Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

HANGZHOU, China—In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool.

U.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven’t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn’t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.

In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool.

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Summary: Researchers say coffee prevents Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s for those consuming 3 cups daily. The brain health benefits of the beverage seem to differ between decaf and regular coffee. [Author: Brady Hartman. This article first appeared on LongevityFacts.com.]

Perhaps you’ve heard the latest news – the evidence on coffee’s health benefits is increasing every day.

In fact, new research shows that coffee protects your brain, and recent studies show that daily coffee drinkers have a significantly reduced risk of both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

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In last years CANTOS trial, the anti-inflammatory drug Canakinumab reduced heart attacks 25% and cancer by 50%.

(Part of the look back at the best of 2017)

Summary: The drug Canakinumab reduced heart attacks by 25% and cancer by 50% by reducing chronic inflammation, according to the authors of the recent CANTOS trial. [This report was originally published on LongevityFacts on Aug 27, 2017, and has been updated. Author: Brady Hartman]

In late August, researchers announced that they had found a breakthrough drug which reduces heart attack risk by one-fourth while cutting the risk of cancer in half. The researchers announced that the new medicine can prevent tens of thousands of deaths from heart attack and cancer.

Biggest Breakthrough Since Statins

Harvard researchers said the discovery promises to “usher in a new era” of treatment. Presenting their findings at one of the largest gatherings of heart experts, doctors hail the new drug as the “biggest breakthrough since statins.”

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(Part of the look back at the best of 2017)

Summary: Doctors lengthen telomeres with RNA therapy to reverse aging in human cells, according to a new research report. Telomere attrition is one of the nine hallmarks of aging. [Author: Brady Hartman] This article first appeared on LongevityFacts.]

Dr. John Cooke is department chair of cardiovascular sciences at Houston Methodist Research Institute and is the lead author of a recent paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Dr. Cooke’s team used RNA therapy to lengthen the telomeres of patients’ cells, making them younger in the process. In a video statement accompanying the report, the lead author remarked:

“We can make aged cells younger.”

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“Yes, Mr. Bedford is here.”

That’s what Marji Klima, executive assistant at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, told me over email this week. She was referring to Dr. James Hiram Bedford, a former University of California-Berkeley psychology professor who died of renal cancer on Jan. 12, 1967. Bedford was the first human to be cryonically preserved—that is, frozen and stored indefinitely in the hopes that technology to revive him will one day exist. He’s been at Alcor since 1991.

His was the first of 300 bodies and brains currently preserved in the world’s three known commercial cryonics facilities: Alcor; the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan; and KrioRus near Moscow. Another 3,000 people still living have arranged to join them upon what cryonicists call “deanimation.” In other words, death.

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Nearly 500 years ago in what we now call Mexico, a disease started rippling through the population. Red spots appeared on the skin, accompanied by wretched vomiting, bleeding from multiple orifices, and eventually, death. Combined with an invasion from Europe and horrific droughts, it was generally not a pleasant time or place to be alive.

It bore the name cocoliztli, meaning ‘pestilence,’ and it killed between five and 15 million people in just three years. As many plagues were at the time, it proved deadly and mysterious, burning through entire populations. Occurring centuries before John Snow’s work on cholera gave rise to epidemiology, data on the disease’s devastation was sparse. Over the years, researchers and historians attempted to pin the blame for the illness on measles, plague, viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola, and typhoid fever—a disease caused by a variation of the bacteria Salmonella enterica.

In a paper published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers present evidence that the latter was the most likely candidate in this cast of microbial miscreants. The study was pre-printed in biorxiv last year. The researchers detected the genome of a different variety of Salmonella enterica (the specific variety is Paratyphi C) in teeth of individuals buried in a cemetery historically linked to the deadly outbreak.

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But it remains to be seen whether drug regulators will go along with a new way of making medicines. To do so, agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will need to rewrite their rules for validating the safety of medicines. Instead of signing off on the production facility and manufactured drug samples, regulators would have to validate that reactionware produces the desired medication. Cronin agrees it’s a hurdle. But he argues that future printed reactors could simply include a final module containing standard validation tests that produce a visual readout, much like a pregnancy test. “I think it’s manageable.”

Digitized chemistry on demand could also undermine drug counterfeiters.

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