Lifeboat Foundation

A platform for single-molecule measurement of binding kinetics & enzyme activity.

The first molecular electronics chip has been developed, realizing a 50-year-old goal of integrating single molecules into circuits to achieve the ultimate scaling limits of Moore’s Law. Developed by Roswell Biotechnologies and a multi-disciplinary team of leading academic scientists, the chip uses single molecules as universal sensor elements in a circuit to create a programmable biosensor with real-time, single-molecule sensitivity and unlimited scalability in sensor pixel density. This innovation, appearing this week in a peer-reviewed article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), will power advances in diverse fields that are fundamentally based on observing molecular interactions, including drug discovery, diagnostics, DNA

Continue reading “First Molecular Electronics Chip Developed — Realizes 50-Year-Old Goal” »

“It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” said Bennett.

The heart was provided by Revivicor, a company based in Virginia that has been engineering pig organs for roughly two decades. In several experiments for pig-to-baboon transplants, the organs survived up to nine months, until the animals passed away due to a lung infection unrelated to the transplant.

Overall, the heart had 10 hefty genetic edits. Three of them wiped out sugar molecules on the outside of cells that provoke an immune response. Six bolstered the chance of the human host accepting the heart—amping up an anti-inflammatory response, preventing blood vessel damage, and dampening any antibodies against the organ. Finally, the last edit limited the pig heart’s size. Although it generally matched the size of a human heart, the team wanted to prevent the pig organ from overgrowth inside Bennett’s chest once it was transplanted—something they previously noticed happened in baboons.

And it took less than a full workday. Stanford Medicine scientists and their collaborators have engineered a new genome sequencing technique that can diagnose rare genetic diseases in an average of eight hours. This is a record-breaking time frame that is leap and bounds ahead of other current advanced technologies.

Gene sequencing is crucial to advancing science! Check out why cutting time and cost is key.

Circa 2019

The race to engineer the next-generation banana is on. The Colombian government confirmed last month that a banana-killing fungus has invaded the Americas — the source of much of the world’s banana supply. The invasion has given new urgency to efforts to create fruit that can withstand the scourge.

Scientists are using a mix of approaches to save the banana. A team in Australia has inserted a gene from wild bananas into the top commercial variety — known as the Cavendish — and are currently testing these modified bananas in field trials. Researchers are also turning to the powerful, precise gene-editing tool CRISPR to boost the Cavendish’s resilience against the fungus, known as Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4).

Continue reading “CRISPR might be the banana’s only hope against a deadly fungus” »

😃 circa 2017.

George Church and colleagues use gene drive to target fungal pathogen resistance.

Could one of Earth’s most intelligent species be an alien, ‘seeded’ on the planet by an interstellar genetic code? Scientists speculate that the clue might be found in the ancient precursor to life: RNA. Image top of page: Shutterstock License Related Articles Octopus & the Origin of Consciousness (Planet Earth Report) Unfathomable […].

Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhKZIq3SlYE
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GUEST BIO:
David Sinclair is a geneticist at Harvard and author of Lifespan.

Continue reading “Meat-based vs Plant-based Diet for Longevity | David Sinclair and Lex Fridman” »

Church points to factors that helped make such a success of three of the top COVID-19 vaccine technologies. For one thing, they all used gene therapy technologies, and each was a new method relative to the past and to each other. For instance, the AstraZeneca vaccine was based on an adenovirus capsid containing double-stranded DNA as opposed to an adeno-associated virus (AAV) of the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccine, while the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were based on single-stranded mRNA inside lipid nanoparticles.

“Implementation science is the unsung handmaiden of biomedical discovery!”

Secondly, each of them was approved by the FDA 10 times faster than the vast majority of therapeutic products, and finally, the cost per vaccine has been as low as $2 per dose for the United Nations’ COVAX global access program. That’s about a million times cheaper than Zolgensma, he says, referring to the AAV gene therapy medication used to treat spinal muscular atrophy. So since “any one of these could spark a revolution,” according to Church, imagine what could happen in the next 12 months if all four factors pertain again?

After only 23 minutes, he could even pee again!

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham transplanted kidneys derived from genetically modified pigs into a brain-dead person last year as part of human preclinical trials, Science Daily reported.

Organ transplant from another species recently made big news, a heart from a genetically modified pig was transplanted into a human whose heart condition left with no other option. While the transplant was authorized under compassionate grounds by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the idea is catching up with the provider of the organ, Revivicor, already having completed two such trials in dead patients.

Continue reading “A Brain-Dead Person Just Scored Two Kidneys From Genetically Modified Pigs” »