Lifeboat Foundation

What Are ‘COVID Nails’—And Are They a Sign You’ve Had the Virus? Here’s What Doctors Say.

Tim Spector, a British epidemiologist and principal investigator of the Zoe COVID Symptom Study app, recently tweeted about the phenomenon and included a photo of COVID nails, writing, “Do your nails look odd? COVID nails are increasingly being recognized as the nails recover after infection and the growth recovers leaving a clear line. Can occur without skin rashes and appears harmless.”

Some people in the comments said they’ve definitely experienced this after having the coronavirus. “I noticed this and also hair loss 3 months after covid,” one wrote. “These were my post Covid nails! This was approx 2 months after the infection,” another said.

Continue reading “‘COVID Nails’ Could Be a Sign You’ve Survived the Coronavirus-And They’re Actually Pretty Common” »

Mastering meat production in this way will lead to advances in medical science and treatment.

“Cultured meat also ultimately offers the opportunity to create meat products that are more well-defined, tunable, and potentially healthier than meat products today, which are constrained by the biological limitations of the domestic animals from which they are derived.”

Owing to advances in industrial-scale cell culture process, the production of cultured meat has been largely standardized. Typically stem cells are first seeded into extracellular matrix scaffolds usually made of edible biomaterials like collagen and chitin. To support cellular metabolic activities, culture media containing nutrients like glucose and sera are next added to the bioreactor where continual mechanical motion facilitates good diffusion of nutrients and oxygen into and removal of metabolic waste products from the cells. After about 2–8 weeks, the cells grow into tissue layers and can be harvested and packaged.

Continue reading “Scientific Challenges and Solutions for Cultured Meat Manufacturing” »

These findings may have implications for brain disease, disorders.

Scientists at the Krembil Brain Institute, part of University Health Network (UHN), in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), have used precious and rare access to live human cortical tissue to identify functionally important features that make human neurons unique.

This experimental work is among the first of its kind on live human neurons and one of the largest studies of the diversity of human cortical pyramidal cells to date.

Summary: A new study sheds light on how highly sensitive people process information. After experiencing something emotionally evocative, brain activity displayed a depth of processing while at rest. Depth of processing is a key feature of high emotional sensitivity.

Source: UC Santa Barbara.

You know that raw overwhelm people have been reporting after months of a pandemic, compounded by economic issues and social unrest? Does fatigue and compulsive social media scrolling strike a familiar chord?

Aging is the biggest risk factor for perturbation of the nervous system, even in the absence of distinct disease or trauma. For yet unknown reasons, the impulse conducting, myelinated projections and synaptic connections between nerve cells are especially vulnerable to aging-related degeneration. These pathological alterations often manifest as cognitive, sensory, and motor decline in older adults and represent a serious socio-economic challenge.

Malactivation leads to damage

Scientists have long assumed that inflammation plays an important role in this process. Mal-or overactivation of distinct cells belonging to the innate immune system—the microglia—appears to promote damage of nerve fibers and synapses in the aging central nervous system (CNS). In a recent project, scientists of the University Hospital Würzburg have now discovered an important role of the adaptive immune system.

Genetic treatments are difficult to produce without facilities.

Af­ter Kel­li Lug­in­buhl fin­ished her PhD, her ad­vi­sor, Duke bio­engi­neer and Phase­Bio co-founder Ashutosh Chilkoti, sat her down and asked if she want­ed to launch and then run a com­pa­ny. Chilkoti had a once-ob­scure tech­nol­o­gy he and the ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Joe McMa­hon thought could form the ba­sis of his sec­ond com­pa­ny and fi­nal­ly pay huge div­i­dends. Lug­in­buhl knew the tech from years in his lab and was al­ready look­ing for biotech jobs. It all added up.

Three years, some strate­giz­ing, and 10 or so pitch meet­ings lat­er, the trio is launch­ing Isol­ere Bio, with $7 mil­lion in seed fund­ing led by North­pond Ven­tures and tech­nol­o­gy they be­lieve can al­low gene ther­a­py com­pa­nies to vast­ly in­crease the num­ber of dos­es they can pro­duce. It’s one po­ten­tial so­lu­tion to a slow-boil­ing cri­sis that has be­come in­creas­ing­ly acute, as new com­pa­nies strug­gle to get the ma­te­ri­als they need for tri­als and some com­mon dis­eases re­main the­o­ret­i­cal­ly un­fix­able by gene ther­a­py, be­cause com­pa­nies would nev­er be able to make enough dos­es for that many patients.

Continue reading “Startup sets out to tackle the gene therapy manufacturing crisis” »

In diabetic nephropathy—a common cause of kidney disease—levels of NEDD4-2 are severely reduced. This is the case even when salt is not a factor.

University of South Australia researchers have identified an enzyme that may help to curb chronic kidney disease, which affects approximately 700 million people worldwide.

Continue reading “The enzyme that could help 700 million people worldwide” »

After a decade of fighting for regulatory approval and public acceptance, a biotechnology firm has released genetically engineered mosquitoes into the open air in the United States for the first time. The experiment, launched this week in the Florida Keys — over the objections of some local critics — tests a method for suppressing populations of wild Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which can carry diseases such as Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Biotech firm Oxitec launches controversial field test of its insects in Florida after years of push-back from residents and regulatory complications.

A mental health startup built its business on easy-to-use technology. Patients joined in droves. Then came a catastrophic data breach.