Lifeboat Foundation

Singaporean scientists have developed a method for generating stem cells that only requires a single drop of blood.

For my Precision Medicine partners — nice.

Despite eclectic ways of delivering insulin to control blood glucose level in people with type 1 diabetes (T1D), no approach precisely replicates what happens in the body. Gene therapy may hold the answer.

T1D is usually autoimmune, with inherited risk factors such as certain HLA haplotypes contributing to, but not directly causing, the condition. A clever use of gene therapy is to commandeer liver cells to step in for the pancreatic beta cells that autoimmunity destroys.

Continue reading “Gene Therapy for Type 1 Diabetes: Preclinical Promise” »

Imagine this: you accidentally swallowed a battery (!), and to get it out, you need to take a pill that turns into a robot. Researchers from MIT, the University of Sheffield and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new kind of origami robot that transforms into a microsurgeon inside your stomach. They squished the accordion-like robot made of dried pig intestine inside a pill, which the stomach acid dissolves. A magnet embedded in the middle allows you or a medical practitioner to control the microsurgeon from the outside using another magnet. It also picks up the battery or other objects stuck inside your stomach.

This new design is a follow up to an older origami robot also developed by a team headed by MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus. It has a completely different design and propels itself by using its corners that can stick to the stomach’s surface. The team decided to focus on battery retrieval, because people swallow 3,500 button batteries in the US alone. While they can be digested normally, they sometimes burn people’s stomach and esophagus linings. This robot can easily fish them out of one’s organs before that happens. Besides origami surgeons, Rus-led teams created a plethora of other cool stuff in the past, including robots that can assemble themselves in the oven.

Continue reading “MIT’s tiny robot operates on your stomach from the inside” »

While CRISPR, nanobots and head transplants are making headlines as medical breakthroughs, a number of new technologies are also making progress tackling some of the toughest age-old diseases still plaguing millions of people in the poorest parts of the world.

In low income countries, over 75% of the population dies before the age of 70 due to infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, lung infections, tuberculosis, diarrheal diseases, malaria, and increasingly, cardiovascular diseases. Over a third of deaths in low income countries are among children under age 14 primarily due to pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, malaria and neonatal complications. In the developed world, those living in extreme poverty, such as homeless populations, also die on average at age 48.

Over the last year, artificial intelligence, robotics and biotechnology have all generated a number of new solutions that have the potential to dramatically reduce these problems.

Continue reading “Fighting Developing World Disease With AI, Robotics, and Biotech” »

Nice read.

At the beginning of the movie 50/50, Adam Lerner is diagnosed with neurofibrosarcoma, a cancer of the spine’s nerve tissue. Adam sits in his doctor’s office while the doctor rattles off the word several times, but Adam has no idea what it means, or if there’s anything wrong with him at all. Eventually, his doctor uses the word “cancer,” and Adam’s perspective goes blurry, the doctor’s voice drowned out by a high-pitched ringing.

Many people have had real experiences like this one. Cancer is still one of the scariest words you can hear in a diagnosis. And chances are, you know someone who has heard it—almost 40 percent of adults are diagnosed with some form of it during their lifetime. Every patient’s story is different, and they don’t all have a happy ending. But because of decades of research into how cancer works, patients diagnosed with cancer today have a much better chance of survival than ever before.

Continue reading “How The Meaning Of Cancer Has Changed” »

Gene expression is the process by which genetic information is used to produce proteins, which are essential for cells to function properly and fulfil their many purposes. It takes place in two distinctive steps: first the transcription, which takes place in the nucleus, then the translation, in the cytoplasm. Control of gene expression is vital for cells to produce the exact proteins that are needed at the right moment. Until now, gene transcription and translation into proteins were thought to be two independent processes. Today, microbiologists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg (Germany) provide additional evidence that these two processes are intrinsically related and show that a protein complex called Ccr4-Not plays a key role in gene expression by acting as a messenger between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. Published in Cell Reports, these results shed light on the very mechanisms governing gene expression, a process that controls the life and death of our cells.

Gene expression refers to the biochemical processes through which the information that is stored in our genes is read like an instruction book to produce proteins that will make our cells function properly. Until now, gene expression was thought to take place in two distinctive steps: first transcription, which takes place in the nucleus, then translation, in the cytoplasm. Today, research led by UNIGE and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory shows that transcription and translation are intrinsically related and continuously influence one another. To do so, a very efficient communication within the cell, between the nucleus and the cytoplasm, is essential. This dialogue is made possible by a protein complex called Ccr4-Not, which globally determines the cell translational capacity.

Gene expression: a two-way street

Martine Collart and her team from the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine discovered in 2014 that the Ccr4-Not complex enables the cytoplasm to provide information to the nucleus during translation. Today, they prove that it is a two way-street communication as the nucleus also communicates information to the cytoplasm at all stages of gene expression, thanks to Ccr4-Not. This complex acts as a messenger between the nucleus and the cytoplasm to ensure that both transcription and translation levels are well adapted. It is also able to enhance translation to compensate for transcriptional stress, thus ensuring that gene expression remains well-balanced.

Nice and interesting Gene Mutation Discovery.

A single defect in a gene that codes for a histone — a “spool” that wraps idle DNA — is linked to pediatric cancers in a study published in the journal Science.

“Unlike most cancers that require multiple hits, we found that this particular mutation can form a tumor all by itself,” says Peter W. Lewis, an assistant professor of biomolecular chemistry in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Continue reading “Gene regulatory mutation linked to rare childhood cancer” »

I remember years ago when researchers identified that families with high rates for severe allergies also had high rates of cancer. Today, we talk about cancer and immunology as an intertwined dependency. Just means we’re still understanding cancer, genetic mutations, and the trigger/s in causing cancer among families and individual.

Scientists say the NLCR5 gene allows cancer cells to escape the immune system. A test for the biomarker may predict how long a cancer patient can survive.

Hope for HIV patients.

In 2014, a team of researchers in the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University became the first to successfully eliminate the HIV-1 virus from cultured human cells. Fewer than two years later, the team has made further strides in its research by eliminating the virus from the genome of human T-cells using the specialized gene editing system they designed.

In a new study published in Scientific Reports, the researchers show that the method can both effectively and safely eliminate the virus from the DNA of human cells grown in culture.

Continue reading “Scientists prove effectiveness of gene editing system in eliminating HIV from DNA of CD4+ T-cells” »