Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: 20% of glioblastoma brain cancers are fueled by overactive mitochondria. Researchers say these cases may be treatable by drugs currently under trial.

Source: Columbia University.

A new study has found that up to 20% of glioblastomas–an aggressive brain cancer–are fueled by overactive mitochondria and may be treatable with drugs currently in clinical trials.

UC San Francisco scientists have discovered a new way to control the immune system’s “natural killer” (NK) cells, a finding with implications for novel cell therapies and tissue implants that can evade immune rejection. The findings could also be used to enhance the ability of cancer immunotherapies to detect and destroy lurking tumors.

The study, published today (January 82021) in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, addresses a major challenge for the field of regenerative medicine, said lead author Tobias Deuse, MD, the Julien I.E. Hoffman, MD, Endowed Chair in Cardiac Surgery in the UCSF Department of Surgery.

“As a cardiac surgeon, I would love to put myself out of business by being able to implant healthy cardiac cells to repair heart disease,” said Deuse, who is interim chair and director of minimally invasive cardiac surgery in the Division of Adult Cardiothoracic Surgery. “And there are tremendous hopes to one day have the ability to implant insulin-producing cells in patients with diabetes or to inject cancer patients with immune cells engineered to seek and destroy tumors. The major obstacle is how to do this in a way that avoids immediate rejection by the immune system.”

Biologists have used CRISPR gene editing to store information inside DNA in living bacterial cells, which could become a storage medium of the future.

New program aims to build and demonstrate ruggedized device for tactical applications.

Like.

Comment.

Continue reading “DARPA Seeks Compact, Deployable Electron Accelerator” »

DARPA Looks to Light up Integrated Photonics with Chip-Scale Laser DevelopmentAgency announces performer teams selected for LUMOS program.

Like.

Comment.

Continue reading “DARPA Looks to Light up Integrated Photonics with Chip-Scale Laser Development” »

Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has declared a state of emergency for the nation’s capital and surrounding areas as Covid-19 cases surge to the highest levels since the start of the pandemic.

The emergency declaration will be in place from Friday until February 7 and applies to Tokyo and the three neighboring prefectures of Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa. The emergency includes a number of restrictions on daily life.

Suga has ordered companies to encourage their staff to work from home and reduce office populations by 70%.

Aging is, at least for now, inevitable, and our eyes are not immune to those changes. Vision loss is, in fact, one of the top 10 causes of disability in the US., however, shows that this might be reversible in the future.

A large team of geneticists, ophthalmologists, and other scientists used a group of molecules called Yamanaka factors to turn cells in the eyes of mature mice back to a youthful state. This reversed the damage done by aging, and the cells were then able to regenerate, connect back to the brain, and vision was restored in both models of normal aging and glaucoma.

Continue reading “Scientists have restored youth to aging eyes in mice” »

O,.o wut? Circa 2016.

Let’s talk about negligible senescence, and how crocodiles technically never age. In the end it’s injury or disease that gets them.

Watch out, George Lucas, there’s a new attack of the clones, and these ones are furry.

Japanese researchers have created a potentially endless line of mice cloned from other cloned mice. They used the same technique that created Dolly the sheep to produce 581 mice from an original donor mouse through 25 rounds of cloning, the scientists report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.

“This technique could be very useful for the large-scale production of superior-quality animals, for farming or conservation purposes,” study leader Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, said in a statement.