Lifeboat Foundation

Cardiologists at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are the first in the United States to test a new type of ablation technology for patients suffering from atrial fibrillation, a common type of irregular heartbeat.

The team is participating in a global clinical trial to assess pulsed field ablation (PFA) technology to treat patients with atrial fibrillation. Developed by.

Ogba Educational Clinic

A nightmarish scene was burnt into my memory nearly two decades ago: Changainjie, Beijing’s normally chaotic “fifth avenue,” desolate without a sign of life. Schools shut, subways empty, people terrified to leave their homes. Every night the state TV channels reported new cases and new deaths. All the while, we had to face a chilling truth: the coronavirus, SARS, was so novel that no one understood how it spread or how to effectively treat it. No vaccines were in sight. In the end, it killed nearly 1,000 people.

It’s impossible not to draw parallels between SARS and the new coronavirus outbreak, COVID-19, that’s been ravaging China and spreading globally. Yet the response to the two epidemics also starkly highlights how far biotech and global collaborations have evolved in the past two decades. Advances in genetic sequencing technologies, synthetic biology, and open science are reshaping how we deal with potential global pandemics. In a way, the two epidemics hold up a mirror to science itself, reflecting both technological progress and a shift in ethos towards collaboration.

Continue reading “How to Battle an Epidemic? Digitize Its DNA and Share It With the World” »

Iraj Harirchi, who has strongly denied any cover-up of a growing outbreak, has self-quarantined.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9-z0kglwpwo

They don’t waste much time getting right into it. He is 57 but has been told he is physically 47.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey of SENS Research Foundation was interviewed by the extremely popular Joe Rogan, and they discussed the damage repair approach to aging. Dr. de Grey talked about the current state of aging research, including stem cell therapies, and explained the role of SENS in developing next-generation rejuvenation biotechnology therapies. He also brought up the role of funding, a key bottleneck in research and development, and gave his prognosis on how quickly these therapies will be developed.

Wuhan Coronavirus Pandemic — new US case.

“U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar confirmed a new case of the coronavirus in the U.S. “Coming into this hearing, I was informed that we have a 15th confirmed case, the epidemiology of which we are still discerning,” he testified before a House panel. The new case brings the total number of cases in the U.S. to 60. The CDC has separated out 45 confirmed infections in people evacuated from a cruise ship in Japan or from Wuhan, China from its official case count.”

As of Wednesday, more than 81,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported, resulting in at least 2,764 deaths.

Need for a vaccine to stop this novel coronavirus is needed today more than ever. And it looks like we might not have to wait for long after all.

Scientists since the news of the outbreak have been working on a vaccine to combat and prevent people from the novel coronavirus and now a company called Moderna has announced that it has finally developed a coronavirus vaccine that will soon be ready for human testing.

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The standard gene-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, frequently produces a type of DNA mutation that ordinary genetic analysis misses, claims new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In describing these findings the researchers called such oversights “serious pitfalls” of gene editing (Skryabin et al., 2020). In all, the new results suggest that gene-editing is more error-prone than thought and, further, that identifying and discarding defective and unwanted outcomes is not as easy as generally supposed.

This is a great outline of how the outbreak could end (from best to worst-case scenario): 1. Public health interventions control the 2019 n-CoV 2. The virus burns itself out (I love this analogy of viruses to fires) like the Spanish flu 3. It becomes a common virus like ex-pandemic H1N1 (swine) flu.

The World Health Organization has declared the growing coronavirus outbreak in China to be a global health emergency. It’s a recognition that the outbreak — now with nearly 10,000 cases — may continue to spread beyond China, and that the nations of the world should lend their assistance and be prepared.

Researchers at California Polytechnic State University have developed a low-cost approach that improves cell-free biotechnology’s utility for bio-manufacturing and portability for field applications.

Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) is a biotechnology that harnesses active cellular machinery in a test tube without the presence of living cells, allowing researchers to directly access and manipulate biochemical processes. Scientists and engineers are looking to utilize cell-free biotechnology for numerous applications including on-demand biomanufacturing of biomaterials and therapeutics, point-of-care diagnostics of disease biomarkers and environmental pollutants, and transformative biochemical education platforms.

Cell-free biotechnology researchers have already made many of these applications a reality in the lab, but getting them to work in the field, clinic and classroom is more difficult. The cellular machinery extracted for use in cell-free biotechnology contains biomolecules such as proteins and RNAs, which break down at warmer temperatures, greatly limiting the shelf life of the cellular machinery. Transporting it from one laboratory to another or taking it out of the lab for field applications requires refrigeration to maintain its activity. Being tethered to the “cold chain” is a fundamental limit to meeting cell-free biotechnology’s potential.