Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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By discovering the culprit behind decreased blood flow in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s, biomedical engineers at Cornell University have made possible promising new therapies for the disease.

You know that dizzy feeling you get when, after lying down for an extended period, you stand up a little too quickly?

That feeling is caused by a sudden reduction of blood flow to the , a reduction of around 30 percent. Now imagine living every minute of every day with that level of decreased blood flow.

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We recently visited the Longevity Leaders Conference in London and had the opportunity to speak with Kelsey Moody, the CEO of Ichor Therapeutics, a company focused on targeting age-related diseases by targeting the aging processes themselves. We previously interviewed him back in 2017, so it was the ideal time to catch up on what had been happening with his company since then.

Ichor and its portfolio companies have been very busy over the last year, so I thought it was time that we caught up on progress. Can you tell us how things are going for the Ichor group?

Ichor really had a good year in 2018. We raised over $16 million across our portfolio, and that’s really allowed us to scale up all aspects of our operations. We’re at over 50 employees now, mostly bench scientists and research technicians, and we’re really delivering on our goal of being a vertically integrated biopharmaceutical company.

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“We found that lactate stimulates synaptic activity-dependent genes in the short-term and genes involved in regulating neuronal excitability in the long-term,” explains the first author of the paper Michael Margineanu, a KAUST Master’s student.

Study illustrates the links between brain energy metabolism and neuronal activity.

A genome-wide study led by Dean Pierre Magistretti sheds light on the mechanisms through which lactate regulates long-term memory formation and neuroprotection.

The breakdown of sugar in non-neuronal brain cells, called astrocytes, produces lactate, which gets shuttled to neurons as a source of energy. This lactate not only supports the energy demands of neurons, but also rapidly and transiently activates multiple genes that modulate neuronal activity and regulate brain function.

Continue reading “Lactate activates multiple genes that modulate neuronal activity” | >

In a 2018 Science paper, co-authored with Jacob Bellmund, Christian Doeller, and Edvard Moser—neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and the Kavli Institute in Trondheim—Gärdenfors, of the University of Lund, buttressed his idea with recent advances in brain science. He argued that the brain represents concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for the brain’s “inner GPS.”

“Cognitive spaces are a way of thinking about how our brain might organize our knowledge of the world,” Bellmund said. It’s an approach that concerns not only geographical data, but also relationships between objects and experience. “We were intrigued by evidence from many different groups that suggested that the principles of spatial coding in the hippocampus seem to be relevant beyond the realms of just spatial navigation,” Bellmund said. The hippocampus’ place and grid cells, in other words, map not only physical space but conceptual space. It appears that our representation of objects and concepts is very tightly linked with our representation of space.

Gärdenfors’ theory highlights a fruitful path, not only for cognitive scientists, but for neurologists and machine-learning researchers.

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