Lifeboat Foundation

Stanford researchers have developed an algorithm that offers diagnoses based off chest X-ray images. It can diagnose up to 14 types of medical conditions and is able to diagnose pneumonia better than expert radiologists working alone.

A paper about the algorithm, called CheXNet, was published Nov. 14 on the open-access, scientific preprint website arXiv.

“Interpreting X-ray images to diagnose pathologies like pneumonia is very challenging, and we know that there’s a lot of variability in the diagnoses radiologists arrive at,” said Pranav Rajpurkar, a graduate student in the Machine Learning Group at Stanford and co-lead author of the paper. “We became interested in developing machine learning algorithms that could learn from hundreds of thousands of chest X-ray diagnoses and make accurate diagnoses.”

Biologist Mark Roth, at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, is working with animal subjects, putting them into suspended animation. The idea is that a patient who is in medical crisis could be put into a suspended state like hibernation, until he or she could be stabilized and in this way, get past it.

Though we tend to expire when the oxygen level is low, many animals go into a suspended state in extremely low oxygen environments. In the lab, one must enter into such an environment quickly. Roth is currently working with nematodes—a kind of roundworm—and expects to eventually work up to humans.

Continue reading “Science Is Starting to Explore the Gray Zone Between Life and Death” »

Advances in regenerative medicine, particularly stem cells and 3D-bioprinted organs, could soon make heart transplantation an obsolete medical procedure.

3D printing has come a long way. In a new study, scientists explore the potential of using bacteria-laced ink to print living materials.

From pizza to urine-based space plastic and even blood vessels, it seems there’s no limit to what can be 3D printed. A new 3D printing platform, created by ETH researchers led by Professor André Studart, head of the Laboratory for Complex Materials, is advancing the process by working with living materials. The specially designed material is actually an ink infused with bacteria. The machine is then able to print living biochemical designs for a wide variety of purposes, which vary depending on the bacteria used. Their research has been published in Science Advances.

A new study reveals that semi-synthetic organisms — in this case, E.coli bacteria containing two artificial DNA bases — can produce proteins.

It worked. Working with mice, they were able to reverse the disease symptoms of kidney disease, type 1 diabetes, and a form of muscular dystrophy. In the mouse with kidney disease, for example, they turned on two genes associated with kidney function and saw the kidney function improved.

The unassumingly named CRISPR/Cas9 is a technology that stands to remake the world as we know it. By allowing scientists to more easily than ever cut and paste all those As, Cs, Ts, and Gs that encode all the world’s living things, for one thing, it could one day cure many devastating diseases.

All that power, though, comes with one pretty sizable caveat: Sometimes CRISPR doesn’t work quite like we expect it to. While the scientific establishment is still embroiled in a debate over just how serious the problem is, CRISPR sometimes causes off-target effects. And for scientists doing gene editing on human patients, those mutations could wind up inadvertently causing problems like tumors or genetic disease. Yikes.

Continue reading “A Modified CRISPR Could Treat Common Diseases Without Editing DNA” »

Mukherjee is now 47 and lives in New York; Marsh, 67, lives in Oxford. To different extents both of these doctors still practise in their respective fields – Mukherjee at Columbia University’s cancer centre, Marsh as a visiting doctor at various hospitals around the world, including in Kathmandu in Nepal. Both men have continued to write: Marsh a second volume of autobiography, called Admissions, published this year, and Mukherjee a study of genetics called The Gene: An Intimate History, published last year. When they sat down to talk to each other over Skype one Saturday afternoon in November, they began with a subject on which their two lifelong disciplines overlap: the treatment of brain cancer.

The cancer specialist and the neurosurgeon talk about treating cancer, writing and facing death in their own families by Tom Lamont.