Lifeboat Foundation

This new titanium heart has a mag lev inside to spin continuously and pump at the same rate as a normal heart.

Heart failure is a global epidemic affecting at least 26 million people worldwide, 6.2 million adults in the U.S., and is increasing in prevalence. Heart transplantations are reserved for those with severe heart failure and are limited to fewer than 6,000 procedures per year globally.

Consequently, the U.S. National Institutes of Health estimated that up to 100,000 patients could immediately benefit from mechanical circulatory support (MCS), and the European market is similarly sized. Without intervention, patients with severe HF have a bleak outlook. For these patients, drug therapy is a limited, relatively ineffective option. Although a heart transplant would meet their needs, only 6,000 donor hearts are available globally each year.

Continue reading “Replacing Hearts. Restoring Lives” »

For the first time, the fully mechanical heart made by BiVACOR, which uses the same technology as high-speed rail lines, has been implanted inside a human being. The feat marks a major step in keeping people alive as they wait for heart transplants.

The total artificial heart (TAH) was implanted as part of an early feasibility study overseen by the US Food and Drug Administration. According to a statement from the Texas Heart Institute where the implantation surgery was carried out, the heart “is a titanium-constructed biventricular rotary blood pump with a single moving part that utilizes a magnetically levitated rotor that pumps the blood and replaces both ventricles of a failing heart.”

BiVACOR, which has been working on the device since 2013, says that the advantage of using a magnetically levitated rotor to drive the device’s blood-circulating function is that there is no friction, which can be such a damaging force to machinery that scientists are looking at ways to reduce its effects. The device is by no means the first artificial heart to be used – the first successful implant took place in 1969 – but it is the first to employ this novel use of maglev technology.

Stretchy seaweed. reverse vending machines. qr-coded take-out boxes. to cure our addiction to disposable crap, we’ll all need to get a little loony.

Since 2020, the condition known as long COVID-19 has become a widespread disability affecting the health and quality of life of millions of people across the globe and costing economies billions of dollars in reduced productivity of employees and an overall drop in the work force.

The intense scientific effort that long COVID sparked has resulted in more than 24,000 scientific publications, making it the most researched health condition in any four years of recorded human history.

Long COVID is a term that describes the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These range from persistent respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath, to debilitating fatigue or brain fog that limits people’s ability to work, and conditions such as heart failure and diabetes, which are known to last a lifetime.

In a recent study published in Science Advances, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, used the nematode model Caenorhabditis elegans to determine whether the olfactory nervous system could non-autonomously control the mitochondrial unfolded protein response in response to cellular stress.

A critical part of maintaining a state of cellular homeostasis is coordinating responses to environmental stress across tissues. Substantial evidence now supports the fact that the central nervous system regulates stress across all tissues. Furthermore, cell non-autonomous induction of stress responses occurs in peripheral tissues when unfolded protein responses (UPR) in the mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum are activated in the neurons.

Stressed cells undergo misfolding or unfolding of proteins, and UPR transmits protein folding status information to the nucleus to enable cellular stress responses or induce apoptotic cell death. The non-autonomous control of cellular stress responses is believed to be essential for the organism to survive toxic environmental conditions.

According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is a top public health risk that was responsible for 1.27 million deaths across the globe in 2019. When repeatedly exposed to antibiotics, bacteria rapidly learn to adapt their genes to counteract the drugs—and share the genetic tweaks with their peers—rendering the drugs ineffective.

Superpowered bacteria also torpedo medical procedures—surgery, chemotherapy, C-sections—adding risk to life-saving therapies. With antibiotic resistance on the rise, there are very few new drugs in development. While studies in petri dishes have zeroed in on potent candidates, some of these also harm the body’s cells, leading to severe side effects.

What if there’s a way to retain their bacteria-fighting ability, but with fewer side effects? This month, researchers used AI to reengineer a toxic antibiotic. They made thousands of variants and screened for the ones that maintained their bug-killing abilities without harming human cells.

which is widely believed to be the root cause of many age-related diseases.

The study, published today in the journal npj Aging, raises the exciting possibility of a protective agent that could dampen age-related inflammation and restore normal immune function in older adults.

PEPITEM (Peptide Inhibitor of Trans-Endothelial Migration) was initially identified at the University of Birmingham in 2015. While the role of the PEPITEM pathway has already been demonstrated in immune-mediated diseases, this is the first data showing that PEPITEM has the potential to increase healthspan in an aging population.

We’re closer to a cure for HIV than ever before. This half hour, Scripps News examines the fight against a virus that has killed millions of people around the world in the last generation.

In 2023 there were nearly 40 million people living with HIV. Some 30.7 million of them receive antiretroviral treatment. Despite recent advances in preventing infections, more than a million people are expected to become newly infected in 2024. More than 600,000 will die of HIV/AIDS.

But a handful of people have now been cured, thanks to recent breakthroughs in treatment.

Creative Diagnostics provides expertise in antiviral (or antibacterial) assays, cell-based antiviral (or antibacterial) compound screening, and best in vivo model solutions to drive your projects to completion. We are a reliable partner for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.