Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo declared an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, a rare and deadly disease, on Tuesday, the World Health Organization reported. The declaration came after laboratory results confirmed two cases of the disease in the province of Bikoro in the northwestern part of the country.

Ebola virus disease, which most commonly affects people and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees), is caused by one of five Ebola viruses. The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission. The average case fatality rate is around 50%.

A government statement released Tuesday states that the Ministry of Health has “taken all necessary measures to respond promptly and effectively to this new epidemic of Ebola in the DRC’s national territory”.

Read more

Crispr could eliminate Genetic disease.

It’s so small it can’t be seen with the naked eye, but research is showing that CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is bringing sight to the blind.

UC San Diego researchers are using CRISPR, a technology that allows scientists to edit genomes, to cure disease.

For the last two years, Ophthalmologist Dr. Kang Zhang and UC San Diego researchers have been working with CRISPR, injecting CRISPR into the eyes of mice to cure retinitis pigmentosa – a genetic form of blindness. “What we’ve seen in mice is that we can bring back actually 30 percent of vision sometimes even 50 percent of vision,” Dr. Zhang told NBC 7.

Read more

On May 1, around 200 scientists from the Genome Project-write (GP-write) met in Boston and announced the first target of their project: the creation of cells that cannot be infected by viruses.

What is the Genome Project-write?

GP-write includes sub-projects like the Human Genome Project-write (HGP-write), which was formally announced on June 2, 2016, and is an extension of the Genome Projects, which were launched in 1984. These projects were created to develop ways to read DNA in microbes, plants and multiple animal species, including humans.

Read more

Viewing the body as a chemical system and treating maladies with pharmaceuticals is so 20th century. In 21st century medicine, doctors may consider the body as an electrical system instead, and prescribe therapies that alter the electrical pulses that run through the nerves.

The defense agency announces funding for 7 projects under its new ElectRx program.

Read more

A landmark study has revealed that cholesterol in the brain may play a fundamental role in catalyzing the formation of amyloid beta clusters, thought to be a central mechanism leading to the devastating degenerative symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, set out to uncover what causes amyloid beta proteins to cluster into the plaques that slowly accumulate and cause the primary degenerative symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

“The levels of amyloid-beta normally found in the brain are about a thousand times lower than we require to observe it aggregating in the laboratory – so what happens in the brain to make it aggregate?” asks Michele Vendruscolo, lead on the new research.

Read more

Summary: A new study sheds light on how the cerebellum is able to make predictions and learn from mistakes, especially when it comes to completing complex motor actions. The findings could help in the development of new machine learning technologies.

Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine.

In studies with monkeys, Johns Hopkins researchers report that they have uncovered significant new details about how the cerebellum — the “learning machine” of the mammalian brain — makes predictions and learns from its mistakes, helping us execute complex motor actions such as accurately shooting a basketball into a net or focusing your eyes on an object across the room.

Read more