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Category: biotech/medical

A journalist, a soup exec, and an imam walk into a room. There’s no joke here. It’s just another day at CrisprCon.

On Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of scientists, industry folk, and public health officials from all over the world filled the amphitheater at the Boston World Trade Center to reckon with the power of biology’s favorite new DNA-tinkering tool: Crispr. The topics were thorny—from the ethics of self-experimenting biohackers to the feasibility of pan-global governance structures. And more than once you could feel the air rush right out of the room. But that was kind of the point. CrisprCon is designed to make people uncomfortable.

“I’m going to talk about the monkey in the room,” said Antonio Cosme, an urban farmer and community organizer in Detroit who appeared on a panel at the second annual conference devoted to Crispr’s big ethical questions to talk about equitable access to gene editing technologies. He referred to the results of an audience poll that had appeared moments before in a word cloud behind him, with one bigger than all the others: “eugenics.”

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Johnson and Johnson recently announced that it was halting a clinical trial for a new Alzheimer’s drug after safety issues emerged. This latest failure adds to the dozens of large, costly clinical trials that have shown no effect in treating this devastating disease.

The growing list of failures should give us pause for thought – have we got the causes of Alzheimer’s all wrong?

In the first analysis of the disease, the German physician, Alois Alzheimer, noted odd changes in the brain of a patient who died of the condition. Alzheimer identified two kinds of protein aggregates that are not found in younger brains: plaques that are found between brain cells and tangles that are found inside brain cells.

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Researchers at the US National Cancer Institute have reported in on an experimental breast cancer therapy that achieved remarkable results, rehabilitating Judy Perkins from the brink of death (she had been given two months to live, had tumors in her liver and throughout her body) to robust health two years later.

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Very promising since “Identifying what changes are happening in the brain when interventions successfully reduce depressive symptoms could allow us to create more effective, pharmaceutical-free approaches to help alleviate depression in people who experience chronic traumatic brain injury symptoms,” said study author Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHealth.

Images show prefrontal connectivity patterns after cognitive training in individuals who suffered traumatic brain injury. Kihwan Han et al (2018) _____ Cognitive training reduces depression, rebuilds injured brain structure & connectivity after traumatic brain injury (UT-Dallas release): “New research from the Center.

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MIT researchers, working with scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have developed a new way to power and communicate with devices implanted deep within the human body. Such devices could be used to deliver drugs, monitor conditions inside the body, or treat disease by stimulating the brain with electricity or light.

The implants are powered by radio frequency waves, which can safely pass through human tissues. In tests in animals, the researchers showed that the waves can power devices located 10 centimeters deep in tissue, from a distance of 1 meter.

“Even though these tiny implantable devices have no batteries, we can now communicate with them from a distance outside the body. This opens up entirely new types of medical applications,” says Fadel Adib, an assistant professor in MIT’s Media Lab and a senior author of the paper, which will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) conference in August.

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Sought after guest speaker, Aubrey de Grey, has appeared on numerous popular programs including CBS 60 Minutes, BBC, TED and The Colbert Report to name just a few. Today, he joins The Future Tech Podcast, to share his vision on how we can improve the aging process through enhancing the human body’s capability of rejuvenation through cell immortality and pluripotency to human aging and age-related disease.

The. Vice President of New Technology and Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics, Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., is also the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501©(3) biomedical research charity that performs, and funds research devoted to battling the progression of aging.

In this fascinating discussion, Aubrey explains some of the obstacles that need to be overcome, including issues involving age-related tissue damage and stem cell decline which contribute to accelerating the aging process. He also discusses what AgeX is doing in stem cell research and in regenerative medicine that will improve not only the longevity of life, but also the quality and health of individuals throughout the aging process. He also touches on what he sees could be the future in the science of aging and treatments being worked on by the rejuvenation research community.

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By Julianna Photopoulos

A plasma patch could soon be used to dress wounds. Plasma is a state of matter, like a solid or gas, and can kill bacteria including those that are resistant to antibiotics. Normally plasmas form at high temperatures, but a new patch can create cold plasmas that may be ideal for use on the body.

The patch is developed by German company Coldplasmatech and produces a plasma by sending high energy electrons through the air between the patch and skin. This rips some of the electrons off molecules …

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New research on brain ageing and mitochondria from Salk Institute.

Thanks to a new technique, researchers from the Salk Institute’s Gage laboratory have shown that impaired energy production might be a reason why human brains are susceptible to age-related diseases in the first place [1].

In particular, Salk scientists observed that induced neurons (iNs) obtained from fibroblasts of older individuals had dysfunctional mitochondria and therefore decreased energy levels compared to younger neurons. Out-of-shape mitochondria have previously been implicated in degenerative brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and this finding might help reveal more about the connection between these diseases and this particular hallmark of aging.

Mitochondrial dysfunction 101

Continue reading “Mitochondrial dysfunction in aged brain cells” | >

Newts are the only four-legged vertebrates that can regenerate their body parts, even as adults. When a newt loses a limb, a mass of cells called a blastema is generated at the stump, from which a new, fully functional limb is eventually regenerated. Can this remarkable ability be explained by genes shared by vertebrates, including humans, or by unique genes that the newt may have evolved?

In a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers at several Japanese universities, including the University of Tsukuba, and the University of Dayton, report the discovery of a novel gene, Newtic1, from the blastema of an adult newt. This gene is expressed in a subset of red cells and may contribute to limb regeneration in adult newts. Red blood cells, or erythrocytes, function to deliver oxygen around an animal’s body. Unlike the other cells in the mammalian body, the erythrocytes lack nuclei, allowing them to carry more oxygen and squeeze into fine . In the newt and most other non-mammalian species, however, these cells contain a nucleus. Other than oxygen delivery, the function of these nucleated cells is unknown. This study provides, for the first time, an insight into the roles of these nucleated cells.

In the study, the researchers constructed a database of all the protein-coding genes from the Japanese fire-bellied newt that had been reported in the Japan newt research community. This database contained DNA sequence information of genes from 19 different tissues, including different regenerating organs and limb blastemas. To identify genes related to limb regeneration, they used statistical analyses to look for genes whose expression was increased in association with the formation of the limb blastema. From 694,138 sequences, they found 105,464 expressed in the limb blastema. Further screening of these sequences resulted in the identification of a single gene which was named Newtic1. Its existence in newt tissues was confirmed using both DNA- and protein-based methods. Similar genes exist in axolotl and another newt species, but not in any other species.

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