Lifeboat Foundation

Life-saving Ai

If you had to guess how long it takes for a drug to go from an idea to your pharmacy, what would you guess? Three years? Five years? How about the cost? $30 million? $100 million?

Well, here’s the sobering truth: 90 percent of all drug possibilities fail. The few that do succeed take an average of 10 years to reach the market and cost anywhere from $2.5 billion to $12 billion to get there.

Continue reading “How AI Will Make Drug Discovery Low-Cost, Ultra-Fast, and Personalized” »

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors evolved a simple trick that could have helped thwart a major infectious disease. It probably saved our skins, but the change was far from a perfect solution.

New research has uncovered evidence that mutations arising between 600,000 and 2 million years ago were part of a complex of adaptations that may have inadvertently made us prone to inflammatory diseases and even other pathogens.

An international team of researchers compared around a thousand human genomes with a few from our extinct cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, to fill in missing details on the evolution of a family of chemicals that coat the human body’s cells.

Sao Paulo State Governor Joao Doria displays a box of the COVID-19 vaccine produced by the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech at the Hospital das Clinicas (HC) in Sao Paulo State, during its trial stage, during a press conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on July 21, 2020 amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. — The vaccine trial will be carried out in Brazil in partnership with the Brazilian Research Institute Butanta. (Photo by Nelson ALMEIDA / AFP) (Photo by NELSON ALMEIDA/AFP via Getty Images)

“Pets have more love and compassion in them than most humans.”–Robert Wagner.

The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just transform how we work and communicate. It also accelerated the need for more proactive health measures for chronic health problems tied to diet. Such problems have emerged as a top risk factor for coronavirus and people with poor metabolic health accounted for half of COVID-19 hospitalizations in some regions around the world. The resulting high numbers led the authors of a report in The Lancet to issue a call for more resources to tackle metabolic health to avoid needless deaths.

Thankfully, new tools have been developed to offer comprehensive understanding of nutrition. This expertise and technology won’t just help us tackle metabolic health – it could help us finally fully realize the power of plants to improve health and wellness outcomes.

As workers return to offices, they face a potential risk from Legionella bacteria, which can grow in water inside inactive plumbing systems.

Antivirus: a weekly digest of the latest COVID-19 research.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an emerging global pandemic that is threatening the viability of healthcare systems worldwide. The virus responsible for the disease is also known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and abbreviated as SARS-CoV-2. The eruption started in China on December 29, 2019 and by March 2020 it was reported that it had spread to several countries across the world.

In the final days of 2019, Chinese doctors identified a number of similar cases of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan in China. Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei Province in China accommodating 11 million inhabitants. Soon, it was discovered that the disease was caused by a new strain of virus which was named SARS-CoV-2.

Looks like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found the root cause of the latest Salmonella Newport outbreak. And it’s not alien DNA or demon sperm. It’s onions, specifically red onions.

Yep, if you like red onions with your salads, on your pasta, in your burgers, or just all over your body, you may be shedding a tear. Eating red onions is the one thing that many people affected by this Salmonella outbreak seem to have in common. Well, that and diarrhea as well as all the other wonderful stuff that comes with Salmonella infections.

I first covered this outbreak eight days ago for Forbes. Back then, the cause of the outbreak, which had already affected at least 125 people in 15 states at the time, was unknown. The CDC couldn’t warn the public to avoid any specific foods, and avoiding all foods would not have been a practical suggestion.