Biotech lobbyists and companies are trying to get the Trump administration to hand regulation of genetically edited animals over to the USDA, which has more lenient rules than the FDA, which currently regulates animals.
Low-fat pigs? Chickens with cancer-fighting eggs?
Pharma and biotech companies spend billions of dollars each year to acquire genomic data. Scientists need large genomic datasets to identify causes of disease and develop cures. However, growth of the genomic data market is hindered by small data quantities, data fragmentation, lack of data standardization and slow data acquisition.
Nebula Genomics will leverage blockchain technology to eliminate the middleman and empower people to own their personal genomic data. This will effectively lower sequencing costs and enhance data privacy, resulting in growth of genomic data. Our open protocol will leverage the genomic data growth by enabling data buyers to efficiently aggregate standardized data from many individuals and genomic databanks.
Perfect vision is great. But like any advantage it comes with limitations. Those with ease don’t develop the same unique senses and strengths as someone who must overcome obstacles, people like Lana Awad, a neurotech engineer at CTRL-labs in New York, who diagnosed her own degenerative eye disease with a high school science textbook as a teen in Syria and went on to teach at Harvard University.
Though they see themselves as clear leaders, visionaries with all the obvious advantages—like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, for example—can be blind in their way, lacking the context needed to guide if they don’t recognize their counterintuitive limitations. This is problematic for humanity because we’re all relying on them to create the tools that increasingly rule every aspect of our lives. The internet is just the start.
Tools that will meld mind and machine are already a reality. Neurotech is a huge business with applications being developed for gaming, the military, medicine, social media, and much more to come. Neurotech Report projected in 2016 that the $7.6 billion market could reach $12 billion by 2020. Wired magazine called 2017, “a coming-out year for the brain machine interface (BMI).”
UCLA scientists have developed a new method that utilizes microscopic splinter-like structures called “nanospears” for the targeted delivery of biomolecules such as genes straight to patient cells. These magnetically guided nanostructures could enable gene therapies that are safer, faster and more cost-effective.
The research was published in the journal ACS Nano by senior author Paul Weiss, UC Presidential Chair and distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, materials science and engineering, and member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.
Gene therapy, the process of adding or replacing missing or defective genes in patient cells, has shown great promise as a treatment for a host of diseases, including hemophilia, muscular dystrophy, immune deficiencies and certain types of cancer.
A team of plant geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has identified a protein receptor on stem cells involved in plant development that can issue different instructions about how to grow depending on what peptide (protein fragment) activates it.
This is the first such multi-functional receptor found to work in this way to control plant development. The new findings obtained by CSHL Professor David Jackson and colleagues may have important implications for efforts to boost yields of essential food crops such as corn and rice.
Plant growth and development depend on structures called meristems — reservoirs in plants that contain stem cells. When prompted by peptide signals, stem cells in the meristem develop into any of the plant’s organs — roots, leaves, or flowers, for example. These signals generally work like a key (the peptide) fitting into a lock on the surface of a cell (the protein receptor). The lock opens momentarily, triggering the release of a chemical messenger inside the cell. The messenger carries instructions for the cell to do something, such as grow into a root or flower cell or even stop growing altogether. Conventionally, one or more peptides fit into a receptor to release a single type of chemical messenger.
Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have discovered a potential target for therapies that may prevent or delay heart failure from pressure overload of the heart. It could also be a biomarker to warn physicians that a patient is at risk of this happening.
Early macrophage infiltration is a step in heart failure
In a new study, Dr. Sumanth Prabhu and his team showed that preventing the early infiltration of CCR2+ macrophages into the heart, in a mouse model of heart failure, significantly reduced enlargement of the heart and the decline of the pumping ability that leads to heart failure [1]. This means that the infiltration of macrophages is a critical step in heart failure.
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On Tuesday, a 13-year-old boy from New Jersey was at the center of medical history as he became the first person in the US to receive an FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited disease. The event marks the beginning of a new era of medicine, one in which devastating genetic conditions that we are born with can be simply edited out of our DNA with the help of modern biomedical technologies.
The therapy, Luxturna, from Spark Therepeutics, was approved by the FDA in December to treat a rare, inherited form of blindness. Its price tag, set at $850,000—or $425,000 per eye—made it the most expensive drug in the US and sparked mass sticker-shock. But the therapy, which in high-profile clinical trials has allowed patients to see the stars for the first times, also offered the almost miraculous possibility of giving sight to the blind.
The therapy is intended to treat retinal diseases, including leber congenital amaurosis or retinitis pigmentosa, caused by mutations in the RPE65 gene. The RPE65 gene produces an enzyme that helps the eye process light. In these disorders, severe visual impairment begins often in infancy, and sometimes degrades over time. Some people with a mutated copy of the gene can see during the day; others are legally blind. The drug works by delivering a correct copy of the RP65 gene to retinal cells, allowing the patient to produce the deficient enzyme—and, hopefully, restoring their vision. (Luxturna is considered by some to be the first “true gene therapy” approved by the FDA, since other approved therapies, like those for blood cancers, involve removing a patient’s cells from their body, modifying them externally, and then infusing them back into the body.)
