Lifeboat Foundation

One of the biggest challenges of researching organs in vivo (or as part of an entire, living organism) is that there is little room for error. Finding treatment for a patient’s kidney, intestine, heart, or any organ must be done carefully; if anything goes wrong, it’s the person’s life on the line. Enter the organoid.

First fully realized and developed in the early 2010s, an organoid is a miniaturized and simplified version of an organ produced in vitro (or outside the entire organism: on their own). The organoid has significant use for researchers as it can be grown, researched, then recreated if any treatments cause tissue harm. Isolating the treatments to an in vitro organ gives researchers flexibility; they can focus entirely on targeted treatments without worrying about harming a living patient.

One of the most significant scientific advances of the last ten years, organoids have revolutionized research across several fields, and continue to grow more advanced and helpful year over year. So, what are these microscopic powerhouses, exactly?

Plus a monkey who took a selfie and ignited a years-long legal battle and crow pooping antics, and more weird things we learned this week.

A team of scientists took a bunch of macaque monkeys, made them into alcoholics, and then successfully weaned them off the sauce after injecting their brains with a special gene — an experiment, detailed in a new paper published in Nature Medicine, that could potentially provide a compelling new treatment for addiction.

“Drinking went down to almost zero,” Oregon Health and Science University professor and co-author Kathleen Grant told The Guardian. “For months on end, these animals would choose to drink water and just avoid drinking alcohol altogether.”

The researchers set out with the premise that continued alcohol use causes changes to neurons and hampers the dopamine “reward circuitry” in the brain.

Since this book is about what I consider intellectual subject matter, I think it’s relevant to keep brains in top shape and thought it would be important to share this. You probably know about this sort of thing but I didn’t know the specific nutrients needed and what was lacking in people with Alzheimer’s. Best wishes.

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease estimated to affect 6 million Americans and 33 million people worldwide. Large numbers of those affected have not yet been diagnosed.

A new study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease by a Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine faculty member shows that brain levels of dietary lutein, zeaxanthin, lycopene, and vitamin E in those with Alzheimer’s disease are half those in normal brains. Higher dietary levels of lutein and zeaxanthin have been strongly linked to better cognitive functions and lower risk for dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

Continue reading “Brains with Alzheimer’s disease have subnormal levels of important dietary antioxidants” »

Testing the efficacy of a vaccine candidate is typically a long process, with the immune response of an animal model taking around two months.

A multi-institution team, led by Matt DeLisa, the William L. Lewis Professor in the Smith School of Chemical Biomolecular Engineering, at Cornell Engineering, is developing a method that is more than an order of magnitude faster.

Using a biomaterials-based organoid, developed in the lab of former Cornell professor Ankur Singh, now at the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the team was able to assess the strength of the immune response in just days.

Plans are already under way to roll it out for the public sector too by the end of the year. With a 2–3 million dose production capacity, a single dose of the two-dose vial is priced at Rs 2,000 currently. Vaccine effective against high risk types of the cancer-causing virus, say oncologists.

The Japanese have created an uncanny AI model that can estimate your true age from the looks of your chest X-ray. It can help doctors in the early detection of chronic disorders.

Have you ever wondered why some people look much older than their chronological age? A new study from Japan’s Osaka Metropolitan University (OMU) suggests this could be a sign of a disease they don’t know yet.

Continue reading “AI age teller: Using chest X-ray to tell your age” »

A research team co-led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has recently made a significant advancement in spinal cord injury treatment by using genetically-modified human neural stem cells (hNSCs).

They found that specifically modulating a gene expression to a certain level in hNSCs can effectively promote the reconstruction of damaged neural circuits and restore locomotor functions, offering great potential for new therapeutic opportunities for patients with spinal cord injury. The findings were published in the journal Advanced Science under the title “Transplanting Human Neural Stem Cells with ≈50% Reduction of SOX9 Gene Dosage Promotes Tissue Repair and Functional Recovery from Severe Spinal Cord Injury.”

Traumatic spinal cord injury is a devastating condition that commonly results from accidents such as falls, car crashes or sport-related injuries.

What if “looking your age” refers not to your face, but to your chest? Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have developed an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model that utilizes chest radiographs to accurately estimate a patient’s chronological age. More importantly, when there is a disparity, it can signal a correlation with chronic disease.

These findings mark a leap in medical imaging, paving the way for improved early disease detection and intervention. The results are published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity.

The research team, led by graduate student Yasuhito Mitsuyama and Dr. Daiju Ueda from the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka Metropolitan University, first constructed a deep learning-based AI model to estimate age from chest radiographs of healthy individuals.