Early in the pandemic, my team spotted something surprising. When people were severely ill with COVID-19 and on a ventilator, the daily rinses of the plastic tubes in their windpipes contained immune cells from the airway. More surprisingly, what was in these airway samples was very different from what was found in the same patient’s blood.
COVID has shown we must study immunity in the whole body — let’s sort the logistics to acquire the right samples.
The longevity industry — startups trying to make people live longer or even forever, basically — tends to attract charlatans and scandal.
But a terrific feature story in New Statesman makes the case that a handful of ventures in the space are finally starting to hone in on some compelling ideas that might eventually provide modest or even radical life extension.
“I’m confident we’ll have an aging drug by the time it’s relevant for me,” 27-year-old Celine Halioua, a PhD dropout who now works at the anti-aging startup Loyal, who predicted that such a drug could become available “within a decade.”
Extreme heat can kill or cause long-term health problems – but for many unendurable temperatures are the new normal.
Extreme heat can also cause “leaky gut”, in which toxins and pathogenic bacteria to seep in to the blood, increasing the likelihood of infections, says Walter. It is almost possible to develop a kind of sepsis infection by being hot, he says. “Gut permeability seems to be a big, big problem.”
In a world-first, US surgeons have successfully transferred a kidney taken from a pig into a braindead human patient, in a major step towards using animal organs in human transplantations.
The team at NYU Langone Health performed the operation on a woman who was recently declared braindead, with the permission of her family. The sole object of the study, according to the lead surgeon Dr Robert Montgomery, was “to provide the first evidence that what appears to be promising results from non-human primates will translate into a good outcome in a human.”
One major obstacle in making xenotransplantation possible has been the rejection of organs by hosts. To overcome this, the team used an organ from a pig that had been genetically engineered in order to remove a sugar molecule known to play a significant role in rejection. The surgeons attached the kidney to large blood vessels outside of the recipient and monitored it for two days.
The kidney used in the new procedure was obtained by knocking out a pig gene that encodes a sugar molecule that elicits an aggressive human rejection response. The pig was genetically engineered by Revivicor and approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a source for human therapeutics.
Dr. Montgomery and his team also transplanted the pig’s thymus, a gland that is involved in the immune system, in an effort to ward off immune reactions to the kidney.
After attaching the kidney to blood vessels in the upper leg, the surgeons covered it with a protective shield so they could observe it and take tissue samples over the 54-hour study period. Urine and creatinine levels were normal, Dr. Montgomery and his colleagues found, and no signs of rejection were detected during more than two days of observation.
A kidney grown in a genetically altered pig seemed to function normally, potentially a new source for desperately needed transplant organs.
No one knows why some people age worse than others and develop diseases-such as Alzheimer’s, fibrosis, type 2 diabetes or some types of cancer-associated with this aging process. One explanation for this could be the degree of efficiency of each organism’s response to the damage sustained by its cells during its life, which eventually causes them to age. In relation to this, researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the University of Leicester (United Kingdom) have developed a new method to remove old cells from tissues, thus slowing down the aging process.
Specifically, they have designed an antibody that acts as a smart bomb able to recognize specific proteins on the surface of these aged or senescent cells. It then attaches itself to them and releases a drug that removes them without affecting the rest, thus minimizing any potential side effects.
The results of this work, which have been published in Scientific Reports, open the door to the development of effective treatments to delay the progress of age-related diseases and even the aging process itself in the longer term, with the aim of increasing the longevity and, above all, the quality of life of people at this stage of their lives.
