Lifeboat Foundation

More recently, digital twins have been the focus of a European Union-funded project that seeks to clone a patient’s entire brain. Dubbed Neurotwin, the research project aims to create virtual models that can be used to predict the effects of stimulation for the treatment of neurological disorders—including epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. When it comes to epilepsy, non-invasive stimulations (where electrical currents are painlessly delivered to the brain) have proven effective in tackling seizures. Given how drugs don’t help a third of epilepsy patients, the technology is coveted yet needs refinement. This is where virtual clones come in.

“The digital avatar is essentially a mathematical model running on a computer,” Giulio Ruffini, coordinator of the Neurotwin project, told WIRED. Including a network of embedded “neural mass models,” the technology hopes to create a map of the neural connections in the brain—a concept termed as the ‘connectome’. “In the case of epilepsy, some areas of the connectome could become overexcited,” the outlet mentioned. “In the case of, say, stroke, the connectome might be altered.” Once the digital clone has been created by the team, with about half an hour-worth of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data and ten minutes of electroencephalography (EEG) readings to capture electrical activities and realistically simulate the brain’s main tissues (including the scalp, skull, cerebrospinal fluid, and grey and white matter), it can then be used to optimise stimulation of the real patient’s brain.

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Public policy includes efforts by governmental as well as nongovernmental agencies (other than professional associations) to manage genetic enhancement. For example, the International Olympic Committee has a policy on performance-enhancing drugs in sport. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration classified synthetic anabolic steroids as a restricted class of drugs, making it more difficult to get access to them. Such measures will not always be successful. Epoetin alfa (EPO) is a useful medication for the many people who suffer from chronic anemia, including people who must undergo regular renal dialysis. As a consequence, it is in very wide supply for legitimate therapeutic purposes, unlike the synthetic anabolic steroids. Imposing strict limitations on access to EPO would create an enormous inconvenience for the large number of people who benefit from the drug. The fact that some athletes are able to get their hands on EPO is an unintended consequence of having the drug widely available for legitimate therapeutic uses. The appropriate public policy will not be the same, necessarily, for every drug.

By “personal policy” we mean the moral understandings and social practices of individuals, parents, and families, including those moral convictions that would cause them to refrain from unwise or unfair use of genetic enhancement technologies. The Worth of a Child, for example, focuses on ethical issues involving children and parents.¹¹ How does one engage that sort of personal policy response? The means we have are limited but powerful: education, public dialogue, and the encouragement of ethical reflection.

In conclusion, there are four points worth reiterating. First, as we think about genetic enhancement, we should use a broad definition of genetic-enhancement technologies, not merely gene manipulation, but indirect genetic technologies, such as biosynthetic drugs. Second, we should try to anticipate the enhancement temptations of new therapies. Such anticipation may help us in shaping the marketing, availability, or other aspects of those technologies. Third, we should promote the adoption of appropriate public and professional policies. Finally, we should provide public education and dialogue to encourage personal ethical reflection on the appropriate uses and limits of genetic-enhancement technologies.

The long-standing enigma of why so many patients suffering with high blood pressure (known as hypertension) also have diabetes (high blood sugar) has finally been cracked by an international team led by the universities of Bristol, UK, and Auckland, New Zealand.

The important new discovery has shown that a small protein cell glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) couples the body’s control of blood sugar and blood pressure.

Professor Julian Paton, a senior author, and Director of Manaaki Mãnawa – The Centre for Heart Research at the University of Auckland, said: “We’ve known for a long time that hypertension and diabetes are inextricably linked and have finally discovered the reason, which will now inform new treatment strategies.”

Eight cutting-edge heart failure projects are set to receive millions of pounds’ worth of funding from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) this year, with the money raised, fittingly enough, by the London Marathon.

