Lifeboat Foundation

Inspiration4 is getting its own documentary. Netflix said Tuesday it would be releasing a five-part series on the mission, its first documentary to cover an event “in near real-time,” in five parts in September.

“Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space” will follow the first all-civilian Inspiration4 crew as they prepare for and undergo a three-day flight to low Earth orbit. The private flight is being funded by — surprise! — a billionaire: Jared Isaacman, the CEO and founder of payment processor Shift4 Payments. He will be joined by Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and a pediatric bone cancer survivor; Christopher Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer and Air Force veteran; and professor of geoscience Sian Proctor.

Isaacman has committed to donating $100 million to St. Jude’s out of his own funds, in addition to the public donation drive that was used to select Sian Proctor’s seat. As of March, the donation drive raised an additional $13 million for the children’s hospital.

Its powers may not rival Wolverine’s, but a regenerative implant engineered by researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and University of Nebraska–Lincoln could help repair bone-deep damage following physical trauma, surgery or osteoporosis.

The team has developed a biodegradable, nanofiber-based implant, or scaffold, whose design could better regenerate bone by effectively guiding the migration of recuperative cells to the injury site. When implanted in rats with bone defects, the cylindrical scaffold promoted the regeneration of bone that was denser, more voluminous and more like the surrounding tissue than that achieved by many other state-of-the-art designs.

The implant spurred regeneration even without the aid of externally sourced stem cells or so-called growth factors, which help promote healing but can also introduce regulatory complications and side effects that range from inflammation to unchecked tissue formation.

A new study detected coronavirus antibodies in 40 percent of deer tested this year. Here’s why that matters.

Although visible signs of aging are usually unmistakable, unraveling what triggers them has been quite a challenge. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions have discovered that a cellular phenomenon called cryptic transcription, which had been previously described and linked to aging in yeasts and worms, is elevated in aging mammalian stem cells.

The team reports in the journal Nature Aging that cryptic transcription occurs because a cellular mechanism that keeps it in check falls apart as cells get old. The findings suggest that strategies that control cryptic transcription could have pro-longevity effects.

“In previous work, we showed that cryptic transcription in yeasts and worms is not only a marker of aging but also a cause,” said corresponding author Dr. Weiwei Dang, assistant professor of molecular and human genetics and the Huffington Center on Aging at Baylor. “Reducing the amount of this aberrant transcription in these organisms prolonged their lifespan.”

Capricor on April 3 said it was continuing to develop its exosome platform technology as a potential COVID-19 vaccine, even as it pursued compassionate use approval for CAP-1002 (See above). The company seeks to develop two candidates. The first is a virus-like particle (VLP) similar in structure to an exosome, and produced by the same process developed by Capricor in its studies of CAP-1002. The other is an exosome-mRNA vaccine formulation designed to elicit a protective, long-lasting immune response to SARS-CoV-2 by targeting all four structural proteins of the virus.

Candidates: Two vaccine candidates for the potential prevention of COVID-19.

Category: VAX

Continue reading “Capricor Therapeutics – Exosome-based vaccine program” »

A COVID-19 vaccine in a pill being developed by Vaxart and a nasal spray from Altimmune could offer convenience and maybe even superior immunity compared to injections.

A new discovery explains what determines the number and position of genetic exchanges that occur in sex cells, such as pollen and eggs in plants, or sperm and eggs in humans.

When sex cells are produced by a special cell division called meiosis, chromosomes exchange large segments of DNA. This ensures that each new cell has a unique genetic makeup and explains why, with the exception of identical twins, no two siblings are ever completely genetically alike. These exchanges of DNA, or crossovers, are essential for generating genetic diversity, the driving force for evolution, and their frequency and position along chromosomes are tightly controlled.

Co-first author of the study Dr. Chris Morgan explains the significance of this phenomenon: “Crossover positioning has important implications for evolution, fertility and selective breeding. By understanding the mechanisms that drive crossover positioning we are more likely to be able to uncover methods to modify crossover positioning to improve current plant and animal breeding technologies.”

In the latest of ongoing efforts to expand technologies for modifying genes and their expression, researchers have developed chemically modified guide RNAs for a CRISPR system that targets RNA instead of DNA. These chemically-modified guide RNAs significantly enhance the ability to target — trace, edit, and/or knockdown — RNA in human cells.

In a study published today in Cell Chemical Biology, the team explores a range of different RNA modifications and details how the modified guides increase efficiencies of CRISPR activity from 2-to 5-fold over unmodified guides. They also show that the optimized chemical modifications extend CRISPR targeting activity from 48 hours to four days. The researchers worked in collaboration with scientists at Synthego Corporation and New England BioLabs, bringing together a diverse team with expertise in enzyme purification and RNA chemistry. To apply these optimized chemical modifications, the research team targeted cell surface receptors in human T cells from healthy donors and a “universal” segment of the genetic sequence shared by all known variants of the RNA virus SARS-COV-2, which is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Increasing the efficiencies and “life” of CRISPR-Cas13 guides is of critical value to researchers and drug developers, allowing for better gene knockdown and more time to study how the gene influences other genes in related pathways.

“CRISPR RNA guide delivery can be challenging, with knockdown time limited due to rapid guide degradation. We were inspired by the guide modifications developed for other DNA-targeting CRISPRs and wanted to test if chemically modified guides could improve knockdown time for RNA-targeting CRISPR-Cas13 in human cells,” says Alejandro Méndez-Mancilla, PhD, a postdoctoral scientist in the lab and co-first author of the study.

“The reason a glucose-responsive insulin is important is that the biggest barrier to the effective use of insulin, especially in Type 1 diabetes, is the fear of the consequences of blood sugar going too low,” says study author Michael A. Weiss.

For sufferers of diabetes, keeping blood glucose levels within a healthy range can be a difficult and labor-intensive balancing act that often requires regular insulin injections, but some scientists imagine a future where medicine does the heavy lifting for them. A team at Indiana University School of Medicine has taken a promising step towards this future, demonstrating a type of “synthetic hinge” that swings into action when blood glucose levels call for corrective action.

The hormone insulin plays a vital role in keeping glucose at healthy levels in the blood, pulling it out of the bloodstream and helping turn it into energy. In diabetes patients, insufficient amounts or insulin that results in a reduction in effectiveness means that blood glucose levels are left to rise to potentially dangerous levels, which can have serious consequences.

Continue reading “‘Synthetic hinge’ opens a door to smart, glucose-responsive insulin” »