Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,597

Steven A. Garan — Silicon Valley’s Role in Fighting Aging

Today, we would like to share the talk that Steven A. Garan gave at our recent conference in New York, Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects & Advances in Research. The conference focused on bringing together the world of research and investment and bringing thought leaders, investors, the media, and the general public together.

Steven A. Garan is the Director of Bioinformatics at the Center for Research and Education on Aging (CREA) and a researcher at UC Berkeley National Laboratory. In his talk at Ending Age-Related Diseases, he discussed the impact of various present and future Silicon Valley technology breakthroughs on overcoming aging.

He gave a somewhat future-facing talk at the conference, which may surprise some people given his senior position at Berkeley; however, we consider this a sign of how times have changed in the last decade. Ten years ago, talking about ending aging would potentially have damaged your career and gotten you unfairly labeled as fringe, much as Dr. Aubrey de Grey was for many years until many others joined his crusade to end aging. It was therefore refreshing to hear Steven talk so positively about the future of biomedical science and about doing something about aging itself in order to end age-related diseases.

Bioengineers borrow from electronics industry to get stem cells to shape up

To understand how cells in the body behave, bioengineers create miniature models of the cells’ environment in their lab. But recreating this niche environment is incredibly complex in a controlled setting, because researchers are still learning all the factors that influence cell behavior and growth. By observing and then modifying their engineered mini-models, scientists are better able to identify those factors.

This form of cellular research is essential to the study of regenerative medicine, which focuses on replacing or repairing damaged tissue, often through the use of , a special population of that can give rise to all tissues in the body. Bioengineers face the central question of regenerative medicine: what causes stem cells to grow, organize, and mature from a small population of cells to complex organs?

To find an answer, a research team from the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology borrowed a process commonly used in the electronics industry called micropatterning, in which the miniaturization of shapes increases the number of transistors on a circuit. The team created micropatterned shapes, coupled with machine learning, to see how confinement influences stem cell maturation and organization.

Kelsey Moody — Antibody Mimetic for Parkinson’s Disease | LEAF

Kelsey Moody, CEO of Ichor Therapeutics, discusses the creation of a gut-stable antibody mimetic for Parkinson’s disease and announces 10 million dollars in investment from Juvenescence into Ichor portfolio company Antoxerene Inc. at the Ending Age-Related Diseases conference in NYC.

More at: https://www.leafscience.org/ending-age-related-diseases-2018/

Discovery reveals why toxic Alzheimer’s plaques don’t always lead to dementia

One of the fundamental pathological markers seen in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease is a build-up of two proteins — amyloid beta and tau — in the brain. It’s this action that many researchers hypothesize is the key symptomatic cause of cognitive decline associated with the disease. However, not all people with a build-up of these proteins display neurological damage and cognitive decline. New research from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston may have finally homed in on the reason behind this strange observation, and the results could lead to a whole new way to battle this devastating disease.

Hitting the pause button on life

🐸 The wood frog, Rana sylvatica, is one of many animals to master the art of a reversible, coma-like state known as metabolic depression. Metabolically depressed animals use tiny amounts of energy, sometimes so little that scientists can’t tell if they have any metabolism at all. Somehow, these animals press the pause button on life, outlasting hard times in demanding environments. Could humans ever learn to imitate death like these animals? Workers from fields as diverse as medicine to space exploration are itching to know the answer… 🤔♾😴.

If other members of the animal kingdom can shut down their bodies over winter, then why can’t we?

How cancer cells communicate — and how we can slow them down

When cancer cells are closely packed together in a tumor, they’re able to communicate with each other and coordinate their movement throughout the body. What if we could interrupt this process? In this accessible talk about cutting-edge science, Hasini Jayatilaka shares her work on an innovative method to stop cancer cells from communicating — and halt their fatal ability to spread.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

Physicists fight laser chaos with quantum chaos to improve laser performance

To tame chaos in powerful semiconductor lasers, which causes instabilities, scientists have introduced another kind of chaos.

High-powered semiconductor lasers are used in materials processing, biomedical imaging and industrial research, but the emitted light they produce is affected by instabilities, making it incoherent.

The instabilities in the laser are caused by optical filaments; light structures that move randomly and change with time, causing chaos. Removing these instabilities has long been a goal in physics, but previous strategies to reduce filaments have usually involved reducing the power of the laser.

Within 5 years, the world could widely accept that we are within striking distance of a post aging world

George Church, Age-X, HIV, Aubrey, a lil bit of everything here.

Within 5 years, the world could widely accept that we are within striking distance of a post-aging world. This could be with the achievement of mice that would normally die at the age of three getting life extension at the age of two and living beyond 5 years. It might be after that with the similar treatments to reverse aging in dogs. It could be with the first age reversal treatments in humans that make people look significantly younger but also restore muscle and other body functions.

Investors would then accelerate any funding needed to complete several very promising anti-aging treatments which are currently being worked upon.

One of the many George Church companies is Rejuvenate Bio. This is a stealth company that has been running tests to reverse aging in dogs.

NYU Offers Full-Tuition Scholarships for All Medical Students

Doctor? Who?

New York University said Thursday that it will cover tuition for all its medical students regardless of their financial situation, a first among the nation’s major medical schools and an attempt to expand career options for graduates who won’t be saddled with six-figure debt [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: School officials worry that rising tuition and soaring loan balances are pushing new doctors into high-paying fields and contributing to a shortage of researchers and primary care physicians. Medical schools nationwide have been conducting aggressive fundraising campaigns to compete for top prospects, alleviate the debt burden and give graduates more career choices. NYU raised more than $450 million of the roughly $600 million it estimates it will need to fund the tuition package in perpetuity, including $100 million from Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone and his wife, Elaine. The school will provide full-tuition scholarships for 92 first-year students — another 10 are already covered through M.D./PhD programs — as well as 350 students already partway through the M.D.-only degree program.

Two Industries in One Field

Now that we are starting to see the arrival of actual therapies aimed at targeting the processes of aging directly in order to prevent age-related diseases, it has become easier to separate two very distinct groups.

The first group consists of the snake oil salesmen peddling unproven supplements and therapies to whoever is foolish enough to buy and take things on faith without using the scientific method. The hucksters have long been a plague on our field, preying on the gullible and tainting legitimate science with their charlatanry and nonsense. One example is the “biotech company” that makes bold claims yet never delivers on those claims in practice, offering data based on poorly designed experiments and tiny cohorts that are statistically irrelevant; another example is the supplement peddler selling expensive supplement blends with flashy names, which, on inspection, turn out to be commonly available herbs and minerals mixed and sold at a high markup. These sorts of people have plagued our community and given the field a reputation of snake oil.

The second group are the credible scientists, researchers, and companies who have been working on therapies for years and sometimes more than a decade. Many of these therapies are following the damage repair approach advocated by Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation over a decade ago. The basic idea is to take an engineering approach to the damage that aging does to the body and to periodically repair that damage in order to keep its level below that which causes pathology. These therapies are now starting to arrive, with some already in human trials right now, and this marks a milestone in our field: the credible science has finally outstripped the snake oil, and the focus can move from pseudoscience to real, evidence-based science.