Lifeboat Foundation

Immunotherapy is an increasingly powerful form of cancer treatment where the patient’s own immune system is equipped with heightened abilities to take down the disease, and one promising arm of this is known as adoptive cell therapy. This involves using altered versions of a patient’s own cells to trigger a more strong-handed response from their own immune system. Scientists at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center are reporting an exciting advance in this area, demonstrating that engineered bone marrow cells can slow the growth of prostate and pancreatic cancers in mice.

The study builds on previous research where scientists demonstrated that a range of cancers, including melanomas, colon cancer and brain cancer, grow much more slowly in mice that are lacking a certain gene, known as p50, which seems to activate a stronger immune response. The Johns Hopkins researchers sought to further validate these earlier findings, while expanding the utility of a promising form of cancer therapy.

To do this, the team worked with what are known as immature myeloid cells, a type of white blood cell, which previous research had indicated could help switch on immune responses that fight tumors. In this case, the immature myeloid cells were taken from the bone marrow of mice engineered to lack the p50 gene, as a way of comparing them to the behavior of cells taken from mice who had the p50 gene in tact.

It’s 5pm in the Farrant household and Jack, six, and Thomas, four, are currently manifesting their desires in the form of Lego. To an outsider this looks like two small children playing with toys, but their mother Catherine proudly points out that Jack has built a yacht – something he is helping his family to acquire via visualisation exercises.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ calls out the nanny. In line with the family’s Paleo diet – of anti-inflammatory, natural foods – they have octopus cooked with lemongrass, and fish-bone broth. ‘Yes, my favourite,’ cries Jack happily, while his mum explains exactly what the broth is: ‘It’s an age-old elixir that’s made from boiling wild bones. It’s very high in iodine, which most of us are deficient in.’

After dinner, the children can continue to express their creativity, or watch some television – though if they’re going to do the latter after 6pm they need to put on their ‘blue-light blockers’, glasses with amber lenses to block the blue light of technology from affecting their sleep. ‘We also do red-light therapy,’ explains Catherine, pointing to a red dinosaur lamp in the boys’ bedroom. ‘It’s to help the body’s natural rhythms of sunset with exposure to red colours at night, and blue and white light in the morning.’

My editorial from today’s (3/18/19) Financial Times:

Far sooner than most people realise, the genetics revolution will transform the world within and around us. Although we think about genetic technologies primarily in the context of healthcare, these tools are set to change the way we make babies, the nature of the babies we make and, ultimately, our evolutionary trajectory as a species — and we are not remotely ready for what’s coming. Yet we must be, to optimise the benefits and minimise the potential harms of genetic technologies.

Continue reading “Human gene editing is too transformative to be guided by the few” »

Takeda said it has begun development of TAK-888, an anti-SARS-CoV-2 polyclonal hyperimmune globulin (H-IG) designed to treat high-risk individuals with COVID-19.

Takeda’s H-IGs are plasma derived-therapies that have previously shown effectiveness in treating of severe acute viral respiratory infections. Such therapies are designed to concentrate pathogen-specific antibodies from plasma collected from recovered patients or vaccinated donors in the future. By transferring the antibodies to a new patient, Takeda reasons, a person’s immune system can better respond to the infection and increase their chance of recovery.

Two big-name biopharmas—Takeda Pharmaceutical and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals—have separately entered the scramble to develop new treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infection, the virus identified as the cause of the global COVID-19 outbreak. [NIH].

Continue reading “Coronavirus: Takeda Pursues Plasma-Derived Treatment; Alnylam and Vir Eye siRNA Therapy” »

For any donations you would like to make to this project, please use the link below, thank you.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_b…GHGLK5ZXAE

Researchers think that a newly identified subatomic particle may have formed the universe’s dark matter right after the Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

While scientists have determined that up to 80% of the matter in the universe could be dark matter, our understanding of what the mysterious substance might be is still lacking, as no one has ever directly observed it.

Circa 2002 4 lines of code to solve everything.

… But first it cracked him. The inside story of how Stephen went from boy genius to recluse to science renegade.

Word had been out that Stephen, the onetime enfant terrible of the science world, was working on a book that would Say It All, a paradigm-busting tome that would not only be the definitive account on complexity theory but also the opening gambit in a new way to view the universe. But no one had read it.

Continue reading “The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ...” »

These predictions were drawn from DeepMind’s new deep learning system but have yet to be experimentally verified, DeepMind noted.

In a study of epilepsy patients, researchers at the National Institutes of Health monitored the electrical activity of thousands of individual brain cells, called neurons, as patients took memory tests. They found that the firing patterns of the cells that occurred when patients learned a word pair were replayed fractions of a second before they successfully remembered the pair. The study was part of an NIH Clinical Center trial for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy whose seizures cannot be controlled with drugs.

“Memory plays a crucial role in our lives. Just as musical notes are recorded as grooves on a record, it appears that our brains store memories in neural firing patterns that can be replayed over and over again,” said Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and senior author of the study published in Science.

Dr. Zaghloul’s team has been recording electrical currents of drug-resistant epilepsy patients temporarily living with surgically implanted electrodes designed to monitor brain activity in the hopes of identifying the source of a patient’s seizures. This period also provides an opportunity to study neural activity during memory. In this study, his team examined the activity used to store memories of our past experiences, which scientists call episodic memories.