Lifeboat Foundation

Metastasis occurs when cancer cells break free from a primary tumor and spread throughout the body, requiring them to sever connections with neighboring cells and migrate to other tissues. Signaling molecules released by the cancer cells drive both processes and thereby increase the malignancy of tumors.

A team of researchers led by Professor Robert Grosse and Dr. Carsten Schwan from the University of Freiburg discovered that the release of prometastatic factors, which drive the malignancy of tumors, is influenced by the cells’ skeleton. The findings were published in the journal Advanced Science.

Universitätsklinikum Erlangen is the first in the world to use CAR T-cells to successfully treat a patient suffering from a severe case of muscle inflammation (myositis). The disease is triggered by a malfunction in the immune system that leads to inflammation of the muscles, and the risk of developing a very severe form of the disease is high. The Lancet has now published news of the successful treatment in a case report.

When the 41 year old Mr. S. noticed a dramatic deterioration in this health last year, he initially put it down to a viral infection. However, his health took a dramatic turn for the worse when he was suddenly no longer to move more than a few feet and was barely able to stand up. His symptoms were caused by a severe autoimmune disease affecting his muscles, joints, skin and lungs belonging to the group of anti-immune muscle inflammatory diseases (myositis). The diagnosis: anti-synthetase syndrome.

The name anti-synthetase syndrome is derived from the observation that the enzymes required for the synthesis of amino acids known as aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases are attacked in error by the immune system. This severely impacts the function of various cells.

Pulses of electricity delivered to a precise location on the spinal cord have helped two stroke patients regain control of a disabled arm and hand, a team reports in the journal Nature Medicine.

Nature article:

Continue reading “Spinal stimulation can improve arm and hand movement years after a stroke” »

An Alzheiber’s treatment porposed by Israeli scientists targets mitochondrial gatekeeper, controlling deterioration of cells.

Up to now, the use of models to research the barrier that separates the circulatory from the nervous system has proven to be either limited or extremely complicated. Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a more realistic model that can also be used to better explore new treatments for brain tumors.

Mario Modena is a postdoc working in the Bio Engineering Laboratory at ETH Zurich. If he were to explain his research on the blood-brain barrier —the wall that protects our central nervous system from harmful substances in the blood stream —to an 11-year-old, he would say, “This wall is important, because it stops the bad guys from getting into the brain.” If the brain is damaged or sick, he says, holes can appear in the wall. Sometimes, such holes can actually be useful, for example, for supplying the brain with urgently needed medicine. “So what we are trying to understand is how to maintain this wall, break through it and repair it again.”

This wall is also important from a medical perspective, because many diseases of the central nervous system are linked to an injury to the blood-brain barrier. To discover how this barrier works, scientists often conduct experiments on live animals. In addition to such experiments being relatively expensive, animal cells may provide only part of the picture of what is going on in a human body. Moreover, there are some critics, who question the basic validity of animal testing. An alternative is to base experiments on human cells that have been cultivated in the laboratory.

A persistent technological challenge has been the difficulty in scaling down the electrochemical performance of large-format batteries to smaller, microscale power sources, hindering their ability to power microdevices, microrobots, and implantable medical devices. However, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have overcome this challenge by developing a high-voltage microbattery (9 V) with exceptional energy and power density, unparalleled by any existing battery design.

Material Science and Engineering Professor Paul Braun (Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, Materials Research Laboratory Director), Dr. Sungbong Kim (Postdoc, MatSE, current assistant professor at Korea Military Academy, co-first author), and Arghya Patra (Graduate Student, MatSE, MRL, co-first author) recently published a paper detailing their findings in Cell Reports.

<em>Cell Reports</em> is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that published research papers that report new biological insight across a broad range of disciplines within the life sciences. Established in 2012, it is the first open access journal published by Cell Press, an imprint of Elsevier.

In a study from St George’s and elsewhere, scientists found 119 areas in the genome that help to determine the size and shape of blood vessels at the back of the eye. They found that an increase in the “twisting” of the arteries could cause high blood pressure and heart disease.

Molecules from mucus can be used to produce synthetic bone graft material and help with the healing of larger bone loss, a new study found.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology report the development of a bioactive gel which they say could replace the clinical gold standard of autografting, in which lost bone is replaced with healthy bone taken from another part of the patient’s body.

Hongji Yan, a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, says the gel contains mucins, molecules which were derived from cow mucus. The mucins are processed into gels which are combined with monetite granules, a commonly-used synthetic bone graft material. The synthetic gel can be injected to the site of the bone loss.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

The coming of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the ability of an artificial intelligence to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can — is inevitable. Despite the predictions of many experts that AGI might never be achieved or will take hundreds of years to emerge, I believe it will be here within the next decade.

How can I be so certain? We already have the know-how to produce massive programs with the capacity for processing and analyzing reams of data faster and more accurately than a human ever could. And in truth, massive programs may not be necessary anyway. Given the structure of the neocortex (the part of the human brain we use to think) and the amount of DNA needed to define it, we may be able to create a complete AGI in a program as small as 7.5 megabytes.