Lifeboat Foundation

Developer Enias Cailliau talks to his girlfriend Sacha on Telegram. She sends him voice memos, texts, and even the occasional selfie. But Sacha isn’t actually real, she’s an AI clone of Cailliau’s real-life girlfriend. Cailliau calls the bot GirlfriendGPT and has now shared his code online for anyone to create their own AI girlfriends too.

“I’d recommend couples to explore the tech as well,” said Sascha Ludwig, whose programmer partner is cloning them with AI.

Dr. Blanca Lizaola-Mayo, MD, a transplant hepatologist and the Medical Director of the Liver Transplant Center at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, is sounding the alarm on NASH or nonalcoholic steatohepatitis.

NASH occurs when a “fatty liver” or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) leads to inflammation and liver cell damage called fibrosis. In its most severe form, it can be fatal.

Researchers have long known that brain tumors, specifically a type of tumor called a glioma, can affect a person’s cognitive and physical function.

Patients with glioblastoma, the most fatal type of brain tumor in adults, experience an especially drastic decline in quality of life. Glioblastomas are thought to impair normal brain functions by compressing and causing healthy tissue to swell, or competing with them for blood supply.

Continue reading “Brain Tumors Can Rewire The Brain, And We Just Found Out How” »

The Human Genome Project (HGP), the world’s largest collaborative biological project, was a 13-year effort led by the U.S. government with the goal of generating the first full sequence of the human genome. In 2003, HGP produced a genome sequence that accounted for more than 90% of the human genome and was considered as close to complete as was possible with the technologies of the time. HGP unlocked the door to a vast but unannotated collection of genes.

In the following decades, via experimental studies, researchers painstakingly curated reannotations in the form of biochemical reaction graphs. Though gene set enrichment analysis considers groups within these annotation graphs, it disregards group dependencies.

Researchers from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) are utilizing data from HGP and making advancements in biochemical reaction network analysis. Their work, published in the May 22, 2023 issue of Patterns, demonstrates their approach and may help predict the effects of rare or indistinct genetic variations and guide precision medicine (treatment that can use a patient’s own genes to help fight disease or guide specific therapy).

Dr. Moss and his son Ben discuss the most important cancer and general health-related topic of all, SUGAR, and the problems it has caused in their lives as well as for more than 50% of adults in the United States and other industrialized countries. They share their personal experiences and the science that clearly connects sugar to cancer, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes.

Program Notes:
For more information on cancer-fighting foods and supplements, please visit our website: https://www.themossreport.com.

Continue reading “Sugar, Metabolism & Cancer — How is metabolic syndrome linked to cancer?” »

I still think it is a threat globally and it based on many cases globally that still rise at an alarming rate.

Prevalence of a new subvariant of Omicron is increasing, but whether it will cause a big surge in infections or hospitalizations isn’t clear.

Drug companies Moderna and Merck have released encouraging results from a vaccine trial that shows promise in the battle against Stage 3 and Stage 4 melanoma, the most serious type of skin cancer. NBC’s Dr. Natalie Azar breaks down the findings on TODAY.

PD-1 inhibitors have been widely used for treatment of multiple types of cancer. 1 With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the effect of anti-COVID-19 vaccination on PD-1 safety and efficacy has become a critical question for oncologists and patients with cancer alike. 2 To avoid potential treatment complications, some physicians have opted to suspend PD-1 inhibitor treatments for recently vaccinated patients with cancer. However, little data exist to support such a decision. Recent studies have found that anti-COVID-19 vaccines such as BNT162b2 (Pfizer BioNTech, New York, New York, USA) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) are well tolerated in patients with cancer, 3–5 and side-effect profiles from these vaccines were similar between healthy volunteers and patients with cancer. 6 One recent meta-analysis summarizing multiple COVID-19 vaccine trials studies concluded that patients with cancer have a significantly lower likelihood of attaining acceptable immune response to COVID-19 immunization when compared with the general population given compromised cancerous immune system. 7 However, whether anti-COVID-19 vaccines have any functional impact on the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatment was unknown. Thus, we conducted a large multicenter study to explore the effects of COVID-19 vaccination on PD-1 inhibitor treatment in patients with cancer.

A total of 3,552 consenting adult patients with cancer were screened from 83 Chinese hospitals and medical centers beginning on January 28, 2021. Eligible participants met the following inclusion criteria: their malignancy had been histopathologically confirmed; they had received at least one dose of camrelizumab8 (one of the most commonly used PD-1 inhibitors in China) after the COVID-19 vaccination program was launched in China in January 2021. Clinical information, demographic data, and medical history were collected at enrollment, and patient treatment, adverse events and outcomes were followed through September 30, 2021. Efficacy and safety of PD-1 treatment were evaluated according to Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumor V.1.19 and National Cancer Institute Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events V.5.0,10 respectively. Patient functionality/performance status was evaluated using Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) criteria.

A collaborative study has found that immunization with the vaccine SinoVac might improve responses to treatment in patients with nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC). The research is published as a “Letter to the Editor” in the journal Annals of Oncology.

Fears that COVID-19 vaccination may interfere with cancer treatment

Cancer cells are clever. They can adapt methods to avoid or divert the body’s immune response to protect their growth and prevent being destroyed. One approach is to target a protein found on T cells called programmed cell death protein 1, or PD-1. When PD-1 is bound to its ligand, PD-L1, it prevents T cells from killing malignant cells. Drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors can block PD-1, releasing the “brakes” on the immune response such that the T cells’ ability to kill cancer cells is unleashed.