Longevity. Technology: Heart disease is the world’s greatest killer, with cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) taking an estimated 17.9 million lives each year [1]. With organs for transplant in short supply, the focus is turning to regenerative medicine – getting the heart to repair itself – and the BHF is planning to fund eight projects all aimed at finding ways to cure heart failure. Given that a picture paints a thousand words, BHF has made the smart move of showcasing this regenerative research through a stunning set of images that shows the Foundation’s desire to not just ameliorate the symptoms of heart disease, or to extend patients’ lives, but to cure heart disease by regenerating, regrowing or replacing damaged cells and tissues.

“Heart failure is a debilitating condition that dramatically affects the lives of almost 1 million people in the UK,” commented Professor Metin Avkiran, BHF Associate Medical Director. “BHF-funded research has spear-headed treatments to give people with heart failure longer, healthier lives, but there is no cure. Regenerative medicine offers that hope.

Regrowing or replacing bone lost to disease is tricky and often painful. In a new study Australian researchers have found a relatively simple way to induce stem cells to turn into bone cells quickly and efficiently, using high-frequency sound waves.

Stem cells have enormous medical potential in helping to regenerate various tissues in the body, but bone has proven particularly hard to work with. Bone originates from what are known as mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which mostly reside in the bone marrow. Collecting these is a painful procedure, then converting them into bone cells is difficult to scale up to useful levels.

But researchers from RMIT have now found a faster and simpler way to induce MSCs to turn into bone cells. Previous studies have suggested that the vibrations from sound waves can induce cell differentiation, but it typically took over a week with mixed results. These experiments have been limited to low frequencies, and it was thought that higher frequencies would have little benefit. So for the new study, the RMIT team investigated these higher frequencies.

Embryonic stem cells and other pluripotent cells divide rapidly and have the capacity to become nearly any cell type in the body. Scientists have long sought to understand the signals that prompt stem cells to switch off pluripotency and adopt their final functional state.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have identified a key regulator of this process. They discovered that a molecule known as BEND3 shuts down expression of hundreds of genes associated with differentiation, maintaining the cell’s stem cell-like status. Only when BEND3 is downregulated can cells adopt their final form and function. Once they differentiate, they usually stop actively proliferating.

The findings are relevant to understanding normal development and also may be useful in cancer research, said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cell and developmental biology professor and department head Supriya Prasanth, who led the research.

A large new study shows people who contracted #COVID19 faced substantially higher risks of neuropsychiatric ailments 1 year later, including brain fog, depression, and substance use disorders.

Dozens of papers have examined the lingering mental health effects of COVID-19, but many have measured conditions such as depression and brain fog only a few months after infection. Now, a giant new study shows people who contracted COVID-19 faced substantially higher risks of neuropsychiatric ailments 1 year later, including brain fog, depression, and substance use disorders. The report, based on millions of people who used the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system early in the pandemic, is published today in.

“Most of us experienced some sort of mental distress during the pandemic, but this shows that people with COVID-19 had a much higher risk of mental health disorders than their contemporaries,” says senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and chief of research at the VA St. Louis Health Care system. “It’s a wake-up call.”

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TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Following multiple news organizations covering allegations of animal abuse at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain chip company, the tech developer issued a statement on its animal welfare policies.

Earlier this month, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine announced lawsuits against the University of California, Davis and Neuralink over its treatment of the macaque monkeys used to test the experimental brain implants developed by Musk’s company.

Decades of research has shown that limits on calorie intake by flies, worms, and mice can enhance life span in laboratory conditions. But whether such calorie restriction can do the same for humans remains unclear. Now a new study led by Yale researchers confirms the health benefits of moderate calorie restrictions in humans — and identifies a key protein that could be harnessed to extend health in humans.

The findings were published on February 10, 2022, in Science.

The research was based on results from the Comprehensive Assessment of Long-term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy (CALERIE) clinical trial, the first controlled study of calorie restriction in healthy humans. For the trial, researchers first established baseline calorie intake among more than 200 study participants. The researchers then asked a share of those participants to reduce their calorie intake by 14% while the rest continued to eat as usual, and analyzed the long-term health effects of calorie restriction over the next two years.