Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Researchers from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute have made progress in the quest to rejuvenate the aging immune system by identifying the factors responsible for the age-related decline of the thymus.

The thymus shrinks as we age

The thymus is one of the most important organs in the body, and it is where thymocytes produced in the bone marrow travel to become new T cells before being trained in the lymph nodes to become the defenders of the adaptive immune system. However, as we get older, the thymus increasingly turns to fat and starts to shrink, causing its ability to produce new T cells to fall dramatically. This process is known as thymic involution and actually begins shortly after puberty, so this is one aspect of aging that begins fairly early in life, although it is many decades later before its decline causes serious health issues.

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The emerging field of synthetic biology—designing new biological components and systems—is revolutionizing medicine. Through the genetic programming of living cells, researchers are creating engineered systems that intelligently sense and respond to diverse environments, leading to more specific and effective solutions in comparison to current molecular-based therapeutics.

At the same time, —using the body’s immune defenses to fight cancer—has transformed over the past decade, but only a handful of have responded, and often results in significant side effects. Designing therapies that can induce a potent, anti– immune response within a solid tumor without triggering systemic toxicity has posed a significant challenge.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) announced today that they are addressing this challenge by engineering a strain of non– that can colonize solid tumors in mice and safely deliver potent immunotherapies, acting as a Trojan Horse that treats tumors from within. The therapy led not only to complete tumor regression in a mouse model of lymphoma, but also significant control of distant, uninjected tumor lesions. Their findings are published today in Nature Medicine.

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A new system called BrainNet lets three people play a Tetris-like game using a brain-to-brain interface.

This is the first demonstration of two things: a brain-to-brain network of more than two people, and a person being able to both receive and send information to others using only their brain.

“Humans are social beings who communicate with each other to cooperate and solve problems that none of us can solve on our own,” says corresponding author Rajesh Rao, a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and a co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology at the University of Washington.

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How do the communities of microbes living in our gastrointestinal systems affect our health? Carnegie’s Will Ludington was part of a team that helped answer this question.

For nearly a century, have probed how genes encode an individual’s chances for success—or fitness—in a specific environment.

In order to reveal a potential evolutionary trajectory biologists measure the interactions between genes to see which combinations are most fit. An organism that is evolving should take the most fit path. This concept is called a fitness landscape, and various mathematical techniques have been developed to describe it.

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For a personal sense of wellness, we may still be better off thinking of aging as an inevitable process with certain positive aspects—like additional wisdom accumulated through experience—rather than a sickness we hope to eradicate. If the many startups working on extended youth and anti-aging endeavors actually manage to create a magic potion that keeps us forever young, then someday we may get the chance to think about what, if anything, humanity loses when it finally finds the fountain of youth.

Aging has come to be seen as a disease we should be preventing.

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