Lifeboat Foundation

In this interview, Dr. Leonid Peshkin offers insights on aging, the pitfalls of excessive optimism, and the role of machine learning in studying age-related disease.

Determined but not complacent, grounded but hopeful, Dr. Leonid Peshkin is one of the scientists working on understanding aging so that it may one day be treated like we treat any other ailment.

As he revealed in an interview with the Boston Globe in mid-2018, the idea of having to lose oneself and one’s loved ones to aging never made any sense to him, and ever since he was a child, he has been preoccupied with aging and the fear that it might take away his father, who was almost 60 when Leon was 10 and, sadly, passed away in July 2018 at the age of 96.

Continue reading “An Interview with Dr. Leonid Peshkin” »

We had no shortage of blood pressure medication recalls in 2018, with multiple companies issuing warnings over drug impurities that could cause cancer. It looks like that trend will continue in 2019 as yet another company has issued a recall of blood pressure tablets after detecting an impurity that may be cancer-causing.

This time around it’s Aurobindo Pharma USA Inc, which is recalling prescriptions of the drug Valsartan, you may remember, has been the subject of recalls due to such impurities in the past. The drug is sold by several manufacturers, and in July of 2018 almost a half-dozen companies were forced to recall their products due to the discovery of human carcinogens in the tablets.

A clinical trial is launching in the UK to test a new Breath Biopsy technology with the goal of finding molecular biomarkers in breath samples that can be used to diagnose a variety of different cancers.

Drive an hour north of Google’s headquarters up to Oyster Point, south San Francisco, and you will find the office of Calico Labs. The steel and glass building has none of the showmanship of its sister company, with its colourful, attention-grabbing Googleplex campus.

Its name is an acronym for “California Life Company” but its lifeless exterior makes it easy to imagine it being named after another Calico – an abandoned mining town further down the Pacific Coast. The company, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is now five years old, but its operations remain highly secretive.

University of Arizona biomedical engineering professor Philipp Gutruf is first author on the paper Fully implantable, optoelectronic systems for battery-free, multimodal operation in neuroscience research, published in Nature Electronics.

Optogenetics is a biological technique that uses light to turn specific neuron groups in the brain on or off. For example, researchers might use optogenetic stimulation to restore movement in case of paralysis or, in the future, to turn off the areas of the brain or spine that cause pain, eliminating the need for—and the increasing dependence on—opioids and other painkillers.

“We’re making these tools to understand how different parts of the brain work,” Gutruf said. “The advantage with optogenetics is that you have cell specificity: You can target specific groups of neurons and investigate their function and relation in the context of the whole brain.”

Continue reading “Controlling neurons with light—but without wires or batteries” »

Dear friends of healthy longevity, yet another year has gone by. Hold back the melancholy though, because in this day and age a passing year can be looked at as a year fewer to wait before rejuvenation biotechnologies are available, rather than a year taken from your healthy lifespan. Busy as we are with all the errands of daily life, it is easy to forget all that’s happened and the progress we’ve made in the field in one year. So while we wait for 2019, let’s take a look back at what 2018 has brought us.

Chan-Zuckerberg researchers implanted a wireless brain device called the “Wand” in a primate. Their first study was published on New Year’s Eve.

A Chinese scientist has claimed to use CRISPR to genetically engineer two babies. An expert explains what this means and the ethical implications.

Scientists at the University of Washington (UW) may have found an unexpected way to tackle persistent indoor air pollution: a common houseplant modified with rabbit DNA.

Researchers wanted to find a way to remove the toxic compounds chloroform and benzene from the home, a UW press release explained. Chloroform enters the air through chlorinated water and benzene comes from gasoline and enters the home through showers, the boiling of hot water and fumes from cars or other vehicles stored in garages attached to the home. Both have been linked to cancer, but not much has been done to try and remove them. Until now.

“People haven’t really been talking about these hazardous organic compounds in homes, and I think that’s because we couldn’t do anything about them,” senior study author and UW civil and environmental engineering department research professor Stuart Strand said in the release. “Now we’ve engineered houseplants to remove these pollutants for us.”

Continue reading “Scientists have combined a house plant with a rabbit gene. This is why” »