I was shocked to learn recently that one of the major reasons longevity drugs haven’t been going to human trials, despite obvious promise, is that the FDA requires that any potential drug trial has to have a disease or condition it treats. Because aging hasn’t been seen as a disease or medical condition, no drug trials have been allowed to go forward to treat it. NONE! Finally, late last year, aging has been OFFICIALLY recognized as a disease and is therefor now a valid target disease for drug trials. **sigh**.
Are we one step closer to developing compounds that can extend our lifespan?
Interesting and could change as well as acellerate our efforts around bot technology and humans as well as other areas of robotic technology.
Like Jedi Knights, researchers at Purdue University are using the force — force fields, that is. (Photo : Windell Oskay | Flickr)
Like Jedi Knights, researchers at Purdue University are using the force — force fields, that is. The team of scientists has discovered a way to control tiny robots with the help of individual magnetic fields, which, in turn, might help us one day learn how to control entire groups of microbots and nanobots in areas like medicine or even manufacturing.
While the idea of controlling microbots might be simple, it’s a deceptively complicated goal, especially if the bots in question are conceivably too small to realistically accommodate a tiny enough battery to power them. This is where the magnetic force fields come into play: they can generate enough energy and charge to move the microbots about — “like using mini force fields.”
Wow!!! Chewing gum wearable technology, Cyborg Chips, Ingestible sensors to let doctors know if you’re taking your meds, etc. 2016 is going to be interesting
The phrase “Brave New World” has become one of the most often used clichés in medical technology in recent years. Google the title of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian, and anticipatory, novel with the word medicine and 2,940,000 results appear.
But could there be better shorthand to describe some of the recent developments in medical, health and bio-tech? Consider these possibilities coming to fruition, or close to, in 2016:
1. Back from Extinction
Gene-editing startup Editas Medicine of Cambridge, Mass., filed to go public this month. The company’s founder, Harvard professor George Church, hopes to, among other things, revive the extinct woolly mammoth or create a facsimile. Investors include Google and Bill Gates.
Researchers in Germany have successfully grown the innermost layer of human fallopian tubes in the lab — the first step towards creating a functional model that will allow scientists to study how reproductive diseases such as cancer start, as well as provide important insight into the enigmatic organs.
The fallopian tubes play a crucial role in the female reproductive system by connecting the ovaries to the uterus, but recent research has suggested that if fallopian tube cells become infected, they can migrate, and could be a key trigger for ovarian cancer — one of the most deadly types of female reproductive cancer.
Despite the importance of these organs, we have a lot to learn about how they function, particularly on the inside — an area that (as you can imagine) is particularly challenging for scientists to study while their patients are alive.
We may be able to keep our gut in check after all. That’s the tantalizing finding from a new study published today that reveals a way that mice—and potentially humans—can control the makeup and behavior of their gut microbiome. Such a prospect upends the popular notion that the complex ecosystem of germs residing in our guts essentially acts as our puppet master, altering brain biochemistry even as it tends to our immune system, wards off infection and helps us break down our supersized burger and fries.
In a series of elaborate experiments researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital discovered that mouse poop is chock full of tiny, noncoding RNAs called microRNAs from their gastrointestinal (GI) tracts and that these biomolecules appear to shape and regulate the microbiome. “We’ve known about how microbes can influence your health for a few years now and in a way we’ve always suspected it’s a two-way process, but never really pinned it down that well,” says Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, not involved with the new study. “This [new work] explains quite nicely the two-way interaction between microbes and us, and it shows the relationship going the other way—which is fascinating,” says Spector, author of The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss Is Already in Your Gut.
What’s more, human feces share 17 types of microRNAs with the mice, which may portend similar mechanisms in humans, the researchers found. It could also potentially open new treatment approaches involving microRNA transplantations. “Obviously that raises the immediate question: ‘Where do the microRNAs come from and why are they there?,’” says senior author Howard Weiner, a neurologist at both Harvard and Brigham. The work was published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.
DNA-based lock-and-key pore design allows for precision delivery of drugs to cancer and other cells (credit: Stefan Howorka and Jonathan Burns/UCL)
Scientists at University College London (UCL) and Nanion Technologies in Munich have developed synthetic DNA-based pores that control which molecules can pass through a cell’s wall, achieving more precise drug delivery.
Therapeutics, including anti-cancer drugs, are ferried around the body in nanoscale carriers called vesicles, targeted to different tissues using biological markers. The new DNA-based pore design is intended to improve that process.
ReDO, an international collaboration between the Belgium-based Anticancer Fund and the U.S.- based GlobalCures, has published their investigation into diclofenac in the open-access journal ecancermedicalscience.
It’s not always talked about in polite company, but your body produces a lot of gases scientists know little about.
