Lifeboat Foundation

It worked on mice—and one day it might work on humans as well.

Scientists have created a teeny tiny, creepy crawly-like robot they hope will travel through the human body to cure diseases. Made of gelatin, the 3D-printed device may eventually replace pills or intravenous injections that can cause problematic side effects. Bring on the killer robots! We need ’em more than ever.

Read more ❯.

I knew my life would be spent trying to tackle the problem of defeating death itself.

Dr. Michael West presents on age reprogramming to induce tissue regeneration (iTR) at RAADfest 2022.

Continue reading “Mike West at RAADfest 2022” »

Researchers implanted 14 electrodes into the brains of volunteers with depression. One says it saved his life.

John’s life changed forever when he broke up with his girlfriend. The breakup sent him into a downward spiral, and led to his first depressive episode when he was 27 years old. “At first it’s just extreme sadness… then you start losing sleep,” says John (not his real name), who spoke on condition of anonymity. He developed crippling anxiety and experienced panic attacks and dark thoughts that eventually led him to attempt to end his own life.

Drugs didn’t work for John—he says he has tried pretty much every antidepressant, antipsychotic, and sedative out there.

The entire DNA of 100,000 newborns in England will be sequenced to spot rare genetic conditions early.

Year 2020 face_with_colon_three

Scientists are working to end the need for human heart transplants by 2028. A team of researchers in the UK, Cambridge, and the Netherlands are developing a robot heart that can pump blood through the circulatory network but is soft and pliable. The first working model should be ready for implantation into animals within the next 3 years, and into humans within the next 8 years. The device is so promising that it is among just 4 projects that have made it to the shortlist for a £30-million prize, called the Big Beat Challenge for a therapy that can change the game in the treatment of heart disease.

The other projects include a genetic therapy for heart defects, a vaccine against heart disease, and wearable technology for early preclinical detection of heart attacks and strokes.

Continue reading “Robotic heart to replace human transplants on the horizon” »

Older women heal bone fractures slower than men. Now a team has found that a single, localized delivery of estrogen to a fracture can speed up healing in postmenopausal mice. The findings could have implications for the way fractures in women are treated in the future.

Over 250,000 hip fractures occur each year in adults aged 65 or older in the U.S., three-quarters of which are female. Within a year, between 15 and 36% of hip fracture patients will die. While staggering, the gender gap is unsurprising given that more women than men suffer from osteoporosis, a disease that weakens the bones. And yet, only recently has the scientific community shifted their focus to understanding this difference.

“The majority of stem cell research is done on male animals. There’s very little research that has actually been done on females,” said Wu Tsai Alliance member Charles Chan, Ph.D., an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford University and co-senior author of the paper published Oct. 30 in Nature Communications. “The research is long overdue, especially the question of why women heal differently from men.”

Individuals with long COVID, sometimes referred to as “long-haulers,” experience symptoms that may persist for weeks, months, or even years after their acute viral infection. While symptoms vary widely, a common complaint among patients is “brain fog”—a colloquial term for significant, persistent cognitive deficits, with consistent impairment of executive functioning and working memory.

Long-haulers may experience a lack of mental clarity, poor focus and concentration, memory problems, difficulty with multi-tasking, and more. Brain fog can be debilitating, but there currently are no treatment options that are approved for the condition.

While the number of patients they studied is too small for their results to be definitive, Yale researchers, using their extensive experience with two existing medications, have published initial evidence that those drugs, given together, can mitigate or even eliminate brain fog.

Summary: The integrity of cholinergic pathways may indicate very early changes in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: Karolinska Institute.

A new collaborative study from Karolinska Institutet, Deutsches Zentrum für Neurodegenerative Erkrankungen (DZNE), and Czech Technical University suggests a novel imaging marker of brain connectivity might be a very early indicator of pathological changes in Alzheimer’s disease.