Lifeboat Foundation

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the devastating impact of acute lung inflammation (ALI), which is part of the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) that is the dominant cause of death in COVID-19. A potential new route to the diagnosis and treatment of ARDS comes from studying how neutrophils—the white blood cells responsible for detecting and eliminating harmful particles in the body—differentiate what materials to uptake by the material’s surface structure, and favor uptake of particles that exhibit “protein clumping,” according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The findings are published in Nature Nanotechnology.

Researchers investigated how neutrophils are able to differentiate between bacteria to be destroyed and other compounds in the bloodstream, such as cholesterol particles. They tested a library consisting of 23 different protein-based nanoparticles in mice with ALI which revealed a set of “rules” that predict uptake by neutrophils. Neutrophils don’t take up symmetrical, rigid particles, such as viruses, but they do take up particles that exhibited “protein clumping,” which the researchers call nanoparticles with agglutinated protein (NAPs).

“We want to utilize the existing function of neutrophils that identifies and eliminates invaders to inform how to design a ‘Trojan horse’ nanoparticle that overactive neutrophils will intake and deliver treatment to alleviate ALI and ARDS,” said study lead author Jacob Myerson, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics. “In order to build this ‘Trojan horse’ delivery system, though, we had to determine how neutrophils identify which particles in the blood to take up.”

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Undoubtedly the fear of death, encoded in our DNA to improve our chances of survival, is one of the least pleasant characteristics we are forced to live with. The idea that our life must have an end and then there is nothingness is not at all attractive, so it is not surprising that in the course of his history man has imagined countless ways to circumvent death.
Immortality (or eternal life) is the concept of surviving forever or for an indefinite period of time, without facing death or overcoming death itself.

Immortality can be intended in two main meanings, physical and spiritual. Physical immortality is generally conceived as the endless existence of the mind from a physical source, such as a brain or a computer. Spiritual immortality is generally conceived as the endless existence of an individual after physical death.

Continue reading “The Future Technology To Become Immortal” »

A small box glowing with a brilliant blue light has saved the lives of numerous babies since its inception, and it’s only getting started.

This innovative box is called Crib A’Glow, and it’s a low-cost phototherapy solution for treating newborn babies with neonatal jaundice, a condition in which a baby’s skin and the whites of the eyes appear yellow due to excess bilirubin. When untreated, this ailment, which is extremely common as newborns haven’t developed the liver function to properly process the bilirubin, can cause hearing loss, blindness, brain damage, and even death, which is why instant treatment is recommended. This is where the novel phototherapy unit comes in.

Crib A’Glow was developed by Virtue Oboro 0, a mother and graphic designer from Nigeria, after her son’s experience with jaundice. Shortly after giving birth in 2015, Oboro noticed the classic yellow hue commonly associated with the disease in her son, and right after, he was diagnosed with jaundice. However, due to a lack of available phototherapy units in the hospital, his health deteriorated to the point that a blood transfusion was needed immediately. Her son survived the incident; however, Oboro was a changed woman after that.

When technology allows you to do things by just thinking, it provides a massive boost to people whose functional independence has been taken away.

A magnetic field can be used to switch nanolasers on and off, shows new research from Aalto University. The physics underlying this discovery paves the way for the development of optical signals that cannot be disturbed by external disruptions, leading to unprecedented robustness in signal processing.

Lasers concentrate light into extremely bright beams that are useful in a variety of domains, such as broadband communication and medical diagnostics devices. About ten years ago, extremely small and fast lasers known as plasmonic nanolasers were developed. These nanolasers are potentially more power-efficient than traditional lasers, and they have been of great advantage in many fields—for example, nanolasers have increased the sensitivity of biosensors used in medical diagnostics.

So far, switching nanolasers on and off has required manipulating them directly, either mechanically or with the use of heat or light. Now, researchers have found a way to remotely control nanolasers.

A major new study of ancient DNA has traced the movement of people into southern Britain during the Bronze Age. In the largest such analysis published to date, scientists examined the DNA of nearly 800 ancient individuals.

The new study, led by the University of York, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Vienna, shows that people moving into southern Britain around 1300‒800 BC were responsible for around half the genetic ancestry of subsequent populations.

The combined DNA and archaeological evidence suggests that, rather than a violent invasion or a single migratory event, the genetic structure of the population changed through sustained contacts between mainland Britain and Europe over several centuries, such as the movement of traders, intermarriage, and small scale movements of family groups.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has officially recommended the widespread use of a malaria vaccine for the first time.

“As some of you may know, I started my career as a malaria researcher, and I longed for the day that we would have an effective vaccine against this ancient and terrible disease,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Today is that day, an historic day.”

The challenge: Malaria is a serious parasitic disease spread by mosquitoes. Although eradicated in the U.S. and many other countries, it’s a major threat to people in other parts of the world, claiming more than 400,000 lives every year, and about half of the deaths are children under the age of five.

Q&A with Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, discussing research her team conducted recently that discovered local vaccines administered with a nasal spray were more effective in protecting mice against influenza than vaccines that are injected into the muscle, the way standard flu shots are done.

A Yale School of Medicine research team led by Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, recently found that local vaccines administered with a nasal spray were more effective in protecting mice against influenza than vaccines that are injected into the muscle, the way standard flu shots are done. Iwasaki, who is Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Immunobiology and professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and of epidemiology (microbial diseases), discusses her new research, which was published December 10 in Science Immunology.

Akiko Iwasaki: We found that local mucosal immunity that’s established by intranasal vaccination elicits a much more robust and cross reactive, cross protective immunity than a conventional vaccine that uses intramuscular injection. And the way we got to this knowledge is that we were comparing different routes of vaccine administration and found that only after the intranasal vaccination, there are these antibodies that are secreted into the mucosa known as IgA. And this IgA coats the mucus membrane and mucus surface and protects the host by preventing the virus from entering the body. So it’s like putting the guard outside of the door instead of inside the door where antibodies normally work, inside the body.

Continue reading “Nasal Vaccination May Protect Against Respiratory Viruses Better Than Injected Vaccines” »

They are at the forefront in the fight against viruses, bacteria, and malignant cells: the T cells of our immune system. But the older we get, the fewer of them our body produces. Thus, how long we remain healthy also depends on how long the T cells survive. Researchers at the University of Basel have now uncovered a previously unknown signaling pathway essential for T cell viability.

Like human beings, every cell in our body tries to ward off death as long as it can. This is particular true for a specific type of immune cells, called T-lymphocytes, or T cells for short. These cells keep viruses, bacteria, parasites and cancerous cells at bay. While T cell production is an active process in infants, children and young adults, it comes to a gradual stop upon aging, meaning that in order to maintain adequate immunity up to an old age, your T cells should better live as long as you.

How T cells manage to survive for such a long time, up to several decades in humans, has long remained unclear. In collaboration with scientists at the Department of Biomedicine and sciCORE, the Center for Scientific Computing of the University of Basel, Professor Jean Pieters’ research group at the Biozentrum has now revealed the existence of a hitherto unrecognized pathway promoting long-term survival of T cells. In Science Signaling they report that this signaling pathway, regulated by the protein coronin 1, is responsible for suppressing T cell death.