Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: bioengineering

The Methuselah Foundation wants to extend healthy life — By advancing tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, they want to create a world where 90-year olds can be as healthy as 50-year olds—by 2030.

Donate to the Methuselah Foundation here at this link

Methuselah Foundation reviewed the progress they made over the past year. Much of what you’ll read in this year in review letter is very late-breaking, and leads us to believe that 2017 will be a very important year in medical developments. 2016 took us a broad step closer to fulfilling our mission statement to “Make 90 the New 50, by 2030”. Why can we say that? For starters, let’s look at several achievements to date that made this year so successful:

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Orginal press: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/02/prweb14062199.htm

Bioquark, Inc., (http://www.bioquark.com) a life sciences company focused on the development of novel biologics for complex regeneration and disease reversion, and SC21 Biotech, (http://www.sc21bio.tech), a biotechnology company focused on translational therapeutic applications of autologous stem cell therapy, have announced a collaboration to focus on novel cellular reprogramming and production approaches for CCR5 Delta32 homozygous cord blood stem cells, for long-term control of HIV via transplantation.

“We are very excited about this collaboration with SC21 Biotech,” said Ira S. Pastor, CEO, Bioquark Inc. “The natural synergy of our cellular reprogramming tools and SC21 Biotech’s translational cell therapy experience, will make for a transformational opportunity in this area of HIV disease control.”

HIV-1 infection afflicts more than 35 million people worldwide. For individuals who have access to antiretroviral therapy, these drugs can effectively suppress, but not cure, HIV-1 infection. The only documented case for an HIV/AIDS cure was a patient with HIV-1 and acute myeloid leukemia who received allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation from a graft that carried the HIV-resistant CCR5-Delta32 homozygous mutation. The patient has remained without any evidence of HIV infection for more than 8 years after discontinuation of antiretroviral drug therapy.

However, identifying immune matched adult CCR5- Delta32 homozygous donors for a given patients is not readily feasible in part because the prevalence is in only about 0.8%–1% of individuals of northern European descent and much less in other ethnic groups, as well as the fact that for such transplants with adult cells there needs to be a very close HLA match between donor and patient.

In contrast, cord blood that is CCR5- Delta32 homozygous provides a major advantage in that much less stringent HLA matching is required between donor and patient. However, a technological method to cost effectively and industrially scale the production of such cells has been missing.

“We look forward to working closely with Bioquark Inc. on this exciting initiative,” said Mr. Paul Collier, Managing Director of SC21 Biotech. “The ability to apply Bioquark’s cellular reprogramming tools in order to produce industrial quantities of such precious cell lines will offer a much greater global penetration of this important therapeutic modality for HIV.”

“Bioquark has spent several years studying the evolutionarily perfected ability of bioactive moieties found in ooplasms to turn back biological time and re-set cellular regulatory state” said Dr. Sergei Paylian, Founder, CSO, and President, Bioquark Inc. “This unique initiative is one more step in our broad translation of such natural capabilities to control the progression of human diseases.”

About Bioquark, Inc.

Bioquark Inc. is focused on the development of natural biologic based products, services, and technologies, with the goal of curing a wide range of diseases, as well as effecting complex regeneration. Bioquark is developing both biological pharmaceutical candidates, as well as products for the global consumer health and wellness market segments.

About SC21 Biotech

SC21 Biotech is a novel a biotechnology company focused on translational therapeutic applications, as well as expedited, experimental access for “no option” patients, to a novel range of regenerative and reparative biomedical products and services, with the goal of reducing human degeneration, suffering, and death.

Rare breeds of chickens could soon come from entirely different types of hens. The University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute with help from US biotechnology company Recombinetics used gene editing techniques to create surrogate hens that grow up to produce eggs with all the genetic information of different breeds.

We’ve seen gene editing and transfer techniques used to create better yeast, bigger trees and even glowing pigs, among numerous other examples, but this is believed to be the first gene-edited bird to come out of Europe.

The team used a gene editing tool called TALEN (for transcription activator-like effector nucleases), which is similar to the more widely publicized CRISPR/Cas9, to delete part of a chicken gene called DDX4 that is related to fertility. Hens with this modification did not produce eggs but were healthy in all other ways.

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Our society has never aged more rapidly – one of the most visible symptoms of the changing demographics is the exponential increase in the incidence of age-related diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases and osteoarthritis. Not only does aging have a negative effect on the quality of life among the elderly but it also causes a significant financial strain on both private and public sectors. As the proportion of older people is increasing so is health care spending. According to a WHO analysis, the annual number of new cancer cases is projected to rise to 17 million by 2020, and reach 27 million by 2030. Similar trends are clearly visible in other age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease. Few effective treatments addressing these challenges are currently available and most of them focus on a single disease rather than adopting a more holistic approach to aging.

