The world has gained a new weapon in the war on malaria, among the oldest known and deadliest of infectious diseases: the first vaccine shown to help prevent the disease. By one estimate, it will save tens of thousands of children each year.
Malaria kills about half a million people each year, nearly all of them in sub-Saharan Africa — including 260,000 children under 5. The new vaccine, made by GlaxoSmithKline, rouses a child’s immune system to thwart Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest of five malaria pathogens and the most prevalent in Africa.
The World Health Organization on Wednesday endorsed the vaccine, the first step in a process that should lead to wide distribution in poor countries. To have a malaria vaccine that is safe, moderately effective and ready for distribution is “a historic event,” said Dr. Pedro Alonso, director of the W.H.O.’s global malaria program.
Surgeons have successfully attached a pig’s kidney to a human and confirmed that the body accepted the transplant in a major scientific breakthrough, The New York Times reported.
This successful operation is a promising sign as scientists work to be able to use animal organs in life-saving transplants in humans.
Scientists altered a pig gene and engineered the kidney to eliminate sugar to avoid an immune system attack. In the past, the human body would reject the transplant due to the presence of glycan, a sugar molecule in pig cells.
Science, Technology & Protocols For Healthy Longevity And Sustainable Health — Joanna Bensz, Founder and CEO, Longevity Center & International Institute of Longevity (IIOL), joins me on Progress, Potential, And Possibilities Geopolitical Intelligence Services #Health #Wellness #Aging #Longevity #JoannaBensz #PrinceMichaelOfLiechtenstein
Joanna Bensz is Founder and CEO of Longevity Center (https://longevity-center.eu/), a boutique preventive health and longevity medical center, that focuses on scientifically and medically advanced technologies and protocols for healthy longevity and sustainable health.
Joanna is also Founder and CEO of the International Institute of Longevity (IIOL — https://l-institute.com/), an international organization with offices in Liechtenstein and Poland, co-founded in partnership with H.S.H. Prince Michael of Liechtenstein, focusing on developing a healthy longevity agenda in Europe, identifying, highlighting and promoting solutions, technologies and lifestyle choices that prevent chronic and age related diseases leading to increasing vitality and healthy life spans.
Over her career, Joanna has spent time in a range of regional, general and business development director positions, with a number of Fortune 500 companies across Central and Eastern Europe, including at the international project management, architectural and engineering PM Group, Lockheed Martin, and at Geopolitical Intelligence Services, an organization providing independent political intelligence, strategic analysis and future scenarios to companies, governments, organizations and individual leaders, also founded by H.S.H. Prince Michael of Liechtenstein.
Joanna has also served as the Vice Chairman and Board Member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Poland, and was responsible for development and leadership of AmCham regional offices in Wroclaw and Kraków.
One explanation for this could be the degree of efficiency of each organism’s response to the damage sustained by its cells during its life, which eventually causes them to age. In relation to this, researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the University of Leicester (United Kingdom) have developed a new method to remove old cells from tissues, thus slowing down the aging process.
Early in the pandemic, my team spotted something surprising. When people were severely ill with COVID-19 and on a ventilator, the daily rinses of the plastic tubes in their windpipes contained immune cells from the airway. More surprisingly, what was in these airway samples was very different from what was found in the same patient’s blood.
COVID has shown we must study immunity in the whole body — let’s sort the logistics to acquire the right samples.
The longevity industry — startups trying to make people live longer or even forever, basically — tends to attract charlatans and scandal.
But a terrific feature story in New Statesman makes the case that a handful of ventures in the space are finally starting to hone in on some compelling ideas that might eventually provide modest or even radical life extension.
“I’m confident we’ll have an aging drug by the time it’s relevant for me,” 27-year-old Celine Halioua, a PhD dropout who now works at the anti-aging startup Loyal, who predicted that such a drug could become available “within a decade.”
Extreme heat can kill or cause long-term health problems – but for many unendurable temperatures are the new normal.
Extreme heat can also cause “leaky gut”, in which toxins and pathogenic bacteria to seep in to the blood, increasing the likelihood of infections, says Walter. It is almost possible to develop a kind of sepsis infection by being hot, he says. “Gut permeability seems to be a big, big problem.”
In a world-first, US surgeons have successfully transferred a kidney taken from a pig into a braindead human patient, in a major step towards using animal organs in human transplantations.
The team at NYU Langone Health performed the operation on a woman who was recently declared braindead, with the permission of her family. The sole object of the study, according to the lead surgeon Dr Robert Montgomery, was “to provide the first evidence that what appears to be promising results from non-human primates will translate into a good outcome in a human.”
One major obstacle in making xenotransplantation possible has been the rejection of organs by hosts. To overcome this, the team used an organ from a pig that had been genetically engineered in order to remove a sugar molecule known to play a significant role in rejection. The surgeons attached the kidney to large blood vessels outside of the recipient and monitored it for two days.
The kidney used in the new procedure was obtained by knocking out a pig gene that encodes a sugar molecule that elicits an aggressive human rejection response. The pig was genetically engineered by Revivicor and approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a source for human therapeutics.
Dr. Montgomery and his team also transplanted the pig’s thymus, a gland that is involved in the immune system, in an effort to ward off immune reactions to the kidney.
After attaching the kidney to blood vessels in the upper leg, the surgeons covered it with a protective shield so they could observe it and take tissue samples over the 54-hour study period. Urine and creatinine levels were normal, Dr. Montgomery and his colleagues found, and no signs of rejection were detected during more than two days of observation.
A kidney grown in a genetically altered pig seemed to function normally, potentially a new source for desperately needed transplant organs.
No one knows why some people age worse than others and develop diseases-such as Alzheimer’s, fibrosis, type 2 diabetes or some types of cancer-associated with this aging process. One explanation for this could be the degree of efficiency of each organism’s response to the damage sustained by its cells during its life, which eventually causes them to age. In relation to this, researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the University of Leicester (United Kingdom) have developed a new method to remove old cells from tissues, thus slowing down the aging process.
Specifically, they have designed an antibody that acts as a smart bomb able to recognize specific proteins on the surface of these aged or senescent cells. It then attaches itself to them and releases a drug that removes them without affecting the rest, thus minimizing any potential side effects.
The results of this work, which have been published in Scientific Reports, open the door to the development of effective treatments to delay the progress of age-related diseases and even the aging process itself in the longer term, with the aim of increasing the longevity and, above all, the quality of life of people at this stage of their lives.
