Lifeboat Foundation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXhCysAEa4k

This discussion includes Dr. Williams’ work with gene therapy, cancer research, and follistatin — a myostatin inhibitor. he administered to himself years ago.

Dr. Williams, CMO of BioViva Science, is a radiologist with a passion for gene and cellular therapies that can be administered under image guidance. He also has an interest in image guided cancer therapies. He did research for several years with adenoviral vector technology for the treatment of cancer. He has spent the last five years involved in research using AAV technology. Dr. Williams obtained his medical degree from Louisiana State University and completed an internship in Internal Medicine followed by a residency in Radiology at The University Of South Alabama. In residency, he was selected for the RSNA Research Fellow award.

Continue reading “Gene Therapy Today with Dr. Jason Williams and Liz Parrish” »

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, offered up some interesting thoughts on Intel’s Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) instruction set, calling it a “power virus” that was only created to make the company’s CPU hardware perform well in benchmarks. He also admitted to being “biased” and “grumpy” in his assessment.

His comments came in a mailing list (via Phoronix) discussing an article suggesting AVX-512 might not be part of Intel’s upcoming Alder Lake architecture. If that comes to pass, it will be just fine by Torvalds.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: “When you’re dealing with something that’s changing in real time—that’s really the nature of science.”

“As the information changes, then you have to be flexible enough—and humble enough—to be able to change how you think about things.” abcn.ws/32pBD6L

Can artificial intelligence enhance human surgeons with AI superpowers to reduce medical errors?

After receiving two doses of the vaccine, all 45 participants developed so-called neutralizing antibodies against the virus.

Clinical trial on patients in 6 mths after promising results on mice.

Tired of the coronavirus? Well, the good news is that there are several vaccines in development that are in their final phase of clinical testing before they can be approved for public usage. The bad thing, however, is the fact that there are only so many doses each vaccine manufacturer can make- meaning solving the pandemic will be as much a problem of distribution and manufacturing as it is research and development.

PS: The stock footage from this photo comes from Videvo!

Continue reading “Coronavirus Vaccines in Phase 3 Development | The State of Science” »

Glioblastoma is the most aggressive type of cancer that begins with the brain and develops from astrocytes, star-shaped brain cells that help protect the brain from diseases in the blood and provide the brain’s neurons with nutrients, with around 12,000 cases diagnosed in the United States each year. Glioblastoma cells have more genetic abnormalities than the cells of other types of astrocytoma brain cancer. Now researchers from the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine report they have identified an oncogene responsible for this deadly cancer.

Their study, “A cytoskeleton regulator AVIL drives tumorigenesis in glioblastoma,” is published in Nature Communications and led by Hui Li, PhD, associate professor, pathology, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the UVA Cancer Center.

“Glioblastoma is a deadly cancer, with no effective therapies. Better understanding and identification of selective targets are urgently needed. We found that advillin (AVIL) is overexpressed in all the glioblastomas we tested including glioblastoma stem/initiating cells, but hardly detectable in non-neoplastic astrocytes, neural stem cells or normal brain,” the researchers wrote.

The CRISPR-Cas system, naturally found in many prokaryotes, is widely used for genome editing. CRISPR arrays in the bacterial genome, derived from the genome of invading viruses, are used to generate a CRISPR RNA that guides the Cas enzyme to destroy repeat viral invaders. Recently, an unexpectedly compact CRISPR-Cas system was identified in huge bacteriophages. Pausch et al. show that even though this system lacks commonly found accessory proteins, it is functional. In addition to a CRISPR array, the only component of the system is an enzyme called CasF, which uses the same active site to process transcripts of the CRISPR arrays into CRISPR RNA and to destroy foreign nucleic acids. This system, which is active in human and plant cells, provides a hypercompact addition to the genome-editing toolbox.

Science this issue p. 333

CRISPR-Cas systems are found widely in prokaryotes, where they provide adaptive immunity against virus infection and plasmid transformation. We describe a minimal functional CRISPR-Cas system, comprising a single ~70-kilodalton protein, CasΦ, and a CRISPR array, encoded exclusively in the genomes of huge bacteriophages. CasΦ uses a single active site for both CRISPR RNA (crRNA) processing and crRNA-guided DNA cutting to target foreign nucleic acids. This hypercompact system is active in vitro and in human and plant cells with expanded target recognition capabilities relative to other CRISPR-Cas proteins. Useful for genome editing and DNA detection but with a molecular weight half that of Cas9 and Cas12a genome-editing enzymes, CasΦ offers advantages for cellular delivery that expand the genome editing toolbox.