Lifeboat Foundation

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.

Given there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the futurology subreddit, we thought it was a great time to have a look at the progress the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA where you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Given that there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the Futurology subreddit, we think it’s a great time to have a look at the progress that the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA, in which you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Today, there are many drugs and therapies that we take for granted. However, we should not forget that what is common and easily accessible today didn’t just magically appear out of thin air; rather, at some point, it used to be an unclear subject of study on which “more research was needed”, and even earlier, it was just a conjecture in some researcher’s head.

Continue reading “SENS: Progress in the Fight Against Age-related Diseases” »

Dr. Hébert will be in Berlin to provide an update on his fascinating work. The use of stem cells to repair the brain is relatively straightforward for Parkinson’s disease, in which cell depletion is localized to one small region, but in Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, the cell loss is widely distributed, whereas cells can only be injected into one spot. The solution that Dr. Hébert explores is to make those cells migrate before dividing and differentiating.

https://www.undoing-aging.org/dr-jean-hebert-to-speak-at-undoing-aging-2018

‘UN diplomats confirmed that the new email release would worsen the “bad name” of gene drives in some circles. “Many countries [will] have concerns when this technology comes from DARPA, a US military science agency,” one said.‘.

Cutting-edge gene editing tools such as Crispr-Cas9 work by using a synthetic ribonucleic acid (RNA) to cut into DNA strands and then insert, alter or remove targeted traits. These might, for example, distort the sex-ratio of mosquitoes to effectively wipe out malarial populations.

Some UN experts, though, worry about unintended consequences. One told the Guardian: “You may be able to remove viruses or the entire mosquito population, but that may also have downstream ecological effects on species that depend on them.”

Continue reading “US military agency invests $100m in genetic extinction technologies” »