Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

For every star performing biotech, life sciences or innovative 3D printing company there are another 9 where investors would have been better off keeping their cash under a mattress.

As Organovo report their first full year operating on a commercial basis we look for clues as to which category they might fit into. With more than 25 patents secured and another 80 pending, does the current share price and today’s published financial accounts tell the full story?

Organovo increased total revenue from $570 thousand in 2015 to $1.5 million for 2016. However, losses also increased from $30.8 million to $38.6 million. Although yet to turn a profit, Organovo were always going to generate a sizeable amount of text in the 3D Printing media and beyond. The promise of combining biophysics, developmental biology and of course 3D printing to advance healthcare and life sciences is an attractive proposition.

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Theoretical physicists have confirmed that it’s not just the information coded into our DNA that shapes who we are — it’s also the way DNA folds itself that controls which genes are expressed inside our bodies.

That’s something biologists have known for years, and they’ve even been able to figure out some of the proteins responsible for folding up DNA. But now a group of physicists have been able to demonstrate for the first time through simulations how this hidden information controls our evolution.

Let’s back up for a second here, because although it’s not necessarily news to many scientists, this second level of DNA information might not be something you’re familiar with.

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Exponential Finance celebrates the incredible opportunity at the intersection of technology and finance. Watch live as hundreds of the world’s leading investors, entrepreneurs and innovators gather in New York to define the future of the way we do business.

In Bitcoin’s early years computer scientists and early adopters were running the show. Now, a new community of academics, entrepreneurs, and economists, are working with cryptocurrencies and blockchain to bring the technology to a new set of diverse applications.

From building peer-to-peer networks for secure data computation and storage to decentralized content management systems that give patients access to health-care records across hospital databases, blockchain and digital currencies are starting to rewrite the rules of the 21st century transaction.

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Very cool.

Pinpointing the type of bacteria that are at the root of an infection in clinical samples removed from living tissues, such as blood, urine or joint fluids, to quickly identify the best anti-microbial therapy still poses a formidable challenge. The standard method of culturing can take days to reveal pathogens, and they often fail to bring them to light altogether.

A team lead by Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University now reports a method in PLoS, which enables the rapid isolation and concentration of infectious bacteria from complex clinical samples to help speed up bacterial identification, and it should be able to accelerate the determination of antibiotic susceptibilities as well.

“We leveraged FcMBL? the genetically engineered pathogen-binding protein we developed for our sepsis therapeutic device program? to develop a fast and simple technology to help overcome this diagnostic roadblock,” said Ingber, who is the Wyss Institute’s Founding Director, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Using clinical samples of joint fluids, we were able to show that this method can be used to quickly and efficiently isolate bacterial pathogens for various kinds of subsequent analysis, including PCR, which is commonly used for molecular diagnostics in clinical laboratories.”

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No thanks.

Biologists have been mixing the DNA of different animals since the 1970s, but the idea of injecting the genes of animals into humans remains taboo. Called transgenics, it’s a practice that could cure illness in the future — and eventually reshape our species. Here’s what you need to know about it.

Illustration by Jim Cooke.

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Machines running on human energy? Yes, it can happen, according to Dan Nicolau, Jr. from the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California. Nicolau and his colleagues successfully completed a proof-of-concept study of a book-sized computer that runs on adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a biochemical that releases energy in cells and aids in energy transfer.

The study results published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), describe the combination of geometrical modeling and engineering as well as nanotechnology to create circuitry that uses 1.5 x 1.5 cm in area and the naturally occurring protein to operate.

A More Sustainable Option

Other than the mere presence of a human energy source in a machine, an astounding aspect of the device is how, as opposed to electrical energy that produces heat, the biological agent powering this new computer enables it to remain cool and energy efficient, making it more sustainable.

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Life Extension e InSilico Medicine anunciaram uma esforço colaborativo para identificar romance biomarcadores de envelhecimento humano através do uso de big data analytics e inteligência artificial.

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