Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

Bioviva a Seattle, WA, based biotech is ambitiously moving forward with gene therapy in people to mitigate the consequences of aging. They have not gone for the low hanging fruit either, they are being supported by Maximum Life Foundation to raise enough to run a clinical trial to try to cure Alzheimer’s! They are targeting the supporting Microglia cells in the brain to help regenerate them and hopefully reverse the effects of the disease. A worthy cause if ever I saw one and if it works could translate to other similar conditions like Parkinson’s and ALS. Lets hope they can get this vital work underway. This will then be the first example of regenerative medicine in a person that treats the dysfunction of aging.

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“Furthermore, the chromatophore project marks a shift in computational biophysics from analyzing the individual cell parts (e.g., a single protein) to analyzing the specialized systems of the cell (e.g., hundreds of proteins working together to carry out an autonomous function). This is a significant step toward the long-term goal of simulating an entire living organism.”

Nearly all life on Earth depends on photosynthesis, the conversion of light energy into chemical energy. Oxygen-producing plants and cyanobacteria perfected this process 2.7 billion years ago. But the first photosynthetic organisms were likely single-celled purple bacteria that began absorbing near-infrared light and converting it to sulfur or sulfates about 3.4 billion years ago.

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University have engineered a tethered ribosome that works nearly as well as the authentic cellular component, or organelle, that produces all the proteins and enzymes within the cell. The engineered ribosome may enable the production of new drugs and next-generation biomaterials and lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes function.

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Researchers in the US have been testing a new type of antidepressant medication on rats, and say it’s able to treat the symptoms of depression in less than a day, compared to the three to eight weeks it takes current drugs to work. If the results can be replicated in humans, the drug could offer a much more effective option than treatments such as Prozac and Lexapro, which are only effective in only a third of patients who have been diagnosed with depression.

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More interesting developments on the regenerative medicine front this time from UCSF and Villeda. B2M is a downstream consequence of too much TGF-b1 as demonstrated in the recent Conboy regeneration test. This is more validation that cell and tissue regeneration is very near future and should translate to humans.

At UC San Francisco, we are driven by the idea that when the best research, the best teaching and the best patient care converge, we can deliver breakthroughs that help heal the world.

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Genome editing by engineered Cas9 systems (credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers) CRISPR/Cas systems for genome editing have revolutionized biological research over the past three years, and their ability to make targeted changes in DNA sequences in living cells with relative ease and affordability is now being applied to clinical medicine and will have a significant impact on advances in drug and other therapies, agriculture, and food products.

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A good summary of the crisis in research and the broken paradigm the medical world is currently stuck in from Josh Mitteldorf’s excellent blog.

Capital shuns risk. — The essence of science is exploration of the unknown. Science and Capitalism is not exactly a match made in heaven. Government and foundation funding has always been behind the curve of innovation, but the recent contraction in US science funding has engendered an unprecedented intensity of competition. This has translated into a disastrous attitude of risk aversion. A “hard-headed” business model prevails at the funding agencies, and they are now funding only those projects that they deem “most likely to succeed.”

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