Lifeboat Foundation

“The main goal is to build a smart new city, a new city that is competitive at the global level, to build a new locomotive for the transformation… toward an Indonesia based on innovation and technology based on a green economy.”

Environmental groups not on board However, not all are on board with Widodo’s new plans. Environmental groups worry that the new city may disturb the orangutans, leopards, and other wildlife that already live there. There is also the fact that the new development would cost a whopping $34 billion, a price much too high to pay during an already costly pandemic.

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Continue reading “Indonesia Is Changing Its Capital Because of Jakarta’s Unsolvable Problems” »

Blood plasma, cellular reprogramming, endogenous.

You may have heard a lot of talk recently about cellular reprogramming, rejuvenation or even “rejuvenation programming”, but what does that all mean and what are the 3 main strategies that several researchers and companies (maybe Altos Labs) will be further investigating?

Continue reading “3 Rejuvenation Strategies For Aging” »

In order to satiate youth-hungry bald people, scientists are growing human hair cells on mice.

Ernesto Lujan, a biologist and founder of medical startup dNovo, told MIT Technology Review that his company has successfully transplanted human hair stem cells onto a mouse.

The result is a horrifying abomination of all that is good, and proof that science has gone too far.

Safed’s Ziv Medical Center has sent a letter to Health Ministry director Nachman Ash requesting he grant emergency authorization for the anti-COVID drug Amor 18 developed by the Israeli company Amorphical in order to treat patients in moderate to serious condition due to the coronavirus, Channel 2 reported Friday.

In letter to Health Ministry director, Ziv Medical Center points to promising results from Amor 18’s clinical trial, where all patients who received drug went on to recover (drug uses Amorphous Calcium Carbonate: ACC).

Israeli biotech company Amorphical recently published what it says are promising results from the second stage of its Amor 18 clinical study.

Continue reading “Hospital seeks emergency approval of Israeli COVID drug for moderate-seriously ill” »

What is AI, really? Jeff Dean, the head of Google’s AI efforts, explains the underlying technology that enables artificial intelligence to do all sorts of things, from understanding language to diagnosing disease — and presents a roadmap for building better, more responsible systems that have a deeper understanding of the world. (Followed by a Q&A with head of TED Chris Anderson)

Visit http://TED.com to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more.

Continue reading “Jeff Dean: AI isn’t as smart as you think — but it could be | TED” »

64x Bio comes out of the Har­vard De­part­ment of Ge­net­ics. CEO Lex Rovn­er and her team — which right now, sits around 10 peo­ple — are look­ing to tack­le a key hur­dle for ma­jor com­pa­nies: man­u­fac­tur­ing cell and gene therapies.

Rovn­er met Church while get­ting her PhD at Yale, and went on to do a post­doc­tor­al re­search fel­low­ship in his lab, and, when talk­ing to folks in the in­dus­try, found a mas­sive vi­ral vec­tor man­u­fac­tur­ing bot­tle­neck that wasn’t be­ing talked about.

Af­ter a seed fund­ing round and the com­pa­ny’s launch in 2020, it made some noise in the in­dus­try, par­tic­u­lar­ly as Covid-19 made bot­tle­neck is­sues more vis­i­ble. There’s a wait­list to get a vec­tor from man­u­fac­tur­ers, and not much of a so­lu­tion to the problem.

There is nothing inevitable about aging, or about its rate. Californian bristlecone pines are believed to live for 5,000 years, and there are long-lived mammalian creatures as well. Some marine creatures do not display any signs of aging at all, including hydra, jellyfish, planarian worms, and coral. Certain human cells have immortal characteristics too. When a woman gives birth, she produces a baby which is “new”. Her “germline” (reproduction-related) cells produce a child with no signs of age.

These and many other considerations combine with the unreasonable effectiveness of modern AI to lead some people to believe that significant advances in longevity are imminent. These advances probably cannot happen without the active participation of the wider pharmaceutical industry, and the acceptance by policy makers and regulators that aging is a disease, not just an unfortunate and inevitable component of the human condition. There is still considerable reluctance among major pharmaceutical companies to contemplate specific anti-aging therapeutic developments. But there are encouraging signs of this reluctance being challenged, especially at Novartis and AstraZeneca.

Beyond the pharma giants, Mellon reckons there are 255 companies which claim to be specifically targeting aging, of which 35 are listed on stock markets. But he thinks that only a minority of them are genuinely working to tackle aging, as opposed to one of the diseases it causes, like cancer, dementia, or heart disease. He likens the state of the longevity industry today to the internet industry of 20 years ago, when it was still in its dial-up phase, and downloading information (or, heaven forbid, images) was like sucking jelly through a straw. And although longevity will have such a massive impact on all of us that you might expect progress to be expedited, Mellon points out that the internet did not have to go through lengthy and expensive FDA trials at every step.

Autophagy is often likened to the trash management system of the cell. And just as municipal waste services involve collection, transportation and ultimately disposal, so too must the cell’s autophagy system follow a coordinated, multistep process. It first requires cellular refuse to be bagged up inside sack-like structures known as phagophores. These then mature into cargo containers called autophagosomes, which fuse with degradation hubs called lysosomes. Only then do waste products get broken down.

Any part of that cell-cleaning process could go wrong, and they often do as cells age. But if researchers do not fully understand what aspects of autophagy are defective in any particular disease, drugs that modulate the wrong parts of the pathway could do more harm than good. A therapy could, for instance, help the cell to package more trash. “But if your trash compactor isn’t working properly, you’re just going to end up with a room full of trash bags,” says Tim Sargeant, who studies autophagy at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute in Adelaide. “That’s one of the dangers here.”

As a result, although some anti-ageing researchers and companies have gone all-in on targeting autophagy, others are more circumspect — especially given the lack of solid evidence in people or even mouse models for many of the proposed interventions.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and bears an immense economic burden. Late-stage heart failure often requires total heart transplantation; however, due to donor shortages and lifelong immunosuppression, alternative cardiac regenerative therapies are in high demand. Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), including human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells, have emerged as a viable source of human cardiomyocytes for transplantation. Recent developments in several mammalian models of cardiac injury have provided strong evidence of the therapeutic potential of hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CM), showing their ability to electromechanically integrate with host cardiac tissue and promote functional recovery. In this review, we will discuss recent developments in hPSC-CM differentiation and transplantation strategies for delivery to the heart. We will highlight the mechanisms through which hPSC-CMs contribute to heart repair, review major challenges in successful transplantation of hPSC-CMs, and present solutions that are being explored to address these limitations. We end with a discussion of the clinical use of hPSC-CMs, including hurdles to clinical translation, current clinical trials, and future perspectives on hPSC-CM transplantation.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. In the United States alone, CVD is responsible for ~655,000 deaths and contributes to $200 billion in spending each year. CVD can lead to myocardial infarction (MI), also known as a “heart attack,” which results in restricted blood flow and extensive cell death within the infarct zone. Due to the limited regenerative capacity of the human heart, infarcted myocardium is replaced by fibrotic scar tissue with inferior contractile performance. Over time, pathological remodeling leads to ventricular wall thinning, which can progress to heart failure. There is currently no treatment available that can restore lost cardiomyocytes after MI, and conventional therapies typically only manage the symptoms (3, 4).