Via Jacob Gunn Glanville
Here’s the Forbes article on our program. Press release and some media to follow. We will be publishing our manuscript within a week to bioarxiv.
Jacob Glanville is an admirer of the human immune system — but he thinks we can do better.
A rejuvenation roadmap, and some info on Rejuvenate Bio.
Ray Kurzweil predicted the Technological Singularity will be reached in 2045. This actually means there will be strong AI, something like AGI that is 1 billion times more capable than the human brain in many aspects.
The Madison, Wisconsin-based startup Phoenix has scouted a team of nuclear elites for a new frontier: small reactors that can revolutionize medical imaging, munitions scanning, and even non-destructive testing for quality assurance.
And in the longer term, scientists say training people to run neutron generators helps to familiarize and speed up the future of nuclear fusion.
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells have transformed the treatment of refractory blood cancers. These genetically engineered immune cells seek out and destroy cancer cells with precision. Now, scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering are deploying them against other diseases, including those caused by senescence, a chronic “alarm state” in tissues. The scope of such ailments is vast and includes debilitating conditions, such as fibrotic liver disease, atherosclerosis, and diabetes.
Key to the success of CAR T cell therapy has been finding a good target. The first US Food and Drug Administration-approved CAR T cells target a molecule on the surface of blood cancers called CD19. It is present on cancer cells but few other normal cells, so side effects are limited.
Taking their cue from this prior work, a team of investigators including Scott Lowe, Chair of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program in the Sloan Kettering Institute, and Michel Sadelain, Director of the Center for Cell Engineering at MSK, along with their trainees Corina Amor, Judith Feucht, and Josef Leibold, sought to identify a target on senescent cells. These cells no longer divide, but they actively send “help me” signals to the immune system.
There’s a deluge of apps that detect your covid-19 exposure, often with little transparency. Our Covid Tracing Tracker project will document them.
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The cocktail, now named REGN-COV2, consists of two antibodies—REGN10933 and REGN10987—that are designed to bind non-competitively to the receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. Regeneron says that such binding diminishes the ability of mutant viruses to escape treatment—with details from preclinical research to be published in upcoming research studies.
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals said today it has launched the first clinical trial of its dual-antibody “cocktail” designed to both prevent and treat COVID-19, as well as prevent viral escape. The cocktail, now named REGN-COV2, consists of two antibodies—REGN10933 and REGN10987—that are designed to bind non-competitively to the receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. [Regeneron].
CLEW, an Israeli medtech firm specializing in real-time AI analytics platforms, received approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its “Predictive Analytics Platform in Support of COVID-19 Patients,” the company announced Tuesday.
The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) solution was given Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by the FDA so that it may be implemented within the United States’ health system as soon as possible.
The search for viable coronavirus infection treatments is still ongoing. Many doctors are taking a second look at as many different existing drugs and medication as possible in the hopes of finding a solution. Now, experts are also eyeing to a “little blue pill” or Viagra: nitric oxide.
It’s not all doom and gloom in the energy markets: renewable energy capacity is expected to grow in 2020.
A human embryo editing experiment gone wrong has scientists warning against treading into the field altogether.
To understand the role of a single gene in early human development, a team of scientists at the London-based Francis Crick Institute removed it from a set of 18 donated embryos. Even though the embryos were destroyed after just 14 days, that was enough time for the single edit to transform into “major unintended edits,” OneZero reports.
Human gene editing is a taboo topic — the birth of two genetically modified babies in 2018 proved incredibly controversial, and editing embryos beyond experimentation is not allowed in the U.S. The scientists in London conducted short-term research on a set of 25 donated embryos, using the CRISPR technique to remove a gene from 18 of them. An analysis later revealed 10 of those edited embryos looked normal, but that the other eight revealed “abnormalities across a particular chromosome,” OneZero writes. Of them, “four contained inadvertent deletions or additions of DNA directly adjacent to the edited gene,” OneZero continues.
