Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

The human genome can be thought of as a massive library, containing over 20,000 different “instruction manuals”: your genes. For example, there are genes which contain information to build a brain cell, a skin cell, a white blood cell, and so on. There are even genes that contain information about regulating the genome itself—like books that explain how to organize a library. The ability to regulate gene expression —in other words, the cell’s ability to turn various constellations of genes on or off—is the basis of why different cells (such as a muscle cell or a brain cell) have different forms and functions.

For any library to be useful to a reader, it needs to be organized in an easily searchable way. For example, all the books pertaining to world history may be on one shelf, whereas the cookbooks may be in an entirely different section of the library. In a cellular nucleus, there is over six feet of genetic material packed into a space 50 times smaller than the width of a human hair. How is the “library” in the nucleus organized? When a cell needs to regulate certain genes, how does the cellular machinery find the right ones amongst 20,000 others?

A new paper from the laboratory of Mitchell Guttman, professor of biology, uses a powerful new tool that can peer into the world of the cell’s genetic material (DNA.

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The Neuro-Network.

𝙈𝙚𝙚𝙩 𝙍𝙊𝙎𝘼: 𝙍𝙤𝙗𝙤𝙩 𝙜𝙪𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙨 𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙨𝙪𝙧𝙜𝙚𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙩 𝙃𝙤𝙪𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙣 𝙑𝘼

𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘰𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘸𝘯. 𝘙𝘖𝘚𝘈, 𝘢 𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵, 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘫𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘯 𝘝𝘈 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮 … See more.

Houston VA surgeons successfully complete VA’s first use of ROSA, a minimally invasive robotic device, on an Army Veteran from Oklahoma.

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A decade ago, a London cancer prevention researcher predicted that the United Kingdom’s national HPV vaccination campaign would take more than 15 years to prevent a majority of cervical cancers. So when he analyzed the data this year, he was stunned to find that the vaccine may already have nearly eliminated cervical cancer in the U.K. among young women.

“If this is right,” Peter Sasieni of King’s College London said of his findings, cervical cancers “could be reduced to about 50 – just 50 cancers in the whole of the U.K. for women under 30. It’s really quite exciting to see that day come – excitement and just joy.”

That joy was tempered with envy in the United States, where some of Sasieni’s peers lamented that the HPV vaccination rate for teenage girls lags far behind — about 59% in the U.S. vs. more than 85% in the U.K. The analysis, published last week in the Lancet, suggests the U.K. has notched a major public health victory against cancer through vaccinating the vast majority of young women against HPV, said Allison Kempe, a pediatrics professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who did not work on the study.

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Health Canada is updating the labels for the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines to add immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), an autoimmune condition, as a potential side effect.

In a statement on Tuesday, the agency said very rare cases of ITP have been reported internationally after receiving the Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca) and Janssen (J&J) COVID-19 vaccines.

ITP is a disorder that can cause easy or excessive bruising and bleeding, which results from unusually low blood platelet levels.

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Previously unrecognized control point identified as target for drugs that block transition. A new study led by University of California, Irvine researchers is the first to reveal the specific molecular mechanism that controls the transition from acute to chronic pain, and identifies this mechanism as a critical target for disease-modifying medicines.

Findings from the study, titled “NAAA-regulated lipid signaling governs the transition from acute to chronic pain,” published today in Science Advances, show that disabling N-acylethanolamine acid amidase (NAAA) — an intracellular enzyme-in the spinal cord during a 72 hour time window following peripheral tissue injury halts chronic pain development in male and female mice.

“Delineating the nature, localization and timing of the events involved in pain chronicity is necessary to pinpointing control nodes in the process that can be targeted by new classes of disease-modifying medicines beyond analgesics,” said Daniele Piomelli, Distinguished Professor in the UCI School of Medicine Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology. “This study is the first to identify that NAAA, a previously unrecognized control node, can be effectively targeted by small-molecule therapeutics that inhibit this enzyme, and block the transition from acute to chronic pain.”

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NVIDIA has launched a follow-up to the Jetson AGX Xavier, its $1,100 AI brain for robots that it released back in 2018. The new module, called the Jetson AGX Orin, has six times the processing power of Xavier even though it has the same form factor and can still fit in the palm of one’s hand. NVIDIA designed Orin to be an “energy-efficient AI supercomputer” meant for use in robotics, autonomous and medical devices, as well as edge AI applications that may seem impossible at the moment.

