researchers have created a smart face mask that has a built in speaker and can translate speech into 8 different languages.

We live in a world full of technology but it was a world without smart masks, until now!

A Japanese technology company Donut Robotics has taken the initiative to create the first smart face masks which connects to your phone. Of course, we couldn’t have battled coronavirus with a simple mask that still does the job of protecting us perfectly well. We as a race need to bring technology into everything and more so if it does an array of extremely important, life-saving things like using a speaker to amplify a person’s voice, covert a person’s speech into text and then translate it into eight different languages through a smartphone app.

Continue reading “Japanese researchers have created a smart face mask that connects to your phone” | >

No one wants to walk with a walker, but age has a way of making people compromise on their quality of life. The team behind Superflex, which spun out of SRI International in May, thinks there could be another way.

The company is building wearable robotic suits, plus other types of clothing, that can make it easier for soldiers to carry heavy loads or for elderly or disabled people to perform basic tasks. A current prototype is a soft suit that fits over most of the body. It delivers a jolt of supporting power to the legs, arms, or torso exactly when needed to reduce the burden of a load or correct for the body’s shortcomings.

A walker is a “very cost-effective” solution for people with limited mobility, but “it completely disempowers, removes dignity, removes freedom, and causes a whole host of other psychological problems,” SRI Ventures president Manish Kothari says. “Superflex’s goal is to remove all of those areas that cause psychological-type encumbrances and, ultimately, redignify the individual.”