Lifeboat Foundation

Dr. Ann Marie Kimball (https://epi.washington.edu/faculty/kimball-ann-marie/) is a physician, epidemiologist and currently holds the roles of Associate Fellow at the international affairs think tank Chatham House, and Vice Chair, COVID 19 task force, at The Rotary Foundation / Rotary International.

Previously, Dr. Kimball served as a strategic advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation, supporting the strengthening and development of strategies for Ebola, post-Ebola, and health crisis response, including planning and guiding the formation of a regional disease surveillance network in collaboration with Connecting Organizations for Regional Disease Surveillance (CORDS).

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Balancing Risk and Cutting Edge Medical Innovation — Dr. Paul Offit, MD, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Paul A. Offit, MD, (https://www.paul-offit.com/) is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of virology and immunology, Co-Inventor of a landmark vaccine for the prevention of Rotavirus gastroenteritis, and holds multiple titles including — Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital Of Philadelphia (CHOP), Maurice R. Hilleman Chair of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics, Perelmann School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and Adjunct Associate Professor, The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology.

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An artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology rapidly diagnoses rare disorders in critically ill children with high accuracy, according to a report by scientists from University of Utah Health and Fabric Genomics, collaborators on a study led by Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. The benchmark finding, published in Genomic Medicine, foreshadows the next phase of medicine, where technology helps clinicians quickly determine the root cause of disease so they can give patients the right treatment sooner.

“This study is an exciting milestone demonstrating how rapid insights from AI-powered decision support technologies have the potential to significantly improve patient care,” says Mark Yandell, Ph.D., co-corresponding author on the paper. Yandell is a professor of human genetics and Edna Benning Presidential Endowed Chair at U of U Health, and a founding scientific advisor to Fabric.

Worldwide, about seven million infants are born with serious genetic disorders each year. For these children, life usually begins in intensive care. A handful of NICUs in the U.S., including at U of U Health, are now searching for genetic causes of disease by reading, or sequencing, the three billion DNA letters that make up the human genome. While it takes hours to sequence the whole genome, it can take days or weeks of computational and manual analysis to diagnose the illness.

Summary: Researchers have linked Fragile X and SHANK3 deletion syndrome, two disorders associated with autism, to specific microscopic walking patterns.

Source: Rutgers.

Rutgers researchers have linked the genetic disorders Fragile X and SHANK3 deletion syndrome – both linked to autism and health problems – to walking patterns by examining the microscopic movements of those wearing motion-sensored sneakers.

A team of researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Touchstone Diabetes Center have successfully used CRISPR gene editing to turn fat cells normally used for storage into energy-burning cells.

“It’s like flipping a switch. We removed the ‘brake’ on the energy burning pathway in fat cells by engineering a mutation that disrupts the interaction between a single pair of proteins,” said study leader Rana Gupta, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine. “Our research demonstrates that releasing this brake in fat cells can potentially help make existing diabetes medications much more effective.”

The research at UT Southwestern, ranked as one of the nation’s top 25 hospitals for diabetes and endocrinology care, is published in Genes and Development and supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Extreme heat can kill or cause long-term health problems – but for many unendurable temperatures are the new normal.

Extreme heat can also cause “leaky gut”, in which toxins and pathogenic bacteria to seep in to the blood, increasing the likelihood of infections, says Walter. It is almost possible to develop a kind of sepsis infection by being hot, he says. “Gut permeability seems to be a big, big problem.”

In a world-first, US surgeons have successfully transferred a kidney taken from a pig into a braindead human patient, in a major step towards using animal organs in human transplantations.

The team at NYU Langone Health performed the operation on a woman who was recently declared braindead, with the permission of her family. The sole object of the study, according to the lead surgeon Dr Robert Montgomery, was “to provide the first evidence that what appears to be promising results from non-human primates will translate into a good outcome in a human.”

One major obstacle in making xenotransplantation possible has been the rejection of organs by hosts. To overcome this, the team used an organ from a pig that had been genetically engineered in order to remove a sugar molecule known to play a significant role in rejection. The surgeons attached the kidney to large blood vessels outside of the recipient and monitored it for two days.

Integrated And Cross-Disciplinary Research Focused on Diagnosing, Treating And Curing Cancers — Dr. Antonio Giordano MD, PhD, President & Founder, Sbarro Health Research Organization.

Dr. Antonio Giordano, MD, Ph.D., (https://www.drantoniogiordano.com/) is President and Founder of the Sbarro Health Research Organization (https://www.shro.org/), which conducts research to diagnose, treat and cure cancer, but also has diversified into research beyond oncology, into the areas of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses.

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While the pandemic is still raging, the chaos of the past 18 months has calmed a bit, and the dust is starting to settle. Now the time has come for healthcare CIOs and other health IT leaders to look forward and plan their IT investments – shaped, in no small part, by the lessons of the recent past.