Lifeboat Foundation

The loose alliance, whose backers include Infosys Ltd. co-founders Nandan Nilekani and Kris Gopalakrishnan as well as prominent startups from Practo to Policybazaar, will be formally unveiled as soon as this week in an attempt to salvage a decrepit system by digitizing everything from patient data and records to creating online platforms for hospital care and doctor consultations. Called Swasth — meaning health in Hindi — its 100-plus members have pledged to build new services and coordinate efforts to improve emergency responses.

Some of India’s richest people form an alliance with tech entrepreneurs to fix the country’s broken healthcare system.

A team of researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) reported on the epidemiology of COVID-19 illness experienced at an NCI-designated cancer center during the height of pandemic in New York City.

The characterization of COVID-19 in patients with cancer remains limited in published studies and nationwide surveillance analyses. Reports from China and Italy have raised the possibility that patients with cancer on active therapy have a higher risk of COVID-19 related severe events, although there is a knowledge gap as to which aspects of cancer and its treatment increase the risk of severe COVID-19 disease.

According to a new study from Memorial Sloan Kettering published June 24 in Nature Medicine, patients in active cancer treatment who develop COVID-19 infection don’t fare any worse than other hospitalized patients. Notably, metastatic disease, recent chemotherapy, or major surgery within the previous 30 days did not show a significant association with either hospitalization or severe respiratory illness due to COVID-19. Researchers say their findings suggest that no one should delay cancer treatment because of concerns about the virus.

100% airtight, it ensures any air you breathe is passed through its 2 patent-pending dual-way filters.

Xiang-Dong Fu, PhD, has never been more excited about something in his entire career. He has long studied the basic biology of RNA, a genetic cousin of DNA, and the proteins that bind it. But a single discovery has launched Fu into a completely new field: neuroscience.

For decades, Fu and his team at University of California San Diego School of Medicine studied a protein called PTB, which is well known for binding RNA and influencing which genes are turned “on” or “off” in a cell. To study the role of a protein like PTB, scientists often manipulate cells to reduce the amount of that protein, and then watch to see what happens.

But then he noticed something odd after a couple of weeks — there were very few fibroblasts left. Almost the whole dish was instead filled with neurons.

Continue reading “One-Time Treatment Generates New Neurons, Eliminates Parkinson’s Disease in Mice” »

A trove of DNA sequences from 141,456 people — and counting — offers researchers an unparalleled look at genetic variation across the general population^1,2. The resource has been helping researchers to identify variants that contribute to autism since it was released online about four years ago^3,4.

The genomes of autistic people harbor hundreds of potentially harmful mutations. But to firmly connect a specific variant to the condition, researchers need to see if it is common among typical people — a sign that that variant may actually be benign.

In 2014, researchers debuted one of the first tools to probe the prevalence of a mutation in the general population. Known as the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC), it contained 60,000 sequences of exomes — the protein-coding regions of the genome⁵.

How does the neural activity evoked by visual stimuli support visual awareness? In this paper we report on an individual with a rare type of neural degeneration as a window into the neural responses underlying visual awareness. When presented with stimuli containing faces and target words—regardless of whether the patient was aware of their presence—the neurophysiological responses were indistinguishable. These data support the possibility that extensive visual processing, up to and including activation of identity, can occur without resulting in visual awareness of the stimuli.

Visual awareness is thought to result from integration of low- and high-level processing; instances of integration failure provide a crucial window into the cognitive and neural bases of awareness. We present neurophysiological evidence of complex cognitive processing in the absence of awareness, raising questions about the conditions necessary for visual awareness. We describe an individual with a neurodegenerative disease who exhibits impaired visual awareness for the digits 2 to 9, and stimuli presented in close proximity to these digits, due to perceptual distortion. We identified robust event-related potential responses indicating 1) face detection with the component and 2) task-dependent target-word detection with the P3b component, despite no awareness of the presence of faces or target words.

The number of deaths linked to a Listeria outbreak from meat products in 2019 has doubled.

It had been thought 21 people were infected with Listeria monocytogenes in the Netherlands and Belgium. One person fell sick in October 2017, eight in 2018, and 12 in 2019. Three people died. All patients were hospitalized and one woman had a miscarriage. Two Dutch patients were pregnant women in their 30s. The others were from 64 to 94 years old and 10 were men.

Now it is known that Listeria in processed meats from Offerman, a Ter Beke subsidiary, made 35 people sick. Two women miscarried and six patients died. The information was revealed in the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority’s (NVWA) annual report.

The world’s largest genetic study into chronic fatigue syndrome is to be launched in the UK after receiving £3.2m of funding from the Medical Research Council and National Institute for Health Research.

The research aims to shine a light on the debilitating long-term condition, about which little is known, by collecting DNA samples from 20,000 people who have CFS, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).

CFS is believed to affect about 250,000 people in the UK and has been estimated to cost the economy billions of pounds each year. Individuals experience exhaustion that is not helped by rest, with one in four so severely affected they are unable to leave the house and, frequently, unable to leave their bed. Other symptoms include, pain, mental fogginess, light and noise sensitivities, as well as trouble with memory and sleep. No effective treatment exists.

Genetic perturbations that affect bacterial resistance to antibiotics have been characterized genome-wide, but how do such perturbations interact with subsequent evolutionary adaptation to the drug? Here, we show that strong epistasis between resistance mutations and systematically identified genes can be exploited to control spontaneous resistance evolution. We evolved hundreds of Escherichia coli K-12 mutant populations in parallel, using a robotic platform that tightly controls population size and selection pressure. We find a global diminishing-returns epistasis pattern: strains that are initially more sensitive generally undergo larger resistance gains. However, some gene deletion strains deviate from this general trend and curtail the evolvability of resistance, including deletions of genes for membrane transport, LPS biosynthesis, and chaperones. Deletions of efflux pump genes force evolution on inferior mutational paths, not explored in the wild type, and some of these essentially block resistance evolution. This effect is due to strong negative epistasis with resistance mutations. The identified genes and cellular functions provide potential targets for development of adjuvants that may block spontaneous resistance evolution when combined with antibiotics.