Researchers at the USC Roski Eye Institute, in collaboration with other institutions in California, have shown that a new stem cell-based retinal implant could help people with dry age-related macular degeneration.
The researchers have published the results of their phase 1/2a study in the journal Science Translational Medicine [1].
An early symptom is blurry vision in which straight lines appear distorted. That can progress to darkness, whiteouts, or blurry areas in the center of the visual field. The disease does not, by itself, lead to total blindness because peripheral vision remains unaffected. Although some therapies delay loss of central vision, no current treatments restore it completely.
“Macular degeneration therapies seem to be treating disease symptoms, rather than its cause,” Lin says. “We focused on the role of macrophages in regulating inflammation and the growth of abnormal blood vessels to see whether it may be possible one day to help people who don’t get much benefit from existing treatments and design therapies that may prevent progression to advanced forms of the disease.”
Virus delivers genes to fight vision loss.
DIYers can bioprint living human organs by modifying an off-the-shelf 3D printer costing about $500, announce researchers who published the plans as open source, enabling anyone to build their own system. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) developed a low-cost 3D bioprinter to print living tissue by modifying a standard desktop 3D printer and released the design as open source so that anyone can build their own system.
The biomedical engineering team led by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Associate Professor Adam Feinberg, Ph.D., BME postdoctoral fellow TJ Hinton, Ph.D. just published a paper in the journal HardwareX describing a low-cost 3D bioprinter. The article contains complete instructions for modifying nearly any commercial plastic printer, as well as printing and installing the syringe-based, large volume extruder.
In brief: An implantable cancer vaccine from Harvard has shown promising results in mice, and researchers are testing it in a clinical trial on humans. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
An implantable cancer vaccine being tested on patients by Harvard’s Wyss Institute is a new type of immunotherapy that holds promise to treat a wide range of cancers such as melanoma, as well as auto-immune conditions and infectious diseases. The aspirin-sized implant is made of a polymer scaffold containing growth factors and tissue samples from a patient’s tumors which trains a patient’s immune system to search and destroy cancer cells.
Harvard’s cancer vaccine is approaching the end of clinical testing, promising to be available 4 or 5 years sooner than Stanford’s vaccine with its 97% cure rate.
Nobody has yet been able to prevent or avoid time’s effects on our bodies and minds, and they are inevitable until science finds the solutions to aging. However, before then, we can do some things to try to slow the processes of aging down.
One potential approach is to follow the Mediterranean diet. This diet plan has already been reported to work for many health issues, and recent research suggests that we can use it to fight the aging process as well.
A new series of six studies appearing in the March issue of the Journals of Gerontology have found new correlations between a Mediterranean diet, aging, and health [1–6]. There are also a mountain of previous studies suggesting that this diet may help to somewhat slow aging.
Protein synthesis is a critical part of how our cells operate and keep us alive and when it goes wrong it drives the aging process. We take a look at how it works and what happens when things break down.
Suppose that your full-time job is to proofread machine-translated texts. The translation algorithm commits mistakes at a constant rate all day long; from this point of view, the quality of the translation stays the same. However, as a poor human proofreader, your ability to focus on this task will likely decline throughout the day; therefore, the number of missed errors, and therefore the number of translations that go out with mistakes, will likely go up with time, even though the machine doesn’t make any more errors at dusk than it did at dawn.
To an extent, this is pretty much what is going on with protein synthesis in your body.
Protein synthesis in a nutshell
The so-called coding regions of your DNA consist of genes that encode the necessary information to assemble the proteins that your cells use. As your DNA is, for all intents and purposes, the blueprint to build you, it is pretty important information, and as such, you want to keep it safe. That’s why DNA is contained in the double-layered membrane of the cell nucleus, where it is relatively safe from oxidative stress and other factors that might damage it. The protein-assembling machinery of the cell, ribosomes, are located outside the cell nucleus, and when a cell needs to build new proteins, what’s sent out to the assembly lines is not the blueprint itself, but rather a disposable mRNA (messenger RNA) copy of it that is read by the ribosomes, which will then build the corresponding protein. The process of making an mRNA copy of DNA is called “translation”, and as the initial analogy suggests, it is not error-free.
Harvard professor Dr. David Sinclair reports that the NAD boosting NMN compound reverses aging in blood vessels and restores muscle strength in a new study published March 22nd. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Using the NAD boosting molecule NMN, Dr. David Sinclair’s team reversed blood vessel and muscle aging in mice, while boosting their exercise endurance. As Dr. Sinclair says.
“We’ve discovered a way to reverse vascular aging by boosting the presence of naturally occurring molecules in the body that augment the physiological response to exercise” adding “The approach stimulates blood vessel growth and boosts stamina and endurance in mice and sets the stage for therapies in humans to address the spectrum of diseases that arise from vascular aging.”
As many as 153 million air pollution deaths would be avoided if governments speed up the timetable for reducing fossil fuel emissions, a new Duke University study finds. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
There is an overlooked benefit to lowering carbon emissions, besides reducing sea-level rise, a new study says.
Reducing emissions will likely save about 153 million human lives if the nations of the world agree to cut enough emissions to limit global temperature rise to less than 1.5°C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), by the end of the century. That is about a degree lower than the target set by the Paris climate accords.
Researchers just overturned a 70-year-old fundamental understanding of how our brains learn – paving the way for faster, more advanced AI applications and a different approach to medical treatments for brain disorders. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]
Researchers just overturned the way scientists thought our brains learn – a view that up until now has been widely accepted for almost 70 years.
This discovery-based upon new experimental evidence – paves the way for more modern artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as machine learning and deep learning algorithms that imitate our brain functions at a much faster speed with advanced features. Moreover, the research may change how doctors view disorders of the brain, such as Alzheimer’s and may alter treatments for other forms of dementia.
