Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,804

A good COVID-19 vaccine is one that works for rich and poor alike

And, of course, there is patriarchy. In some parts of the world, women have no control over their health. It is the men – fathers, husbands and uncles – who decide what treatment “their” women receive. Humanitarians have seen men refuse emergency caesareans for their wives. They have also seen them refuse vaccinations for women whose bodies they effectively control.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has launched the world on a pro-poor route to fair global vaccination against COVID-19. This is wonderful news. Now we need to address the challenges of a pro-poor roll-out. A major part of this must involve all States getting behind the COVAX effort to ensure fair global access to COVID-19 vaccination tools. It is good to see the UK co-leading on this with others.

Makers of grow-your-own human steaks say meal kit is not ‘technically’ cannibalism

The saying “You are what you eat” may soon become a lot more literal.

A “DIY meal kit” for growing steaks made from human cells was recently nominated for “design of the year” by the London-based Design Museum.

Named the Ouroboros Steak after the circular symbol of a snake eating itself tail-first, the hypothetical kit would come with everything one needs to use their own cells to grow miniature human meat steaks.

Antiviral method against herpes paves the way for combating incurable viral infections

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have discovered a new method to treat human herpes viruses. The new broad-spectrum method targets physical properties in the genome of the virus rather than viral proteins, which have previously been targeted. The treatment consists of new molecules that penetrate the protein shell of the virus and prevent genes from leaving the virus to infect the cell. It does not lead to resistance and acts independently of mutations in the genome of the virus. The results are published in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

Herpes virus infections are lifelong, with latency periods between recurring reactivations, making treatment difficult. The major challenge lies in the fact that all existing antiviral drugs to treat herpes viruses lead to rapid development of resistance in patients with compromised immune systems where the need for herpes treatment is the greatest (e.g. newborn children, patients with HIV, cancer or who have undergone organ transplantation). Both the molecular and physical properties of a virus determine the course of infection. However, the physical properties have so far received little attention, according to researcher Alex Evilevitch.

“We have a new and unique approach to studying viruses based on their specific physical properties. Our discovery marks a breakthrough in the development of antiviral drugs as it does not target specific viral proteins that can rapidly mutate, causing the development of drug resistance — something that remains unresolved by current antiviral drugs against herpes and other viruses. We hope that our research will contribute to the fight against viral infections that have so far been incurable,” says Alex Evilevitch, Associate Professor and senior lecturer at Lund University who, together with his research team, Virus Biophysics, has published the new findings.

Tesla Model X gets hacked through new relay attack, Tesla says it is pushing a patch

A hacker managed to develop a new key cloning relay attack for Tesla vehicles and demonstrated it on a Tesla Model X.

Tesla was informed of the new attack and it is reportedly pushing a new patch for it.

Thefts of Tesla vehicles are quite rare in North America, but in Europe, they have some more sophisticated thieves that managed a string of Tesla vehicle thefts through relay attacks, and most vehicles haven’t been recovered.

Doctors say CDC should warn people the side effects from Covid vaccine shots won’t be ‘a walk in the park’

Public health officials and drugmakers must be transparent about the side effects people may experience after getting their first shot of a coronavirus vaccine, doctors urged during a meeting Monday with CDC advisors as states prepare to distribute doses as early as next month.

Dr. Sandra Fryhofer of the American Medical Association noted that both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines require two doses at varying intervals. As a practicing physician, she said she worries whether her patients will come back for a second dose because of the potentially unpleasant side effects they may experience after the first shot.

Microfluidic Brain-on-a-Chip: Perspectives for Mimicking Neural System Disorders

Neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) include more than 600 types of nervous system disorders in humans that impact tens of millions of people worldwide. Estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest NDDs will increase by nearly 50% by 2030. Hence, development of advanced models for research on NDDs is needed to explore new therapeutic strategies and explore the pathogenesis of these disorders. Different approaches have been deployed in order to investigate nervous system disorders, including two-and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) cell cultures and animal models. However, these models have limitations, such as lacking cellular tension, fluid shear stress, and compression analysis; thus, studying the biochemical effects of therapeutic molecules on the biophysiological interactions of cells, tissues, and organs is problematic. The microfluidic “organ-on-a-chip” is an inexpensive and rapid analytical technology to create an effective tool for manipulation, monitoring, and assessment of cells, and investigating drug discovery, which enables the culture of various cells in a small amount of fluid (10−9 to 10−18 L). Thus, these chips have the ability to overcome the mentioned restrictions of 2D and 3D cell cultures, as well as animal models. Stem cells (SCs), particularly neural stem cells (NSCs), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and embryonic stem cells (ESCs) have the capability to give rise to various neural system cells. Hence, microfluidic organ-on-a-chip and SCs can be used as potential research tools to study the treatment of central nervous system (CNS) and peripheral nervous system (PNS) disorders. Accordingly, in the present review, we discuss the latest progress in microfluidic brain-on-a-chip as a powerful and advanced technology that can be used in basic studies to investigate normal and abnormal functions of the nervous system.

Science@Berkeley Lab: Engineering the Fruit Fly Genome

Although Drosophila is an insect whose genome has only about 14,000 genes, roughly half the human count, a remarkable number of these have very close counterparts in humans; some even occur in the same order in the fly’s DNA as in our own. This, plus the organism’s more than 100-year history in the lab, makes it one of the most important models for studying basic biology and disease.

To take full advantage of the opportunities offered by Drosophila, researchers need improved tools to manipulate the fly’s genes with precision, allowing them to introduce mutations to break genes, control their activity, label their protein products, or introduce other inherited genetic changes.

“We now have the genome sequences of lots of different animals — worms, flies, fish, mice, chimps, humans,” says Roger Hoskins of Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “Now we want improved technologies for introducing precise changes into the genomes of lab animals; we want efficient genome engineering. Methods for doing this are very advanced in bacteria and yeast. Good methods for worms, flies, and mice have also been around for a long time, and improvements have come along fairly regularly. But with whole genome sequences in hand, the goals are becoming more ambitious.”