Researchers and scientists say new discoveries and drug creation could be beneficial to future astronauts on deep space missions.
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Category: biotech/medical
As might be expected, the CDC is spooked by these bacteria. If they spread, as infections are want to do, the agency is tasked with stopping them, and that’s no easy task.
On April 3, CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat announced the agency’s latest containment strategy, which recommends an aggressive response to the appearance of even a single case of drug-resistant infection. The germs usually appear in hospital settings, so the CDC says health care workers should be prepared to contain the drug-resistant microbes before they can travel beyond a hospital’s doors.
“When there’s a fire somebody needs to put it out,” said Schuchat.
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A 10-year-long study called the PanCancer Atlas is releasing a trove of genetic data in an effort to help doctors treat a wide variety of cancers more precisely.
The history: Over the past decade, 150 researchers from the US and around the world painstakingly analyzed DNA, RNA, and proteins from tumor samples of more than 11,000 patients with 33 different types of cancer.
The findings: From that data, scientists have identified about 300 genes that drive tumor growth. They also found that just over half the tumors samples analyzed carry genetic mutations that could be targeted by therapies that are already on the market. These findings and others appear in 29 different papers today in the journal Cell.
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Protein synthesis is a critical part of how our cells operate and keep us alive and when it goes wrong it drives the aging process. We take a look at how it works and what happens when things break down.
Suppose that your full-time job is to proofread machine-translated texts. The translation algorithm commits mistakes at a constant rate all day long; from this point of view, the quality of the translation stays the same. However, as a poor human proofreader, your ability to focus on this task will likely decline throughout the day; therefore, the number of missed errors, and therefore the number of translations that go out with mistakes, will likely go up with time, even though the machine doesn’t make any more errors at dusk than it did at dawn.
To an extent, this is pretty much what is going on with protein synthesis in your body.
Protein synthesis in a nutshell
The so-called coding regions of your DNA consist of genes that encode the necessary information to assemble the proteins that your cells use. As your DNA is, for all intents and purposes, the blueprint to build you, it is pretty important information, and as such, you want to keep it safe. That’s why DNA is contained in the double-layered membrane of the cell nucleus, where it is relatively safe from oxidative stress and other factors that might damage it. The protein-assembling machinery of the cell, ribosomes, are located outside the cell nucleus, and when a cell needs to build new proteins, what’s sent out to the assembly lines is not the blueprint itself, but rather a disposable mRNA (messenger RNA) copy of it that is read by the ribosomes, which will then build the corresponding protein. The process of making an mRNA copy of DNA is called “translation”, and as the initial analogy suggests, it is not error-free.
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Harvard professor Dr. David Sinclair reports that the NAD boosting NMN compound reverses aging in blood vessels and restores muscle strength in a new study published March 22nd. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Using the NAD boosting molecule NMN, Dr. David Sinclair’s team reversed blood vessel and muscle aging in mice, while boosting their exercise endurance. As Dr. Sinclair says.
“We’ve discovered a way to reverse vascular aging by boosting the presence of naturally occurring molecules in the body that augment the physiological response to exercise” adding “The approach stimulates blood vessel growth and boosts stamina and endurance in mice and sets the stage for therapies in humans to address the spectrum of diseases that arise from vascular aging.”
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Researchers just overturned a 70-year-old fundamental understanding of how our brains learn – paving the way for faster, more advanced AI applications and a different approach to medical treatments for brain disorders. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Researchers just overturned the way scientists thought our brains learn – a view that up until now has been widely accepted for almost 70 years.
This discovery-based upon new experimental evidence – paves the way for more modern artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as machine learning and deep learning algorithms that imitate our brain functions at a much faster speed with advanced features. Moreover, the research may change how doctors view disorders of the brain, such as Alzheimer’s and may alter treatments for other forms of dementia.
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Summary: Nicotinamide riboside (NR), a form of vitamin B, increased levels of NAD report researchers in a new study. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts and was updated on April 3, 2018. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) reported that nicotinamide riboside (NR) – a unique form of B vitamin – increased levels of NAD, in a clinical trial of healthy older adults. Senior study author Doug Seals, a professor and researcher in the Department of Integrative Physiology said
“This was the first ever study to give this novel compound to humans over a period of time,” adding “We found that it is well tolerated and appears to activate some of the same key biological pathways that calorie restriction does.”
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Cutting calories by 15% may help protect us against age-related diseases, suggests a new report of a landmark calorie restriction trial with adults. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
The landmark CALERIE study reports that cutting calories by 15 percent slows down an aging metabolism and may help protect against age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, type 2 diabetes, cancer and other ailments. The researchers published their results on March 22 in the journal Cell Metabolism.
The researchers found that calorie restriction decreased systemic oxidative stress, one of the nine hallmarks of aging linked to age-related diseases.
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New liquid biopsy tests could prevent most cancer deaths with an inexpensive blood draw, as firms bring their cancer tests to trials.
New liquid biopsy tests hold promise to prevent most cancer deaths with a simple, inexpensive blood draw. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
A simple blood test that tells if you have a tumor and where it is in your body is a lot closer to reality and may cost only $500. Johns Hopkins University (JHU) just announced a test earlier this year that detects eight common types of cancer. It may prove inexpensive enough to be prescribed during a routine physical.
The JHU test is not the only early warning test for cancer. In fact, several organizations are developing new low-cost ways of detecting cancer early, creating the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against the disease.
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Viagra reduces colorectal cancer odds in mice by 50%, says a new report which adds that a clinical trial should be the next step.
Summary: Viagra reduces colorectal cancer odds in mice by 50%, says a new report which adds that a clinical trial of low-dose Viagra should be the next step.[This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Viagra cut in half the formation of precancerous polyps that form before the onset of colorectal cancer, says cancer researcher Darren D. Browning Ph.D. – a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Director of the Biochemistry and Cancer Biology Graduate Program at the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) in Augusta.
“Giving a baby dose of Viagra can reduce the amount of tumors in these animals by half,” Dr. Browning says.
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