Lifeboat Foundation

Cardiff University study is ‘major step forward’ in hunt for developmental origins of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

Scientists from Cardiff University have discovered new links between the breakdown in brain cell development and the risk of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

Genetic risk factors are known to disrupt brain development in a number of these disorders, but little is known about which aspects of this process are affected.

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3D printed lab meat, and plant based meats will be more widespread in our future. Would you eat stem cell 3D printed lab meat or plant based meat? Why or why not? What are the differences between natural vs unnatural. Growing up in Texas I know most Texans frown on it, as BBQ is a religion. Is 3D printing meat sustainable\.

Whether it comes from a plant or the cells of an animal, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the meat of the future will probably not be coming from the flesh of slaughtered animals. Instead, whether made from plants or cells, it will be formed into ‘meat’ by a 3D printer. In September of 2021, a Japanese team of researchers at the University of Osaka announced that they had 3D printed Wagyu beef. Beef connoisseurs will recognize the name; Wagyu beef is prized (and suitably priced) for its flavor and fat marbling. Legends abound about the cows such beef derives from, how they are allegedly coddled and massaged, fed a special diet that includes beer — but much of those tales are either exaggerated or pure urban legend. As Joe Heitzeberg, the co-founder and CEO of Crowd Cow explains, There are four breeds native to Japan. Of those four breeds, one of the breeds is genetically unique. It has a genetic predisposition to create this crazy marbling of fat on the inside of muscle tissue. No other livestock does that. The researchers at the University of Osaka used two different types of stem cells from Wagyu cows to create cultured meat, growing living animal cells onto some type of matrix where they are then incubated and grown into animal tissue that has never been part of a living animal. There are currently no reports on the taste of the cultured Wagyu beef but we can assume it’s ‘good’ and given a little time, the technology should be able to produce excellent Wagyu cultured meat — at what price, however, is another big question mark. But there’s another simpler solution that could be a better meat replacement than cultured meat, as even meat grown from stem cells still contains cholesterol and some of the negative health concerns associated with animal protein. Plant-based imitation meat is also being created with 3D printers, and the results are surprising even hardcore meat lovers.

Continue reading “Staking a Claim on the Steak of Tomorrow: 3D Printing Tech is Making ‘Meat’” »

In a first, U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient.

Unusual opportunity

Last week’s procedure marks the first time that a pig organ has been transplanted into a human who has a chance to survive and recover. In 2021, surgeons at New York University Langone Health transplanted kidneys from the same line of genetically modified pigs into two legally dead people with no discernible brain function. The organs were not rejected, and functioned normally while the deceased recipients were sustained on ventilators.

Continue reading “First pig-to-human heart transplant: what can scientists learn?” »

Gene editing approaches promise to treat a range of diseases, but delivering editing agents to cells in animal models and humans safely and efficiently has proven challenging. Now, researchers led by a team at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have developed a way to get gene editing proteins inside cells in animal models with high enough efficiency to show therapeutic benefit.

In new work published in Cell, the team shows how they have engineered virus-like particles to deliver base editors — proteins that make programmable single-letter changes in DNA — and CRISPR-Cas9 nuclease, a protein that cuts DNA at targeted sites in the genome. In collaboration with ​​research teams led by Krzysztof Palczewski at the University of California, Irvine, and Kiran Musunuru at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the team used their particles, called engineered virus-like particles (eVLPs), to disable a gene in mice that can be associated with high cholesterol levels, and partially restored visual function to mice harboring a mutation that causes genetic blindness.

Researchers have developed virus-like particles that deliver therapeutic levels of protein to animal models of disease.

Continue reading “Engineered particles efficiently deliver gene editing proteins to cells in mice” »

In a world medical first, a 57-year-old patient with terminal heart disease received a successful transplant of a genetically-modified pig heart and is still doing well four days later.

A study published by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago describes a new method for analyzing pyroptosis–the process of cell death that is usually caused by infections and results in excess inflammation in the body–and shows that process, long thought to be irreversible once initiated, can in fact be halted and controlled.

The discovery, which is reported in Nature Communications, means that scientists have a new way to study diseases that are related to malfunctioning cell death processes, like some cancers, and infections that can be complicated by out-of-control inflammation caused by the process. These infections include sepsis, for example, and acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is among the major complications of COVID-19 illness.

Pyroptosis is a series of biochemical reactions that uses gasdermin, a protein, to open large pores in the cell membrane and destabilize the cell. To understand more about this process, the UIC researchers designed an “optogenetic” gasdermin by genetically engineering the protein to respond to light.

Continue reading “Scientists uncover new information about cellular death process, previously thought to be irreversible” »

When scientists discovered DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

Houston, TX — Oct 8, 2020 - In a letter published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, a team of physicians from Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, and the University of California, San Francisco, describe a remarkable case of a Type 1 diabetes (T1D) patient, who no longer needs insulin to maintain optimal blood sugar levels. The physicians employed a precision/personalized medicine approach to specifically target the underlying genetic mutation, which was the primary driver of this patient’s diabetes.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of a T1D patient who has experienced a complete reversal of insulin-dependence and we are excited by the prospect that that could be a viable therapeutic strategy for a subset of T1D patients” said corresponding author Dr. Lisa R. Forbes, deputy director for clinical services and community outreach for the Texas Children’s William T. Shearer Center for Human Immunobiology and assistant professor of Pediatrics, Immunology, Allergy and Retrovirology at Baylor.

T1D is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little to no insulin, a hormone that maintains sugar levels in the blood. Currently, the treatment options available to T1D patients consist of managing blood sugar levels with insulin, diet and exercise to prevent further complications.

A man with terminal heart disease is responding well three days after being given a genetically modified pig heart in a first-of-its-kind surgery, his doctors reported on Monday.
The surgery, performed by a team at the University of Maryland Medicine in the United States, is among the first to demonstrate the feasibility of a pig-to-human heart transplant, a field made possible by new gene editing tools.
If proven successful, scientists hope pig organs could help alleviate shortages of donor organs.
For David Bennett, a 57-year-old from Maryland, the heart transplant was his last option.

Al Jazeera’s Barbara Angopa reports.

Continue reading “US man recovering after ‘breakthrough’ pig heart transplant” »