A new smart pill, designed at Melbourne’s RMIT University, could help us learn more and may eventually assist in customising what we eat to suit our bodies.
Researchers from the Centre for Advanced Electronics and Sensors have developed the pill, which can measure intestinal gases, and they have now undertaken the first animal tests using the technology to examine the impact of fibre on the gut.
I could see the value of AI in helping with a whole host of addictions, compulsive disorders, etc. AI at the core is often looking at patterns and predicting outcomes, or the next steps to make, or predicting what you or I will want to do or react to something, etc. So, leveraging AI as a tool to help in finding or innovating new solutions for things like OCD or addictions does truly make sense.
New York-based AiCure, which holds 12 patents for artificially intelligent software platforms that aim to improve patient outcomes by targeting medication adherence, announced the closing of a $12.25 million funding round Monday.
The company’s software was built with help from $7 million in competitive grants from four National Institutes of Health organizations, awarded in order to spur tech developments that would have a significant impact on drug research and therapy. The National Institute of Drug Abuse awarded AiCure $1 million in 2014 to help launch a major study into the efficacy of using the company’s platform to monitor and intervene with patients receiving medication as maintenance therapy for addiction.
Adherence to such therapies is associated with improved recovery, but often patients take improper doses or sell the drugs to others. To address this, AiCure’s platform connects patients with artificial intelligence software via their devices that determines whether a medication is being taken as prescribed. The platform has shown to be feasible for use across various patient populations, including elderly patients and study participants in schizophrenia and HIV prevention trials, according to a news release.
In the early days of the space race of the 1960s, NASA used satellites to map the geography of the moon. A better understanding of its geology, however, came when men actually walked on the moon, culminating with Astronaut and Geologist Harrison Schmitt exploring the moon’s surface during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Image credit: Scientific American
In the modern era, Dr. Gregory Hickock is one neuroscientist who believes the field of neuroscience is pursuing comparable advances. While scientists have historically developed a geographic map of the brain’s functional systems, Hickock says computational neuroanatomy is digging deeper into the geology of the brain to help provide an understanding of how the different regions interact computationally to give rise to complex behaviors.
“Computational neuroanatomy is kind of working towards that level of description from the brain map perspective. The typical function maps you see in textbooks are cartoon-like. We’re trying to take those mountain areas and, instead of relating them to labels for functions like language, we’re trying to map them on — and relate them to — stuff that the computational neuroscientists are doing.”
Hickok pointed to a number of advances that have already been made through computational neuroanatomy: mapping visual systems to determine how the visual cortex can code information and perform computations, as well as mapping neurally realistic approximations of circuits that actually mimic motor control, among others. In addition, researchers are building spiking network models, which simulate individual neurons. Scientists use thousands of these neurons in simulations to operate robots in a manner comparable to how the brain might perform the job.
That research is driving more innovation in artificial intelligence, says Gregory. For example, brain-inspired models are being used to develop better AI systems for stores of information or retrieval of information, as well as in automated speech recognition systems. In addition, this sort of work can be used to develop better cochlear implants or other sorts of neural-prostheses, which are just starting to be explored.
“In terms of neural-prostheses that can take advantage of this stuff, if you look at patterns and activity in neurons or regions in cortex, you can decode information from those patterns of activity, (such as) motor plans or acoustic representation,” Hickok said. “So it’s possible now to implant an electrode array in the motor cortex of an individual who is locked in, so to speak, and they can control a robotic arm.”
More specifically, Hickok is interested in applying computational neuroanatomy to speech and language functions. In some cases where patients have lost the ability to produce fluid speech, he states that the cause is the disconnection of still-intact brain areas that are no longer “talking to each other”. Once we understand how these circuits are organized and what they’re doing computationally, Gregory believes we might one day be able to insert electrode arrays and reconnect those brain areas as a form of rehabilitation.
As he looks at the future applications in artificial intelligence, Hickok says he expects continued development in neural-prostheses, such as cochlear implants, artificial retinas, and artificial motor control circuits. The fact that scientists are still trying to simulate how the brain does its computations is one hurdle; the “squishy” nature of brain matter seems to operate differently than the precision developed in digital computers.
Though multiple global brain projects are underway and progress is being made (Wired’s Katie Palmer gives a succinct overview), Gregory emphasizes that we’re still nowhere close to actually re-creating the human mind. “Presumably, this is what evolution has done over millions of years to configure systems that allow us to do lots of different things and that is going to (sic) take a really long time to figure out,” he said. “The number of neurons involved, 80 billion in the current estimate, trillions of connections, lots and lots of moving parts, different strategies for coding different kinds of computations… it’s just ridiculously complex and I don’t see that as something that’s easily going to give up its secrets within the next couple of generations.”
