Lifeboat Foundation

Now maybe we can snack happily! I think this applies to regular food too? I can eat all the Chinese and Mexican and Italian food I want? Plus for people with genetic risks can’t this not help? I hope so.

Mice fed a high-sugar, high-fat diet for most of their lives managed to escape weight gain and protect their livers when they were treated with an experimental new drug.

The small-molecule drug was developed by a team led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio). K nown by its chemical acronym CPACC, it works by limiting the entry of magnesium into the mitochondria, the parts of the cell in charge of generating energy and burning calories.

Continue reading “Scientists Develop Drug That Prevents Weight Gain in Junk-Food-Eating Mice” »

Welcome to this special issue, focusing on the potential of pluripotent stem cell (PSC)-based therapies and their paths toward clinical application. Since the establishment of human embryonic stem (ES) and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells in 1998 and 2007, respectively, significant progress has been made in differentiating PSCs into a broad range of somatic cells. We are now closer than ever before to having highly functional PSC-derived somatic cells at purity for transplantation therapies to complement damaged or diseased organs and restore their physiologic functions. Like organ transplantation, PSC-based therapies have the potential to regenerate damaged organs that cannot otherwise be healed by using small-molecule or antibody-based drugs.

In this issue, Kobold et al. present an overview of the history and current status of clinical studies utilizing human PSCs. Since the early 2010s, many clinical studies employing human ES cells have been initiated. By 2018, the number of such studies using human iPS cells had skyrocketed. Many PSC-based therapies are currently being tested to treat various pathologic conditions, including different neoplasms and diseases of the eye, adnexa, and circulatory system. However, there are still many diseases that require further efforts to interrogate the true potential of PSC-based therapies. To advance the use of PSC-based therapy to treat a wider range of pathologic conditions in the future, we must continue with extensive basic and clinical research to establish both efficacy and safety for such new therapies.

Although clinical research on PSC-based therapy for liver diseases has not received as much attention, there is much hope for it to become a real alternative to living-donor liver transplantation. Cardinale et al. provided a comprehensive summary of the recent studies on cell-based therapy for liver diseases. In addition, artificial livers generated through bioengineering efforts are now considered to be a viable option. Aside from traditional cell or organ transplantation to restore impaired liver function, transplantation aimed at treating the microenvironment, such as inflammation, in the liver is also an effective therapeutic strategy. Concurrent research efforts in both basic and clinical studies will be crucial in making PSC-based therapy for liver diseases a reality.

“The definition of the human embryo is far from being engrained, it’s constantly evolving with scientific advances,” said Nicolas Rivron, a developmental biologist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. In a perspective published Thursday in Cell, he and an international group of leading luminaries in the fast-moving field of synthetic embryology — or “stembryology,” as it’s sometimes called — argue that these latest scientific advances justify a new definition for the human embryo that’s rooted not in how it was made, but in what it can become.

“Because of this new path, we think it becomes more and more important to think about the embryo not in terms of how it was formed but about the potential it has to generate something,” Rivron told STAT.

He and his co-authors proposed that embryos be defined as “a group of human cells supported by elements fulfilling extra-embryonic and uterine functions that, combined, have the potential to form a fetus.”

Likewise, this dataset had 4,510 cases, 212,242 controls, with 16,380,464 SNPs for psoriasis, and 2,802 cases, 212,242 controls, with 16,380,459 SNPs for psoriasis vulgaris.

The team analyzed the aggregated statistical data using an MR approach to explore the potential causal relationship between the gut microbiome and psoriasis. SNPs with a threshold P-value of 1 × 10⁻⁵ worked as genetic instrumental variables in these MR analyses.

A new study from the University of Minnesota is the first to demonstrate the ability for gene therapy to repair neural connections for those with the rare genetic brain disorder known as Hurler syndrome. The findings suggest the use of gene therapies—an entirely new standard for treatment—for those with brain disorders like Hurler syndrome, which have a devastating impact on those affected.

A collaborative research team led by Interim Head of Physics Professor Shuang Zhang from The University of Hong Kong (HKU), along with National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Imperial College London and University of California, Berkeley, has proposed a new synthetic complex frequency wave (CFW) approach to address optical loss in superimaging demonstration. The research findings were recently published in the journal Science.

Imaging plays an important role in many fields, including biology, medicine and material science. Optical microscopes use light to obtain imaging of miniscule objects. However, conventional microscopes can only resolve feature sizes in the order of the optical wavelength at best, known as the diffraction limit.

To overcome the diffraction limit, Sir John Pendry from Imperial College London introduced the concept of superlenses, which can be constructed from negative index media or noble metals like silver. Subsequently, Professor Xiang Zhang, the current President and Vice-Chancellor of HKU, along with his then team at the University of California, Berkeley, experimentally demonstrated superimaging using both a silver thin film and a silver/dielectric multilayer stack.

This could lead to cures of all diseases and disorders of the human biological systems because one could edit them out 😗😁.

A molecular machine that can be programmed to position a substrate at one of two directing sites on a molecule, which control the stereochemistry of addition to the substrate, demonstrates complexity, precision and function previously only observed in nature.

Increasing evidence suggests that acupressure, a complementary and alternative medicine approach involving applying pressure to specific areas of the body, known as acupoints, can effectively mediate symptoms experienced by cancer patients. Recent studies have shown that acupressure can control cancer-related nausea, fatigue, sleep disruption, and pain.

Most of the growing body of literature promoting the benefits of acupressure involves treatments administered by trained acupuncturists. However, we lack an understanding of the effectiveness of performing acupressure on yourself, a process known as self-acupressure. To address the potential benefits of self-acupressure, a team of researchers conducted a systemic review of published data on self-acupressure for symptom management in cancer patients. The review appears in a recent issue of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

The researchers searched electronic databases for peer-reviewed studies exploring self-acupressure for cancer-related symptoms. The search identified 11 studies to include in the review.

Researchers from The University of Queensland applied an algorithm from a video game to study the dynamics of molecules in living brain cells.

Dr. Tristan Wallis and Professor Frederic Meunier from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute came up with the idea while in lockdown during the COVID-19.

First identified in 2019 in Wuhan, China, COVID-19, or Coronavirus disease 2019, (which was originally called “2019 novel coronavirus” or 2019-nCoV) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). It has spread globally, resulting in the 2019–22 coronavirus pandemic.