Multiple myeloma (MM) remains an incurable disease regardless of recent advances in the field. Therefore, a substantial unmet need exists to treat patients with relapsed/refractory myeloma. The use of novel agents such as daratumumab, elotuzumab, carfilzomib, or pomalidomide, among others, usually cannot completely eradicate myeloma cells. Although these new drugs have had a significant impact on the prognosis of MM patients, the vast majority ultimately become refractory or can no longer be treated due to toxicity of prior treatment, and thus succumb to the disease. Cellular therapies represent a novel approach with a unique mechanism of action against myeloma with the potential to defeat drug resistance and achieve long-term remissions. Genetic modification of cells to express a novel receptor with tumor antigen specificity is currently being explored in myeloma. Chimeric antigen receptor gene-modified T-cells (CAR T-cells) have shown to be the most promising approach so far. CAR T-cells have shown to induce durable complete remissions in other advanced hematologic malignancies like acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). With this background, significant efforts are underway to develop CAR-based therapies for MM. Currently, several antigen targets, including CD138, CD19, immunoglobulin kappa (Ig-Kappa) and B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA), are being used in clinical trials to treat myeloma patients. Some of these trials have shown promising results, especially in terms of response rates. However, the absence of a plateau is observed in most studies which correlates with the absence of durable remissions. Therefore, several potential limitations such as lack of effectiveness, off-tumor toxicities, and antigen loss or interference with soluble proteins could hamper the efficacy of CAR T-cells in myeloma. In this review, we will focus on clinical outcomes reported with CAR T-cells in myeloma, as well as on CAR T-cell limitations and how to overcome them with next generation of CAR T-cells.
Multiple myeloma (MM) is an hematological malignancy characterized by the clonal proliferation of malignant plasma cells. Myeloma develops from a pre-malignant monoclonal proliferation of plasma cells (monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance) which progresses to smoldering myeloma and finally to symptomatic disease (1, 2). With an incidence of 5.6 cases per 100.000 people/year in Western countries it accounts for 1% of all cancers and around 10% of hematological malignancies. Diagnosis of MM is based on the presence of clonal plasma cells plus monoclonal protein in serum or urine and clinical manifestations including hypercalcemia, renal impairment, anemia and/or bone lesions (acronym: CRAB) (4, 5).
Posted in biotech/medical, business, economics, food, media & arts, mobile phones, robotics/AI | Leave a Comment on Net Zero Strategy 2021. Through Disruptive Technology & The Power Of Exponential Growth & Uptake
We are living in a time when we can see what needs to be done, but the industrial legacy of the last century has such power invested, politically and in the media, and so much money at its disposal due to the investors who have too much to lose to walk away, and so they throw good money after bad to desperately try to save their stranded assets.
Well, the next decade will bring new technologies which will rupture the business models of the old guard, tipping the balance on their huge economies of scale, which will quickly disintegrate their advantage before consigning them to history, and these new ways of doing things will be better for us and the environment, and cheaper than every before. Just look at how the internet and the smart phone destroyed everything from cameras to video shops to taxis and the very high street itself.
The rest is not far behind and it all holds the opportunity to mend the damage we have done.
If you want to know more about what lies ahead, check out this video.
It might indeed sound more like science fiction but we are approaching an era where everything will be fundamentally disrupted. From the energy that fuels our modern lifestyles, to the food on our plates, from transportation to medicine to production, the changes that the smartphone forced upon everything they touched, from phones to video cameras to personal music players and information portal, well that is set to happen to everything else. And if you want to know more about how autonomous vehicles could change the world, check this out. https://youtu.be/uFRSf_vD-nw
One form of “self-sacrifice” was to stand on the banks of the Nile and masturbate into the river as offering to honour Lord Amen (this sacred act was how Amen, Cyclical Eternity, came into being originally). Lots of the neurosis around today are because of the biblical view of “onanism” The term “Onanism” is associated with personal indulgence, or excess (even mortal sin for Catholics) perhaps giving rise to infantilised and repressed sexuality and a PANDEMIC of Christian paedophilia. 216,000 children — shouldn’t the Church in France be closed down?
The Church asks for forgiveness as an inquiry says it treated victims with “cruel indifference”.
Scientists reworked CRISPR prime’s molecular makeup to precisely cut out up to 10,000 DNA letters in one go, and increased the tool’s efficiency eight-fold.
