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Archive for the ‘biotech/medical’ category: Page 2234

Jul 14, 2018

Drug boosts immune system in elderly people

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Drugs were created to block a protein called the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) and it boosted the immune system by about 40% in elderly people.

They safely reducing infections in elderly volunteers around 40% by enhancing the immune system.

In 2004, tests that blocked a similar enzyme in fruit flies gave them a longer lifespan.

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Jul 13, 2018

How to predict the side effects of millions of drug combinations

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

An example graph of polypharmacy side effects derived from genomic and patient population data, protein–protein interactions, drug–protein targets, and drug–drug interactions encoded by 964 different polypharmacy side effects. The graph representation is used to develop Decagon. (credit: Marinka Zitnik et al./Bioinformatics)

Millions of people take up to five or more medications a day, but doctors have no idea what side effects might arise from adding another drug.*

Now, Stanford University computer scientists have developed a deep-learning system (a kind of AI modeled after the brain) called Decagon** that could help doctors make better decisions about which drugs to prescribe. It could also help researchers find better combinations of drugs to treat complex diseases.

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Jul 13, 2018

HPV vaccine eliminates skin cancer in 97-year-old, doctors report

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The HPV vaccine has eliminated skin cancer in a 97-year-old woman — giving doctors and patients hope it could be used to treat aggressive cases of skin cancer, such as squamous cell carcinoma.


A 97-year-old woman’s severe case of an untreatable form of squamous cell carcinoma was cleared with injections of the HPV vaccine, her doctors report.

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Jul 13, 2018

Human Trials Show a 30-Year-Old Heart Disease Drug Could Help Treat Type 1 Diabetes

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Finger pricks and daily insulin injections are currently the leading regimen for those with type 1 diabetes, a condition in which the body’s insulin producing cells beta cells are destroyed. And it’s not foolproof.

Patients can often face risks over overcorrecting their blood sugar levels, which can potentially lead to hypoglycemia – low blood sugar – and coma.

Insulin is responsible for regulating the amount of sugar in the blood, and dysfunctions with it can cause diabetes.

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Jul 13, 2018

Australian experiment wipes out over 80% of disease-carrying mosquitoes

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

In an experiment with global implications, Australian scientists have successfully wiped out more than 80% of disease-carrying mosquitoes in trial locations across north Queensland.

The experiment, conducted by scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and James Cook University (JCU), targeted Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread deadly diseases such as dengue fever and Zika.

In JCU laboratories, researchers bred almost 20 million mosquitoes, infecting males with bacteria that made them sterile. Then, last summer, they released over three million of them in three towns on the Cassowary Coast.

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Jul 13, 2018

Memories can pass between generations through DNA

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

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Jul 13, 2018

Inhibition of mTOR Appears to Boost Aged Immune Systems

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Inhibiting TORC1 might boost the immune system of the elderly.


In a recent study conducted by researchers at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts, inhibition of mTOR complex 1 boosts the immune system of aged people, decreasing their yearly rate of infections as well as increasing their response to an influenza vaccine [1].

Study summary

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Jul 13, 2018

Type 2 diabetes, obesity may soon be reversed with gene therapy

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

For the first time, scientists use gene therapy to successfully reverse obesity and insulin resistance in an animal model of type 2 diabetes.

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Jul 13, 2018

HybridHeart: a soft biocompatible artificial heart

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, futurism

The HybridHeart consortium is a European Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Open project. HybridHeart proposes to develop and bring to the clinic a soft biocompatible artificial heart, which can completely replace a patient’s heart in a procedure similar to a heart transplant.

HybridHeart's work based on in situ tissue engineering, soft robotics and wireless energy transfer

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Jul 12, 2018

Caltech’s new machine learning algorithm predicts IQ from fMRI

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, information science, neuroscience, robotics/AI

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology can now assess a person’s intelligence in moments with nothing more than a brain scan and an AI algorithm, university officials announced this summer.

Caltech researchers led by Ralph Adolphs, PhD, a professor of psychology, neuroscience and biology and chair of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, said in a recent study that they, alongside colleagues at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of Salerno, were successfully able to predict IQ in hundreds of patients from fMRI scans of resting-state brain activity. The work is pending publication in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Adolphs and his team collected data from nearly 900 men and women for their research, all of whom were part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-driven Human Connectome Project. The researchers trained their machine learning algorithm on the complexities of the human brain by feeding the brain scans and intelligence scores of these hundreds of patients into the algorithm—something that took very little effort on the patients’ end.

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