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Category: biotech/medical

Summary: Researchers who just finished a precision cancer treatment trial at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles just reported that three out of four adult and child cancer patients responded favorably to a new precision therapy which targets a gene mutation. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) reports that three-fourths of adults and children with a variety of advanced cancers in different sites of the body responded to a novel therapy called larotrectinib that targets a specific genetic mutation.

The researchers published the results of this phase 1/2 trial on February 22, 2018, in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Summary: A startup wants to develop bioprinted beating hearts using stem cells from a patient’s own body using a special 3D bioprinter. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

A startup called BioLife4D wants to develop bioprinted beating hearts using a patient’s own cells as solution for patients seeking heart transplants.

As first reported on USAToday, Steven Morris, the CEO founding partner and of BioLife4D says that if the bioprinted heart is successful, the company hopes to expand to other organs including the pancreas or the kidneys.

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Summary: Cancer vaccines could prevent around 1,000,000 cancer deaths each year, according to a report by the World Health Organization this month. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

In a Feb 2018 report, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that infectious diseases cause 15% of all cancer deaths, and universal vaccination could prevent around one million cancers annually, saying.

“Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and was responsible for 8.8 million deaths in 2015.” Adding “Globally, nearly 1 in 6 deaths is due to cancer.”

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Summary: Aging biomarkers found in a simple urine test can potentially measure how much our body has aged and could predict our future health. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Determining our biological age and future risk of ill health may be as simple as a urine test one day.

In a new study, a team of researchers led by Jian-Ping Cai in the MOH Key Laboratory of Geriatrics at Beijing Hospital discovered two new aging biomarkers in urine that come from the oxidation of RNA and DNA. The new markers could potentially help predict our risk of developing an age-related disease, and even our risk of death.

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The artificial intelligence craze isn’t just hitting Silicon Valley—the Justice Department wants to get in on the action, too.

The agency announced today that it will put $2 million towards research on AI, which it believes could be used to fight human trafficking, illegal border crossings, drug trafficking, and child pornography.

National Institute for Justice, the DoJ’s research wing, is funding the initiative in the hopes that it will help address the opioid crisis and fight crime by helping investigators sift through massive amounts of data.

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3D printing has gained popularity in recent years as a means for creating a variety of functional products, from tools to clothing and medical devices. Now, the concept of multi-dimensional printing has helped a team of researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at the Graduate Cent…

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Researchers at the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University have discovered a potential way to supercharge our stem cells and reverse some aspects of cellular aging.

The Hayflick limit

Normal cells cannot divide indefinitely; they have a built-in replicative limit, which is often called the Hayflick limit after its discoverer, Leonard Hayflick. This Hayflick limit means that regular human cells are unable to replicate forever; once they reach their replicative limit, they cease to divide and enter senescence, a nondividing state in which the cell destroys itself.

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A who’s-who from the world of synthetic biological research have come together to launch Senti Biosciences with $53 million in funding from a slew of venture capital investors.

Led by Tim Lu, a longtime researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the founding fathers of synthetic biology, Senti’s aim is nothing less than developing therapies that are tailored to an individual’s unique biology — and their first target is cancer.

Here’s how Lu described a potential cancer treatment using Senti’s technology to me. “We take a cell derived from humans that we can insert our genetic circuits into… we insert the DNA and encoding and deliver those cells via an IV infusion. We have engineered the cells to locate where the tumors are… What we’ve been doing is engineering those cells to selectively trigger an immune response against the tumor.”

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