Lifeboat Foundation

We lost a really great human today – philosopher Daniel C. Dennett.

Dan was a kind, honest, generous guy. He had a brilliant mind – insightful, critical, with an encyclopedic knowledge of pithy analogies and clinical examples (“intuition pumps” he called them), as well as who came up with them. And despite all of his experience and accomplishments, he always had a kind of childish excitement about new ideas, and new experiments. What he liked best was new insights, wild ideas, honest argument. I first heard the concept of “steel-manning” from him (opposite of “straw man” – putting forth the strongest, best version of an argument you want to critique). He was not interested in cheap wins or rhetorical bullying – he wanted to get to the best version of every story about nature and about ourselves.

I first came into contact with Dan through his books. As a teenager, Brainstorms, Elbow Room, and The Intentional Stance were a fantastic introduction to the most interesting questions, and ways of thinking about them. My dad and I would hit the bookstores every Saturday and there was no way a Dennett book would escape us if a new one came out. We had lots of great times discussing the topics in his books. I eventually was able to ask Dan to sign a few of them for dad, as birthday presents.

T-Cell Priming Immunotherapies To Provide Broad And Robust, Long-Term Immunity — Prof. Dr. Thomas Rademacher, MD, PhD — CEO & Co-Founder, Emergex Vaccines

Professor Dr. Thomas Rademacher, MD, PhD, is CEO and Co-Founder of Emergex (https://emergexvaccines.com/), a company that has developed a novel nanoparticle-based vaccine technology to deliver synthetic viral fragments via microneedles on a skin-adhesive patch. Emergex’s approach works on the principle of priming immune T-cells, opening the door for the development of universal vaccines against highly mutagenic viruses such as the seasonal flu and covid. T-cell priming offers a superior inoculation strategy over traditional vaccines, which rely on the body’s generation of antibodies and fail to keep up with seasonal mutations.

Continue reading “Prof. Dr. Thomas Rademacher, MD, PhD — CEO & Co-Founder, Emergex — T-Cell Priming Immunotherapies” »

Is the Founder and CEO of Torigen Pharmaceuticals (https://www.torigen.com/), a company dedicated to researching and developing novel immuno-oncology products and services specifically for the veterinary market, with a focus on autologous cancer vaccines.

Torigen Pharmaceuticals is a start‑up that resulted from Ashley’s graduate thesis project at the University of Notre Dame, as she was working on her Masters in Engineering, Science and Technology Entrepreneurship in collaboration with Dr. Mark Suckow (https://www.research.uky.edu/staff/ma…). Ashley also received an undergraduate degree in Veterinary Pathology and Pathobiology from University of Connecticut.

“This remains I think an enormous concern,” the UN health agency’s chief scientist, Jeremy Farrar, told reporters in Geneva.

Cows and goats joined the list of species affected last month – a surprising development for experts because they were not thought susceptible to this type of influenza. US authorities reported this month that a person in Texas was recovering from bird flu after being exposed to dairy cattle, with 16 herds across six states infected apparently after exposure to wild birds.

The A(H5N1) variant has become “a global zoonotic animal pandemic”, Farrar said.

Evan A. Scott, PhD, comes to UVA from Northwestern University, where he has conducted groundbreaking research into the use of tiny nanostructures to battle heart disease, cancer, glaucoma and more. Scott’s nanostructures, far too small for the eye to see, allow for the precise delivery of drugs and other therapeutics to specific inflammatory cells to benefit the body’s immune response. His research provides important answers about the fundamental processes responsible for diseases and paves the way for high-tech treatments using cleverly designed, and mind-blowingly miniscule, synthetic materials.

“We are excited to welcome Dr. Scott to head up nanoSTAR at this critical turning point in nanotechnology research at the University of Virginia,” said Melina R. Kibbe, MD, dean of the School of Medicine. “Nanotechnology has vast untapped potential to benefit patients everywhere. It is a long-standing strength for UVA and will be a foundational pillar of the Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology.”

The Manning Institute, under construction at Fontaine Research Park, will tackle some of the greatest challenges in medicine by focusing on cutting-edge areas of research such as nanotechnology, targeted drug delivery, cellular therapies and gene therapy. NanoSTAR, with Scott at the helm, will play a key role in that nanotechnology research, and Scott will work to foster collaborations across Grounds, including among the School of Medicine, School of Engineering and Applied Science, School of Data Science and the College of Arts and Sciences, among others.

Is it possible for nanoparticles to go through the digestive system and deliver medicine directly to the brain tissue? Researchers from Michigan State University say yes, and their latest findings are expected to benefit patients with neurodegenerative disorders like multiple sclerosis, or MS; amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS; and Parkinson’s disease, or PD.

Causal machine learning methods could be used to predict treatment outcomes for subgroups and even individual patients; this Perspective outlines the potential benefits and limitations of the approach, offering practical guidance for appropriate clinical use.

MRI scans of long COVID patients with brain fog suggest that the blood brain barrier may be leaky.

A multi-institutional team of geneticists and genomic and genotyping specialists in Japan has sequenced the genomes of thousands of Japanese people from across the country, looking to settle the debate surrounding the ancestry of the Japanese people.