Lifeboat Foundation

Scientist Michael Snyder tracked his own basic measurements for years. Now he’s released a study of over 100 people using similar data to make lifesaving discoveries about heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

A new imaging technique designed to help surgeons identify the location of malignant brain tumors during surgery is showing promising early clinical trial results. The technique combines a new high-sensitivity near-infrared camera with a special imaging agent synthesized from an amino acid found in scorpion venom.

Doctors in the US have announced plans for a radical gene therapy that aims to drastically reduce the risk of heart attack, the world’s leading cause of death, with a one-off injection.

The researchers hope to trial the therapy within the next three years in people with a rare genetic disorder that makes them prone to heart attacks in their 30s and 40s. If the treatment proves safe and effective in the patients, doctors will seek approval to offer the jab to a wider population.

“The therapy will be relevant, we think, to any adult at risk of a heart attack,” said Sekar Kathiresan, a cardiologist and geneticist at Harvard Medical School who will lead the effort. “We want this not only for people who have heart attacks at a young age because of a genetic disorder, but for garden variety heart attacks as well.”

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Scientists at MIT’s CSAIL and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed an AI model that can predict breast cancer up to five years in advance.

A new therapy to re-engage the heart’s natural electrical pathways—instead of bypassing them—could mean more treatment options for heart failure patients who also suffer from electrical disturbances, such as arrhythmias, according to research led by the University of Chicago Medicine.

In a first-ever pilot study, called the His SYNC trial, researchers compared the effectiveness of two different cardiac resynchronization therapies, or treatments to correct irregularities in the heartbeat through implanted pacemakers and defibrillators. The current standard of care, known as biventricular pacing, uses two pacing impulses in both lower chambers, whereas the newer approach, called His bundle pacing, attempts to work toward engaging and restoring the heart’s natural physiology. The two approaches have never before been directly compared in a head-to-head clinical trial.

“This is the first prospective study in our field to compare outcomes between different ways to achieve cardiac resynchronization,” said cardiologist Roderick Tung, MD, FHRS, the Director of Cardiac Electrophysiology & EP Laboratories at the University of Chicago Medicine. “Through His bundle pacing, we’re trying to tap into the normal wiring of the heart and restore conduction the way nature intended. Previously, we have just accepted that we had to bypass it through pacing two ventricles at a time.”

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Australia has approved the use of CRISPR gene editing tool on plants and animals without the oversight of a governmental body. The controversial move has been called a ‘middle ground’ compared to regulations on other countries.

Follow the life, death, and groundbreaking 3D resurrection of Susan Potter whose body became a high resolution digital cadaver.
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All you need to do is switch out the cell type, and you can fish out a different type of drug candidate.

“It was a huge surprise, we didn’t expect to find so many melanoma cancer cell markers in blood exosomes,” explains Hubert Girault, who heads up the Laboratory of Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry at EPFL Valais Wallis. Professor Girault and his team made the discovery almost by accident. Their findings, which have been published in the journal Chem, offer insight into how cancer cells communicate with each other and send information around the body.

All biological cells excrete exosomes, microscopic spheres or vesicles that are less than 100 nanometers in size and contain a wealth of information in the form of nucleic acids, proteins and markers. Exosomes perform cell-to-cell signaling, conveying information between cells. Under the supervision of Senior Scientist Dr. Horst Pick, EPFL doctoral assistant Yingdi Zhu used cell culture and mass spectrometry to isolate melanoma cancer cell exosomes. She was able to identify cancer cell markers in exosomes for each stage of melanoma growth.

When analyzing the blood exosomes of melanoma patients, the researchers were surprised to discover large quantities of cancer cell markers. The blood collects and transports all the exosomes that the body generates. While healthy cells usually produce exosomes in small quantities, cancer cells produce many more. But it was previously thought that these would be so diluted in the blood that they would be hard to detect. For Professor Girault, the discovery of large quantities of cancer cell markers in blood exosomes raises numerous questions about signaling between cancer cells, which until now were not thought to communicate over longer distances within the body.

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