Lifeboat Foundation

City of Hope, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States, treated the oldest person to be cured of a blood cancer and then achieve remission for HIV after receiving a blood stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation. Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine today demonstrates that older adults with blood cancers who receive reduced intensity chemotherapy before a stem cell transplant with donor cells that are resistant to HIV may be cured of HIV infection.

Paul Edmonds, 68, of Desert Springs, California, is the fifth person in the world to achieve remission for acute myelogenous leukemia and HIV after receiving stem cells with a rare genetic mutation, homozygous CCR5 Delta 32. That mutation makes people who have it resistant to acquiring HIV. Edmonds is also the person who had HIV the longest—for over 31 years—among these five patients.

Continue reading “Case study features successful treatment of the oldest patient to achieve remission for leukemia and HIV” »

A new kind of implant could one day make it far easier for people with type 1 diabetes to manage their disease. The insulin-making implant is a mixture of transplanted islets cells and medical technology, inserted just below the skin in a person’s arm, and if it perform well in clinical trials, it could potentially last for years.

The challenge: Insulin is a hormone that our bodies use to convert sugar in our blood into energy. People with type 1 diabetes don’t produce enough (or any) insulin — if left untreated, this causes dangerously high blood sugar levels, leading to serious health issues or even death.

Regularly checking blood sugar levels and injecting synthetic insulin when they’re high is the most common way to treat type 1 diabetes, but it isn’t the only way.

Summary: Researchers developed an innovative AI tool, DeepGO-SE, that excels in predicting the functions of unknown proteins, marking a significant advance in bioinformatics. Leveraging large language models and logical entailment, this tool can deduce molecular functions even for proteins without existing database matches, offering a groundbreaking approach to understanding cellular mechanisms.

Its precision has placed DeepGO-SE among the top algorithms in an international function prediction competition, demonstrating its potential in drug discovery, metabolic pathway analysis, and beyond. The team aims to apply this tool to explore proteins in extreme environments, opening new doors for biotechnological advancements.

Summary: Researchers developed 20 novel recombinant rabies viral vectors that present unparalleled advantages for neural circuit mapping in aging and Alzheimer’s disease studies. These vectors are engineered to highlight microstructural changes in brain neurons through enhanced fluorescent proteins, offering insights into neural networks at both micro and macro scales.

The vectors’ unique ability to target specific neuron components and perform live imaging makes them potent tools for dissecting neural circuitry in healthy and diseased states. This innovation opens new pathways for targeted treatment strategies and will be shared with the neuroscience community through UCI’s Center for Neural Circuit Mapping.

A concentrated cannabis extract has shown “remarkable” potential to kill off the most dangerous type of skin cancer. It’s still early days, but if the results can be replicated in living animal models and then in humans, it could provide a whole new drug avenue for a disease that is currently difficult to treat: melanoma. The cannabis oil in question is known as PHEC-66, and it was developed by MGC Pharmaceuticals in Australia. In October 2023,…

Scientists have created a wood pulp hydrogel to strengthen anti-cancer medications and restore damaged cardiac tissue.

Now that they have created a novel hydrogel that can be utilised to repair damaged heart tissue and enhance cancer therapies, you can cure a broken heart on Valentine’s Day, according to SciTech Daily.

Dr Elisabeth Prince, a researcher in chemical engineering at the University of Waterloo, collaborated with scientists from Duke University and the University of Toronto to design a synthetic material that is made of wood pulp-derived cellulose nanocrystals. The material’s unique biomechanical qualities are recreated by engineering it to mimic the fibrous nanostructures and characteristics of human tissues.

This timelapse of future technology begins with 2 Starships, launched to resupply the International Space Station. But how far into the future do you want to go?

Tesla Bots will be sent to work on the Moon, and A.I. chat bots will guide people into dreams that they can control (lucid dreams). And what happens when humanity forms a deeper understanding of dark energy, worm holes, and black holes. What type of new technologies could this advanced knowledge develop? Could SpaceX launch 100 Artificial Intelligence Starships, spread across our Solar System and beyond into Interstellar space, working together to form a cosmic internet, creating the Encyclopedia of the Galaxy. Could Einstein’s equations lead to technologies in teleportation, and laboratory grown black holes.

Continue reading “Timelapse of Future Technology 2 (Sci-Fi Documentary)” »

Scientists have long thought of the fluid-filled sac around our lungs merely as a cushion from external damage. Turns out, it also houses potent virus-eating cells that rush into the lungs during flu infections.

Not to be confused with phages, which are viruses that infect bacteria, these cells are macrophages, immune cells produced in the body.

“The name macrophage means ‘big eater.’ They gobble up bacteria, viruses, cancer cells, and dying cells. Really, anything that looks foreign, they take it up and destroy it,” said UC Riverside virologist Juliet Morrison, who led the discovery team. “We were surprised to find them in the lungs because nobody has seen this before, that these cells go into the lung when there’s an infection.”

A research paper published in Nature Cancer details new insights into the role of efferocytosis—the burying of dead cells—in pancreatic cancer that spreads to the liver.

Liver metastasis occurs in 40–50% of people with pancreatic ductal adenosarcoma (PDAC), and there are currently no effective therapies to cure pancreatic cancer patients that have liver metastasis.

Led by University of Liverpool’s Professor Michael Schmid and colleagues, this study found PDAC metastases to show high levels of immunosuppressive macrophages, a type of white blood cell that promotes tumor growth.