Recently a new approach which has the potential of significantly alleviating these problems has been validated by a number of in vivo and in vitro studies. It has been demonstrated that senescent cells (cells which have ceased to replicate due to stress or replicative capacity exhaustion) are linked to many age-related diseases. Furthermore, removing senescent cells from mice has been recently shown to drastically increase mouse healthspan (a period of life free of serious diseases).

Here at CellAge we are working hard to help translate these findings into humans!

CellAge, together with a leading synthetic biology partner, Synpromics, is going to develop synthetic promoters which are specific to senescent cells (SeneSENSE), as promoters that are currently being used to track senescent cells are simply not good enough to be used in therapies. The most prominently used p16 gene promoter has a number of limitations, for example. As our primary mission is to expand the interface between synthetic biology and aging research as well as drive translational research forward, we will offer senescence reporter assay to academics for free. We predict that in the very near future this assay will be also used as a quality control step in the cell therapy manufacturing process to make cell therapies safer!

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For those interested in life extension and bionic / cyborg type enhancements, this CMU Robotics Institute Seminar gives an overview of the background and current developments in artificial vision. José Alain Sahel MD is a world leading ophthalmologist with a lengthy bio and numerous honors and appointments.

In the future, if you’re going blind, these sight restoration technologies may be used to remediate your vision loss.

Three major ideas are covered. 1) Implanting arrays of tiny 3-color LEDs under a failed retina to stimulate still-okay cells, and 2) using gene therapy to express a novel photoreceptor, borrowed from algae, to restore a form of sight to failed cells. These can be done together. Lots of studies in mice, primates, and humans. Some coverage is also given to 3) directly implanting electronics in the brain to send complete images to vision centers, but this is still at an early stage.

None of this is anywhere near total restoration. The patients can make out a few words for the first time. And unlike normal vision, the range of light intensity levels remains very narrow. But obviously it’s much better than nothing and will get better over time.

As a point of humor, he tells the story of one of his blind patients who totally redesigned one of his experiments for him.

In a controversial move, a senior US scientific committee has given the green light to one of the most contentious forms of genome editing: where genetic changes made to human embryos will then be inherited by following generations.

For the first time, a panel of experts from two of the most recognised scientific institutions in the US has advised that this process – called germline editing – should be seriously considered as an option in the future, and not outright prohibited.

It’s a considerably more positive tone than the assessment of an international summit of scientists in December 2015, which declared that it would be “irresponsible to proceed” with germline editing unless safety issues and social consensus could be satisfied.

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While the recent cases of Ebola and Zika contributed to an emphasis on research, response, and policy related to EIDs, the meeting also had presentations on emerging biotechnologies. Of particular note was the Synthetic Biology panel, which focused on the current state of synthetic biology, its use in the health security defense enterprise, and the policy conundrums that need to be addressed.

Synthetic Biology – Complexity through Simplification

The first presenter, Dr. Christopher Voigt of the Synthetic Biology Center at MIT, noted that synthetic biology was the application of engineering principles to biological systems. The end goal of this bioengineering framework is to leverage ever-increasing computer capabilities to simplify both the designing and writing of genomic sequences. Further simplification would then allow for the creation of more complex systems.

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CRISPR/Cas9, a powerful gene editing technique that has already been used in a human, is thought by many as a “cut and paste” for DNA in living organisms. While in a sense that is what happens, delivering the ribonucleoprotein that does the genetic editing and the RNA that hones in on the target, into the cellular nucleus without being damaged is a challenge. That is why the efficiency of successful edits remains very low. Researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst have now come up with nanoparticles that protect the protein and RNA as they’re brought to their work site.

The nanoparticles are engineered around their cargo and have shown a 90% success rate of getting the cargo into the nucleus, and a 30% editing efficiency, which is “remarkable” according to the researchers. So far the team has tested their technique on cultured cells, but they’re already working on trying the same in laboratory animals. As part of their research, they developed a novel way of tracking the Cas9 protein inside the cells, something that will certainly help other scientists in this area.

“By finely tuning the interactions between engineered Cas9En protein and nanoparticles, we were able to construct these delivery vectors. The vectors carrying the Cas9 protein and sgRNA come into contact with the cell membrane, fuse, and release the Cas9:sgRNA directly into the cell cytoplasm,” in a statement said Vincent Rotello, lead author of the study in ACS Nano. “Cas9 protein also has a nuclear guiding sequence that ushers the complex into the destination nucleus. The key is to tweak the Cas9 protein,” he adds. “We have delivered this Cas9 protein and sgRNA pair into the cell nucleus without getting it trapped on its way. We have watched the delivery process live in real time using sophisticated microscopy.”

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