Lifeboat Foundation

This review discusses generalist medical artificial intelligence, identifying potential applications and setting out specific technical capabilities and training datasets necessary to enable them, as well as highlighting challenges to its implementation.

In the last decade, we have witnessed biology bring us some incredible products and technologies: from mushroom-based packaging to animal-free hotdogs and mRNA vaccines that helped curb a global pandemic. The power of synthetic biology to transform our world cannot be overstated: this industry is projected to contribute to as much as a third of the global economic output by 2030, or nearly $30 trillion, and could impact almost every area of our lives, from the food we eat to the medicine we put in our bodies.

The leaders of this unstoppable bio revolution – many of whom you can meet at the SynBioBeta conference in Oakland, CA, on May 23–25 – are bringing the future closer every day through their ambitious vision, long-range strategy, and proactive oversight. These ten powerful women are shaping our world as company leaders, biosecurity experts, policymakers, and philanthropists focused on charting a new course to a more sustainable, equitable, clean, and safe future.

As an early pioneer in the high-throughput synthesis and sequencing of DNA, Emily Leproust has dedicated her life to democratizing gene synthesis to catapult the growth of synthetic biology applications from medicine, food, agriculture, and industrial chemicals to DNA data storage. She was one of the co-founders of Twist Bioscience in 2013 and is still leading the expanding company as CEO. To say that Twist’s silicon platform was a game-changer for the industry is an understatement. And it is no surprise that Leproust was recently honored with the BIO Rosalind Franklin Award for her work in the biobased economy and biotech innovation.

The procedure is a long, long way from being applicable to humans, the researchers stress. But their findings, published today in Nature Cardiovascular Research, reshape our understanding of the regenerative capabilities of the heart – and possibly other organs – and how they might be enhanced through preventive medical intervention.

“It’s a proof of concept,” says Tzahor, “and it points to new avenues of research that examine giving heart treatment not only after the damage happens, but from a preventive position that increases the capacity for recovery from an injury before the damage even occurs.”

In recent years, cancer therapies have often fallen short of expectations, with tumors developing resistance to medication. One such example is alpelisib, a drug approved for use in Switzerland as a treatment for advanced breast cancer.

However, a research group at the Department of Biomedicine of the University of Basel has made a breakthrough in understanding the reasons behind this resistance, publishing their findings in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.

For patients suffering from advanced and metastatic breast cancer, effective treatment options are limited. The PI3K signaling pathway is frequently overactive in breast cancer due to mutations that encourage tumor growth.

As long as people have been alive, they’ve wanted to stay alive. But unlike finding the fountain of youth or becoming a vampire, uploading your brain to a computer or the cloud might actually be possible. Theoretically, we already know how to do it, and Elon Musk is even trying a brain implant with Neuralink. But technically, we have a long way to go. We explain the main technological advancements that we’ll need to make whole brain emulation a reality.

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Continue reading “What It’ll Take To Upload Our Brains To A Computer” »

Until now, it was unclear as to whether drugs that clear amyloid, which accumulate in the brain during aging and accompany diseases such as Alzheimer’s, have any influence over cognitive decline.

Previous studies have aimed to find this out, but results have been inconclusive due to study designs, hard-to-interpret data, and other issues that muddy the waters. March 10-14th saw the 15th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases being held (virtually of course), where Dr. Mark Mintun of Eli Lilly presented data that, at least somewhat, affirmatively answers the question [1].

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease that affects millions of people worldwide. It is characterized by the accumulation of amyloid plaques and disordered protein fibers called tau tangles in the brain, which lead to cognitive impairment and dementia. Scientists have long been trying to understand the underlying mechanisms behind Alzheimer’s disease and find effective treatments for the condition.

Hoping to improve on those earlier efforts, Matthew Daugherty, a biochemist at the University of California San Diego, and colleagues used sophisticated computer software to trace the evolution of hundreds of human genes by searching for similar sequences in hundreds of other species. Genes that seemed to have appeared first in vertebrates and had no predecessors in earlier animals were good candidates for having jumped across from bacteria, particularly if they had counterparts in modern microbes. Among the dozens of potentially alien genes, one “blew me away,” Daugherty recalls.

The gene, called IRBP (for interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein), was already known to be important for seeing. The protein it encodes resides in the space between the retina and the retinal pigment epithelium, a thin layer of cells overlying the retina. In the vertebrate eye, when light hits a light-sensitive photoreceptor in the retina, vitamin A complexes become kinked, setting off an electrical pulse that activates the optic nerve. IRBP then shifts these molecules to the epithelium to be unkinked. Finally, it shuttles the restored molecules back to the photoreceptor. “IRBP,” Zhu explains, “is essential for the vision of all vertebrates.”

Vertebrate IRBP most closely resembles a class of bacterial genes called pepsidases, whose proteins recycle other proteins. Since IRBP is found in all vertebrates but generally not in their closest invertebrate relatives, Daugherty and his colleagues propose that more than 500 million years ago microbes transferred a pepsidase gene into an ancestor of all living vertebrates. Once the gene was in place, the protein’s recycling function was lost and the gene duplicated itself twice, explaining why IRBP has four copies of the original pepsidase DNA. Even in its microbial forebears, this protein may have had some ability to bind to light-sensing molecules, Daugherty suggests. Other mutations then completed its transformation into a molecule that could escape from cells and serve as a shuttle.

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