Lifeboat Foundation

When Heroes (now streaming on Peacock!) hit the airwaves in September of 2006, few characters were as immediately beloved as the appropriately named Hiro Nakamura. Granted the ability to manipulate space-time, Hiro could not only slow down, speed up, and stop time, he could also teleport from one place to another. That’s a useful skill if you need to get to a specific point in time and space to fight an evil brain surgeon or prevent the end of the world. It’s also useful if you want to build the quantum internet.

Researchers at QuTech — a collaboration between Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research — recently took a big step toward making that a reality. For the first time, they succeeded in sending quantum information between non-adjacent qubits on a rudimentary network. Their findings were published in the journal Nature.

While modern computers use bits, zeroes, and ones, to encode information, quantum computers us quantum bits or qubits. A qubit works in much the same way as a bit, except it’s able to hold both a 0 and a 1 at the same time, allowing for faster and more powerful computation. The trouble begins when you want to transmit that information to another location. Quantum computing has a communications problem.

Circa 2021 Immortality of the male genitalia in humans.

Cavernous nerve injury (CNI) is the main cause of erectile dysfunction (ED) following pelvic surgery. Our previous studies have demonstrated that transplantation of different sources of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) was able to alleviate ED induced by CNI in rat models. However, little is known about the therapeutic effects of human gingiva-derived MSCs (hGMSCs) in CNI ED rats. Herein, we injected the hGMSCs around the bilateral major pelvic ganglia (MPG) in a rat model of CNI and evaluated their efficacy. The results showed that treatment of hGMSCs could significantly promote the recovery of erectile function, enhance smooth muscle and endothelial content, restore neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) expression, and attenuate cell apoptosis in penile tissue. Moreover, penile fibrosis was significantly alleviated after hGMSC administration. In addition, potential mechanism exploration indicated that hGMSCs might exert its functions via skewed macrophage polarity from M1 toward M2 anti-inflammatory phenotype. In conclusion, this study found that transplantation of hGMSCs significantly improved CNI-related ED, which might provide new clues to evaluate their pre-clinical application.

There are many causes of erectile dysfunction (ED), which include psychological factors, neurological disorders (such as multiple sclerosis, temporal lobe epilepsy, and cavernous nerve injury), and vasculogenic disorders (such as atherosclerosis, hypertension, and diabetes mellitus). Neurogenic sexual dysfunction makes up about 10–19% in all causes of erectile dysfunction. Neurotic erectile dysfunction is one of most important complications after radical prostatectomy and rectectomy, owing to intraoperative damage of the pelvic cavernous nerve (CN). It affects not only the physical but also mental health in postoperative patients. Despite the improvement of nerve-sparing techniques, the incidence of neurotic ED still has no substantial improvement. The incidences of ED range from 75 to 80% after pelvic surgery (Schauer et al., 2015).

Circa 2021 Secretomes of human pluripotent stem cell-derived smooth muscle cell progenitors upregulate extracellular matrix metabolism in the lower urinary tract and vagina.

Adult mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been studied extensively for regenerative medicine; however, they have limited proliferation in vitro, and the long culture time induces cell senescence. MSCs also contribute to tissue repair through their paracrine function. In this study, we sought to examine the paracrine effects of human smooth muscle cell progenitors (pSMC) on the urethra and adjacent vagina of stress urinary incontinence rodents. We use human pluripotent stem cell (PSC) lines to derive pSMCs to overcome the issue of decreased proliferation in tissue culture and to obtain a homogenous cell population.

Three human PSC lines were differentiated into pSMCs. The conditioned medium (CM) from pSMC culture, which contain pSMC secretomes, was harvested. To examine the effect of the CM on the extracellular matrix of the lower urinary tract, human bladder smooth muscle cells (bSMCs) and vaginal fibroblasts were treated with pSMC-CM in vitro. Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) was induced in rats by surgical injury of the urethra and adjacent vagina. SUI rats were treated with pSMC-CM and monitored for 5 weeks. Urethral pressure testing was performed prior to euthanasia, and tissues were harvested for PCR, Western blot, and histological staining. Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA test and Student t test were used for statistical comparisons.

Continue reading “Secretomes of human pluripotent stem cell-derived smooth muscle cell progenitors upregulate extracellular matrix metabolism in the lower urinary tract and vagina & Therapy” »

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In what appears to be a very promising breakthrough for the treatment of rectal cancer, a small drug trial conducted in the US found every patient treated in the experiment had their cancer successfully go into remission.

Continue reading “Every Single Patient in This Small Experimental Drug Trial Saw Their Cancer Disappear” »

Promising. Very early yet, but promising nonetheless.

It was a small trial, just 18 rectal cancer patients, every one of whom took the same drug.

But the results were astonishing. The cancer vanished in every single patient, undetectable by physical exam; endoscopy; positron emission tomography, or PET scans; or MRI scans.

Continue reading “A Cancer Trial’s Unexpected Result: Remission in Every Patient” »

(CNN)A weekly dose of a medication recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat type 2 diabetes may help adults without diabetes lose weight as well, a new study found.

A recently approved drug for diabetes that helped users lose weight was also tested on overweight people without diabetes, with “impressive” results that rival weight loss surgery, experts say.

Researchers built a 3D model and tested it on young mice who were not yet capable of producing sperm – and after 5–7 weeks, sperm cells in the process of developing were discovered in the model, marking the success of the experiment.

“This system may also serve as an innovative platform for examining the effect of drugs and toxins on male fertility” Prof. Mahmoud Huleihel, BGU’s Faculty of Health Sciences

“This study opens up a new horizon in the process of creating sperm cells in a culture,” says study co-author Prof. Mahmoud Huleihel from BGU’s Faculty of Health Sciences. “It enables the implementation of microfluidic-based technologies in future therapeutic strategies for infertile men and in the preservation of fertility for children undergoing aggressive chemotherapy/radiotherapy treatments that may impair their fertility in puberty.”

Instead of deleting genes, epigenetic editing modulates their activity. A new paper tests if it’s able to undo a genetic effect of early alcohol exposure.

Neuropathic pain may result from neuron damage that triggers the production of the “wrong” neurotransmitter. Gene therapy fixes this in mice.