The chipmaker says Orin is capable of 200 trillion operations per second. It’s built on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPU, features Arm Cortex-A78AE CPUs and comes with next-gen deep learning and vision accelerators, giving it the ability to run multiple AI applications. Orin will give users access to the company’s software and tools, including the NVIDIA Isaac Sim scalable robotics simulation application, which enables photorealistic, physically-accurate virtual environments where developers can test and manage their AI-powered robots. For users in the healthcare industry, there’s NVIDIA Clara for AI-powered imaging and genomics. And for autonomous vehicle developers, there’s NVIDIA Drive.

The company has yet to reveal what the Orin will cost, but it intends to make the Jetson AGX Orin module and developer kit available in the first quarter of 2022. Those interested can register to be notified about its availability on NVIDIA’s website. The company will also talk about Orin at NVIDIA GTC, which will take place from November 8th through 11th.

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Discussing The Future Of “Seno-Therapeutic” Development — Dr. Judith Campisi, PhD, Professor of Biogerontology, Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Dr. Judith Campisi, PhD (https://www.buckinstitute.org/lab/campisi-lab/) is a biochemist, cell biologist, and Professor of Biogerontology at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

Dr. Campisi received a PhD in biochemistry from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and completed her postdoctoral training in cell cycle regulation at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. As an assistant and associate professor at the Boston University Medical School, she studied the role of cellular senescence in suppressing cancer and soon became convinced that senescent cells also contributed to aging. She joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a senior scientist in 1991 working with Dr. Mina Bissell. In 2,002 she started a second laboratory at the Buck Institute. At both institutions, Dr. Campisi established a broad program to understand the relationship between aging and age-related disease, with an emphasis on the interface between cancer and aging.

Dr. Campisi is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Campisi has received numerous awards for her research, including two MERIT awards from the National Institute on Aging and awards from the AlliedSignal Corporation, Gerontological Society of America, and American Federation for Aging Research. She is a recipient of the Longevity prize from the IPSEN Foundation, the Bennett Cohen award from the University of Michigan, and the Schober award from Halle University, and she is the first recipient of the international Olav Thon Foundation prize in Natural Sciences and Medicine. Dr. Campisi currently serves on advisory committees for the Alliance for Aging Research, Progeria Research Foundation, and NIA’s Intervention Testing Program. She is also an editorial board member for more than a dozen peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Campisi is a scientific founder of Unity Biotechnology, a California-based company focused on developing senolytic therapies for age-related pathologies. She has served on the scientific advisory boards of the Geron Corporation, Sierra BioScience, and Sangamo Biosciences.

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Shokrollah Elahi led a new study showing that short-lived white blood cells called neutrophils play a role in impaired T cell functions and counts in people with HIV, as well as the chronic inflammation that is common with the virus. (Photo: Najmeh Bozorgmehr)

In a groundbreaking study of people living with HIV, University of Alberta researchers found that elusive white blood cells called neutrophils play a role in impaired T cell functions and counts, as well as the associated chronic inflammation that is common with the virus.

Neutrophils are a foundational part of the body’s immune system and the most abundant type of white blood cell, making up about 60 to 80 per cent of circulating immune cells in the blood. However, unlike other types of white blood cells, neutrophils are extremely short-lived and cannot be frozen and thawed like other immune cells, making them extremely difficult to examine, said study lead Shokrollah Elahi.

“Neutrophils live for hours to a day or two maximum,” Elahi said. “The body produces a lot of neutrophils, and they do their job and then they die and have to be regenerated in the bone marrow. But despite the fact that neutrophils are the most abundant white blood cells in the blood circulation, their role in the context of HIV has not been very well defined.”

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Wastewater samples are being used to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

It’s sometimes called ‘wastewater-based epidemiology’ (WBE) – a scientific and public health field that involves detecting and monitoring specific molecules in untreated wastewater, to determine how prevalent they are. First proposed more than 70 years ago as a way to track the spread of the deadly poliovirus, WBE has since been used to measure human population exposure to pollutants, and even to estimate the level of drug consumption in major cities. In 2,020 it hit global news headlines when it was first proposed as a way to track SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

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