Lifeboat Foundation

The global health crisis is accelerating meta-trends and hurling civilization towards the transhuman future. The disruptors are being disrupted, and the rush is on to digitize and virtualize everything in weeks’ time that otherwise would have taken a few years to play out. Recent surveys show that we have compressed five years in business and consumer digital adoption within a couple of months. https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-great-reset-2020-…-look-like

#GreatReset2020

Continue reading “The Great Reset 2020: What Would the Near Future Post-Pandemic World Look Like?” »

A growing number of prominent hospitals are using AI-powered tools to advise patient care. But patients often aren’t informed, a STAT examination finds.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-damaged-human-lung-has-been-r…t-to-a-pig

The sad reality of terminal lung illnesses is that there are simply far more patients than there are donor lungs available. This isn’t just because of the low number of donors, which would be problem enough, but many donor lungs are significantly damaged, rendering them unusable.

By using a new experimental technique, though, such a damaged lung has now been restored to function — by sharing its circulatory system with that of a living pig. This leverages the body’s self-repair mechanisms to exceed the capabilities of current donor lung restoration techniques.

Continue reading “Damaged Human Lungs Can Be Repaired by Attaching Them to Pigs, Experiment Shows” »

Groups of neurons in the human brain produce patterns of activity that represent information about the stimuli that one is perceiving and then convey these patterns to different brain regions via nerve cell junctions known as synapses. So far, most neuroscience studies have focused on the two primary components of neuron information processing individually (i.e., the representation of stimuli in the form of neural activity and the transmission of this information in networks that model neural interactions), rather than exploring them together.

A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania recently reviewed literature investigating each of these two components, in order to develop a holistic framework that better describes how groups of neurons process information. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, introduces a holistic theoretical perspective that could inform future neuroscience research focusing on neural information processing.

“In the past decade or so, neuroscientists have used more sophisticated tools to understand how the brain represents things that it sees or hears in its environment,” Harang Ju and Danielle Bassett, the two researchers who carried out the study, told Medical Xpress. “Some researchers studied brain representations as single patterns of brain activity, while others studied representations as changing patterns of activity. The aim of our paper was to explore how understanding the brain as a network of neural units and their connections could frame the recent developments in a way that helps push the field towards a better understanding of the dynamic nature of neural representations.”

Scientists successfully edited RNA in a living animal in such a way that the repaired RNA then corrected a mutation in a protein that gives rise to a debilitating neurological disorder in people known as Rett syndrome.

The advance by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University publishes in the journal Cell Reports.

“This is the first example of using programmable RNA editing to repair a gene in mouse models of a neurological disease,” said senior author Gail Mandel, Ph.D., senior scientist in the OHSU Vollum Institute. “This gives us an approach that has some traction.”

A new method developed at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) uses DNA sequencing to efficiently map long-range connections between different regions of the brain. The approach dramatically reduces the cost of mapping brain-wide connections compared to traditional microscopy-based methods.

Neuroscientists need anatomical maps to understand how information flows from one region of the brain to another. “Charting the cellular connections between different parts of the brain—the connectome—can help reveal how the nervous system processes information, as well as how faulty wiring contributes to mental illness and other disorders,” says Longwen Huang, a postdoctoral researcher in CSHL Professor Anthony Zador’s lab. Creating these maps has been expensive and time-consuming, demanding massive efforts that are out of reach for most research teams.

Continue reading “How to map brain connections using DNA barcodes” »

Moderna, Inc.’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273 will advance to a 30,000-participant Phase III trial later this month, following publication of additional positive Phase I data from a study led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Moderna said its closely-watched COVID-19 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273 will advance to a 30,000-participant Phase III trial later this month, following publication of additional positive Phase I data from a study led by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The Phase III “COVE” study (NCT04470427) is expected to begin registration at study centers nationwide beginning on July 21 with study initiation set for six days later. The primary endpoint of the randomized, 1:1 placebo-controlled trial will be the prevention of symptomatic COVID-19 disease. Key secondary endpoints include prevention of severe COVID-19 disease as defined by the need for hospitalization, and prevention of infection by SARS-CoV-2, Moderna said.

Continue reading “Moderna Advancing COVID-19 Vaccine into Phase III after Positive Initial Clinical Results” »

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have discovered a new link between impaired brain energy metabolism and delirium—a disorienting and distressing disorder particularly common in the elderly and one that is currently occurring in a large proportion of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 [15th of July 2020].

While much of the research was conducted in mice, additional work suggests overlapping mechanisms are at play in humans because cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) collected from patients suffering from delirium also contained tell-tale markers of altered brain glucose metabolism.

Collectively, the research, which has just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that therapies focusing on brain energy metabolism may offer new routes to mitigating delirium.

No industry will be spared.

The pharmaceutical business is perhaps the only industry on the planet, where to get the product from idea to market the company needs to spend about a decade, several billion dollars, and there is about 90% chance of failure. It is very different from the IT business, where only the paranoid survive but a business where executives need to plan decades ahead and execute. So when the revolution in artificial intelligence fueled by credible advances in deep learning hit in 2013–2014, the pharmaceutical industry executives got interested but did not immediately jump on the bandwagon. Many pharmaceutical companies started investing heavily in internal data science R&D but without a coordinated strategy it looked more like re-branding exercise with the many heads of data science, digital, and AI in one organization and often in one department. And while some of the pharmaceutical companies invested in AI startups no sizable acquisitions were made to date. Most discussions with AI startups started with “show me a clinical asset in Phase III where you identified a target and generated a molecule using AI?” or “how are you different from a myriad of other AI startups?” often coming from the newly-minted heads of data science strategy who, in theory, need to know the market.

However, some of the pharmaceutical companies managed to demonstrate very impressive results in the individual segments of drug discovery and development. For example, around 2018 AstraZeneca started publishing in generative chemistry and by 2019 published several impressive papers that were noticed by the community. Several other pharmaceutical companies demonstrated impressive internal modules and Eli Lilly built an impressive AI-powered robotics lab in cooperation with a startup.

Continue reading “Deep Dive Into Big Pharma AI Productivity: One Study Shaking The Pharmaceutical Industry” »