Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

BERKELEY, Calif., Aug. 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a new patent (U.S. 10,385,360) to the University of California (UC), University of Vienna, and Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier covering nucleic acid molecules encoding single-molecule guide RNAs, as well as CRISPR-Cas9 compositions comprising single-molecule guide RNAs or nucleic acid molecules encoding single-molecule guide RNAs.

Over the past six months, UC’s U.S. CRISPR-Cas9 portfolio has sharply increased, and to date includes 11 separate patents for methods and compositions related to the gene-editing technology. Looking ahead, UC anticipates at least six additional related patents issuing in the near future, bringing UC’s total portfolio to 17 patents and spanning various compositions and methods including targeting and editing genes in any setting, such as within plant, animal, and human cells. The portfolio also includes patents related to the modulation of transcription.

“The USPTO has continually acknowledged the Doudna-Charpentier team’s groundbreaking work,” said Eldora L. Ellison, Ph.D., lead patent strategist on CRISPR-Cas9 matters for UC and a Director at Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox. “True to UC’s mission as a leading public university, the patent granted today and others in its CRISPR-Cas9 portfolio will be applied for the betterment of society.”

Read more | >

Cranmer is a member of ATLAS, one of the two general-purpose experiments that, among other things, co-discovered the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He and other CERN researchers recently published a letter in Nature Physics titled “Open is not enough,” which shares lessons learned about providing open data in high-energy physics. The CERN Open Data Portal, which facilitates public access of datasets from CERN experiments, now contains more than two petabytes of information.

It could be said that astronomy, one of the oldest sciences, was one of the first fields to have open data. The open records of Chinese astronomers from 1054 A.D. allowed astronomer Carlo Otto Lampland to identify the Crab Nebula as the remnant of a supernova in 1921. In 1705 Edward Halley used the previous observations of Johannes Kepler and Petrus Apianus—who did their work before Halley was old enough to use a telescope—to deduce the orbit of his eponymous comet.

In science, making data open means making available, free of charge, the observations or other information collected in a scientific study for the purpose of allowing other researchers to examine it for themselves, either to verify it or to conduct new analyses.

Scientists continue to use open data to make new discoveries today. In 2010, a team of scientists led by Professor Doug Finkbeiner at Harvard University found vast gamma-ray bubbles above and below the Milky Way. The accomplishment was compared to the discovery of a new continent on Earth. The scientists didn’t find the bubbles by making their own observations; they did it by analyzing publicly available data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope.

Continue reading “With open data, scientists share their work” | >

There are lots of smart gadgets that track running, but few track swimming — that is, if you’d like something that’s built for swimming first, as opposed to a device with swim-tracking features tacked on. Form, a new fitness company founded by former Recon Instruments employees, is looking to solve this problem with its first product, the $199 Swim Goggles.

Read more | >

After 10 years in remission, Derek Ruff’s cancer returned, this time as stage IV colon cancer. Despite aggressive rounds of chemotherapy, palliative radiotherapy and immunotherapy, his disease progressed. In February 2019, as part of a phase I clinical trial at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health, Ruff became the first patient in the world to be treated for cancer with a human-induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cell therapy called FT500.

Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health treats the first patient treated for cancer with a human-induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cell therapy called FT500. Dan Kaufman collaborated with Fate Therapeutics to bring the iPSC-derived natural killer cell cancer immunotherapy to patients.

Read more | >

Tokyo, Aug. 1 (Jiji Press)—Tokyo-based startup A.L.I. Technologies Inc. plans to start accepting reservations for its “hover bike” flying motorcycle from October, company officials said Thursday.

The startup company, which mainly develops small unmanned aerial vehicles, will unveil the product at the Tokyo Motor Show in autumn.

It aims to sell the product mainly to wealthy foreigners, by touting its cutting-edge technologies.

Read more | >

The leaves of a variety of medicinal plants can stop the growth of breast, cervical, colon, leukemia, liver, ovarian, and uterine cancer, a new study shows.

Researchers found the effects in leaves of the bandicoot berry (Leea indica), South African leaf (Vernonia amygdalina), and simpleleaf chastetree (Vitex trifolia). Three other medicinal plants also demonstrated anti-cancer properties.

“Medicinal plants have been used for the treatment of diverse ailments since ancient times, but their anti-cancer properties have not been well studied,” says Koh Hwee Ling, associate professor from the National University of Singapore’s pharmacy department.

Read more | >

Circa 2017

Efficient intracellular delivery of biologically active macromolecules has been a challenging but important process for manipulating live cells for research and therapeutic purposes. There have been limited transfection techniques that can deliver multiple types of active molecules simultaneously into single-cells as well as different types of molecules into physically connected individual neighboring cells separately with high precision and low cytotoxicity. Here, a high frequency ultrasound-based remote intracellular delivery technique capable of delivery of multiple DNA plasmids, messenger RNAs, and recombinant proteins is developed to allow high spatiotemporal visualization and analysis of gene and protein expressions as well as single-cell gene editing using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated protein-9 nuclease (Cas9), a method called acoustic-transfection. Acoustic-transfection has advantages over typical sonoporation because acoustic-transfection utilizing ultra-high frequency ultrasound over 150 MHz can directly deliver gene and proteins into cytoplasm without microbubbles, which enables controlled and local intracellular delivery to acoustic-transfection technique. Acoustic-transfection was further demonstrated to deliver CRISPR-Cas9 systems to successfully modify and reprogram the genome of single live cells, providing the evidence of the acoustic-transfection technique for precise genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9.

Read more | >