Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

I am still waiting for mine. I cannot wait to the day I use my smart lenses to take pics, videos, login to view work email, etc. BTW — I look forward to day we eliminate email too.

Google may have shelved Google Glass, its failed attempt to persuade the world that internet-connected spectacles were the next big thing, but it has not given up on the concept of smart eyeware.

The internet giant’s Verily Life Sciences unit has been working on connected contact lenses – or rather, eye implants – for some time, and Google founder Sergey Brin dropped a hint at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the technology may soon see the light of day.

Interviewed on stage at Davos, Brin said that Verily had started working on a glucose sensing contact lens project some time ago, and hinted that the first products may come to market soon.

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A team of engineers has developed a new RNA delivery technique that uses short bursts of ultrasound to efficiently deliver RNA into cells, reducing colon inflammation.

MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have demonstrated that they can deliver strands of RNA efficiently to colon cells, using bursts of ultrasound waves that propel the RNA into the cells. Using this approach, the researchers dramatically turned down the production of a protein involved in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), in mice.

“What we saw in this paper was the ultrasound can enable rapid delivery of these molecules,” says Carl Schoellhammer, a postdoc at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the study’s lead author. “In this case it was proinflammatory molecules that we were shutting off, and we saw tremendous knockdown of those proteins.”

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Eeek.

(HealthDay)—Eight people who worked at several rat-breeding facilities in Illinois and Wisconsin have been infected with a virus not commonly found in the United States, federal health officials said Friday.

This is the first known outbreak of Seoul virus associated with pet rats in the United States, although there have been several outbreaks in wild rats, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Seoul virus is a member of the Hantavirus family of rodent-borne viruses and is carried by wild Norway rats worldwide. Most rats infected with the virus do not appear sick.

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Not good to hear.

(HealthDay)—For patients with unresected anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC), overall survival (OS) is poor, but radiation therapy (RT) dose is associated with improved survival, according to a study published online Dec. 27 in Cancer.

Todd A. Pezzi, from the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and colleagues examined the outcomes of patients with unresected ATC who underwent no surgery or grossly incomplete resection. The authors assessed correlates of OS for 1,288 patients.

The researchers found that the median OS was 2.27 months, and 11 percent of patients were alive at one year. There was a positive correlation for RT dose and survival for the entire study cohort, for those receiving systemic therapy, and for those with stage IVA, B, and C disease. Older age, one or more comorbidities, and distant metastases correlated with OS in multivariate analyses (hazard ratios, 1.317, 1.587, and 1.385, respectively); there were also correlations for receipt of systemic therapy (hazard ratio, 0.637) and for receipt of RT versus no RT (45 Gy: hazard ratio, 0.843; 45 to 59.9 Gy: hazard ratio, 0.596; and 60 to 75 Gy: hazard ratio, 0.419). Propensity-score matching confirmed the RT dose-survival correlation for patients who received higher (60 to 75 Gy) versus lower (45 to 59.9 Gy) therapeutic doses.

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A “smart” needle with an embedded camera is helping doctors perform safer brain surgery.

The device was developed by researchers at the University of Adelaide in South Australia and uses a to identify at-risk blood vessels.

The probe, which is the size of a human hair, uses an infrared light to look through the brain.

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In Brief:

  • Predictions from the co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Future Council, Melanie Walker, say we’ll soon enter a post-hospital world due to advances in personalized medicine, health monitoring, and nanotechnology.
  • New and evolving technologies in medical science convince Walker we’ll live in a society not dependent on hospitals by 2030.

As the world of medicine is increasingly changed by biology, technology, communications, genetics, and robotics, predicting the outlook of the next few decades of medicine becomes harder. But that is exactly what Melanie Walker of the World Economic Forum does, and she predicts a bright new future for healthcare.

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Why is it so hard to convince people living longer is a good thing? This short article has some evidence worth considering.

Most advocates of life extension report facing resistance to the idea of increased lifespans by medical means when trying to disseminate this idea among general public. Resistance manifests itself in many forms, ranging from concerns such as overpopulation to concerns about unequal access to life extending treatments. But the most unexpected thing is probably that people often don’t want an increased lifespan at all. Surveys in different countries show, that when people are asked “how long would you like to live?”, they often give a number equal to or slightly higher than the current life expectancy in a given country[1–4].

But wait… Isn’t extending life for more decades a good thing that everyone should strive for? In reality we often do not see enough enthusiasm for the idea in general. So why is this?

It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it

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Microbial burden is a real problem in aging and researchers are finding ways to boost our immune system to resist these microscopic enemies.

Microbial burden is a significant contribution to aging and our bodies are under daily attack from these microscopic invaders. The more completely we can remove these invaders the less impact they will have on the aging process.

“Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Newcastle University in the U.K. are investigating how infectious microbes can survive attacks by the body’s immune system. By better understanding the bacteria’s defenses, new strategies can be developed to cure infections that are currently resistant to treatments, the researchers said”

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Synthetic chemicals commonly found in insecticides and garden products bind to the receptors that govern our biological clocks, University at Buffalo researchers have found. The research suggests that exposure to these insecticides adversely affects melatonin receptor signaling, creating a higher risk for metabolic diseases such as diabetes.

Published online on Dec. 27 in Chemical Research in Toxicology, the research combined a big data approach, using computer modeling on millions of chemicals, with standard wet-laboratory experiments. It was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Disruptions in human circadian rhythms are known to put people at higher risk for diabetes and other metabolic diseases but the mechanism involved is not well-understood.

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The graphene temporary tattoo seen here is the thinnest epidermal electronic device ever and according to the University of Texas at Austin researchers who developed it, the device can take some medical measurements as accurately as bulky wearable sensors like EKG monitors. From IEEE Spectrum:

Graphene’s conformity to the skin might be what enables the high-quality measurements. Air gaps between the skin and the relatively large, rigid electrodes used in conventional medical devices degrade these instruments’ signal quality. Newer sensors that stick to the skin and stretch and wrinkle with it have fewer airgaps, but because they’re still a few micrometers thick, and use gold electrodes hundreds of nanometers thick, they can lose contact with the skin when it wrinkles. The graphene in the Texas researchers’ device is 0.3-nm thick. Most of the tattoo’s bulk comes from the 463-nm-thick polymer support.

The next step is to add an antenna to the design so that signals can be beamed off the device to a phone or computer, says (electrical engineer Deji) Akinwande.

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