Lifeboat Foundation

Specialized cells that conduct electricity to keep the heart beating have a previously unrecognized ability to regenerate in the days after birth, a new study in mice by UT Southwestern researchers suggests. The finding, published online in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, could eventually lead to treatments for heart rhythm disorders that avoid the need for invasive pacemakers or drugs by instead encouraging the heart to heal itself.

“Patients with arrhythmias don’t have a lot of great options,” said study leader Nikhil V. Munshi, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiologist and Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, Molecular Biology, and in the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development. “Our findings suggest that someday we may be able to elicit regeneration from the heart itself to treat these conditions.”

Dr. Munshi studies the cardiac conduction system, an interconnected system of specialized heart muscle cells that generate electrical impulses and transmit these impulses to make the heart beat. Although studies have shown that nonconducting heart muscle cells have some regenerative capacity for a limited time after birth—with many discoveries in this field led by UTSW scientists—conducting cells called nodal cells were largely thought to lose this ability during the fetal period.

Exclusive: Report from planning exercise in 2016 alerted government of need to stockpile PPE and set up contact tracing system.

It probably didn’t feel like much, but that simple kind of motion required the concerted effort of millions of different neurons in several regions of your brain, followed by signals sent at 200 mph from your brain to your spinal cord and then to the muscles that contracted to move your arm.

At the cellular level, that quick motion is a highly complicated process and, like most things that involve the human brain, scientists don’t fully understand how it all comes together.

Continue reading “An ultra detailed map of the brain region that controls movement, from mice to monkeys to humans” »

DNA contains the genetic information that influences everything from eye color to illness and disorder susceptibility. Genes, which are around 20,000 pieces of DNA in the human body, perform various vital tasks in our cells. Despite this, these genes comprise up less than 2% of the genome. The remaining base pairs in the genome are referred to as “non-coding.” They include less well-understood instructions on when and where genes should be created or expressed in the human body.

DeepMind, in collaboration with their Alphabet colleagues at Calico, introduces Enformer, a neural network architecture that accurately predicts gene expression from DNA sequences.

Earlier studies on gene expression used convolutional neural networks as key building blocks. However, their accuracy and usefulness have been hampered by problems in modeling the influence of distal enhancers on gene expression. The proposed new method is based on Basenji2, a program that can predict regulatory activity from DNA sequences of up to 40,000 base pairs.

In January 2,020 at the event where General Motors automated driving division Cruise took the wraps off the Origin robotaxi, a slide briefly appeared in the presentation showing a version of the vehicle for package deliveries. Today during the General Motors investor day, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann provided more details about the company’s business model and revenue opportunities and showed both a delivery module and a wheelchair accessible version.

Cruise has been providing automated deliveries in partnership with Walmart WMT +0.7% in the Phoenix area since late 2020. Throughout much of last year during the worst early phases of the pandemic in the San Francisco area, Cruise vehicles were used to provide more than 50,000 food deliveries to medical personnel and those in need. Those efforts have all utilized the current test fleet of Chevrolet Bolts which are not optimized for goods delivery.

There’s a lot of excitement at the intersection of artificial intelligence and health care. AI has already been used to improve disease treatment and detection, discover promising new drugs, identify links between genes and diseases, and more.

By analyzing large datasets and finding patterns, virtually any new algorithm has the potential to help patients — AI researchers just need access to the right data to train and test those algorithms. Hospitals, understandably, are hesitant to share sensitive patient information with research teams. When they do share data, it’s difficult to verify that researchers are only using the data they need and deleting it after they’re done.

Secure AI Labs (SAIL) is addressing those problems with a technology that lets AI algorithms run on encrypted datasets that never leave the data owner’s system. Health care organizations can control how their datasets are used, while researchers can protect the confidentiality of their models and search queries. Neither party needs to see the data or the model to collaborate.

With almost instant improvement.

A team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco Health has successfully treated a patient with severe depression by targeting the specific brain circuit involved in depressive brain patterns and resetting them thanks to a new proof-of-concept intervention.

Continue reading “A New Brain Implant Relieved Treatment-Resistant Depression, in a World First” »

Based on Transformers, our new architecture advances genetic research by improving the ability to predict how DNA sequence influences gene expression.

When the Human Genome Project succeeded in mapping the DNA sequence of the human genome, the international research community were excited by the opportunity to better understand the genetic instructions that influence human health and development. DNA carries the genetic information that determines everything from eye colour to susceptibility to certain diseases and disorders. The roughly 20,000 sections of DNA in the human body known as genes contain instructions about the amino acid sequence of proteins, which perform numerous essential functions in our cells. Yet these genes make up less than 2% of the genome. The remaining base pairs — which account for 98% of the 3 billion “letters” in the genome — are called “non-coding” and contain less well-understood instructions about when and where genes should be produced or expressed in the human body.

University of Kentucky College of Medicine researchers were part of a new study that gives insight into how limb development evolved in vertebrates.

The findings, published in Current Biology Oct. 4 identify a gene that plays a central role in the evolution of limb development in vertebrates. By manipulating this gene in mice, researchers were able to activate an ancestral form of limb development seen in early tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates).

In the limbs of all tetrapods, the bones on the hands and feet on the outside edge form first, known as postaxial development. The study focuses on salamanders, which are the only exception to this rule: their limb bones develop preaxially, or from the inside edge; the thumb before pinky.