Lifeboat Foundation

More and more people under 50 have been diagnosed with bowel cancer in different parts of the world over the past few decades.

By Grace Wade

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📝 — Schulze, et al.

The present work reviews the strategies and technical approaches used to overcome the multilayered problems associated with large bone defect healing in long bones, with emphasis on research rooted in scaffold-guided tissue regeneration.

Continue reading “Scaffold Guided Bone Regeneration for the Treatment of Large Segmental Defects in Long Bones” »

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📝 The Many Faces of Immune Activation in HIV-1 Infection: A Multifactorial Interconnection — Mazzuti, et al.

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Continue reading “Patient-Derived Organoids: The Beginning of a New Era in Ovarian Cancer Disease Modeling and Drug Sensitivity Testing” »

A new mRNA therapy tested in mice may target the root cause of the potentially fatal pregnancy disorder preeclampsia. It’s yet to be tested in humans.

To predict your #longevity, you have two main options. You can rely on the routine tests and measurements your doctor likes to order for you, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, weight, and so on. Or you can go down a biohacking rabbit hole the way tech millionaire turned longevity guru Bryan Johnson did to live longer. Johnson’s obsessive self-measurement protocol involves tracking more than a hundred biomarkers, ranging from the telomere length in blood cells to the speed of his urine stream (which, at 25 milliliters per second, he reports, is in the 90th percentile of 40-year-olds).

Scientists crunched the numbers to come up with the single best predictor of how long you’ll live—and arrived at a surprisingly low-tech answer.

One year of treatment with the targeted drug olaparib improves long-term survival in women with high-risk, early-stage breast cancer with mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, new results from a major clinical trial show.

Ten years since the first patient was recruited, new findings from the phase III OlympiA trial – presented at San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) 2024 – show that adding olaparib to standard treatment cuts the risk of cancer coming back by 35 per cent, and the risk of women dying by 28 per cent.

After six years, 87.5 per cent of patients who were treated with the drug were still alive compared with 83.2 per cent of those who were given the placebo pills.

Continue reading “Major trial shows prolonged benefit of olaparib in early-stage inherited breast cancer” »

Large-scale protein and gene profiling have massively expanded the landscape of cancer-associated proteins and gene mutations, but it has been difficult to discern whether they play an active role in the disease or are innocent bystanders.

In a study published in Nature Cancer, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine revealed a powerful and unbiased machine learning-based approach called FunMap for assessing the role of cancer-associated mutations and understudied proteins, with broad implications for advancing cancer biology and informing therapeutic strategies.

“Gaining functional information on the genes and proteins associated with cancer is an important step toward better understanding the disease and identifying potential therapeutic targets,” said corresponding author Dr. Bing Zhang, professor of molecular and human genetics and part of the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center at Baylor.

Cells in the immune system don’t always fight; they often rest and wait for threats, like viruses or bacteria. When such threats emerge, the cells activate to defend the body. This delicate balance between rest and activation is crucial to our health—immune cells must be poised for activation to protect against threats, but if they’re overly active, autoimmune diseases can result.

But what controls this important balance?

In a new study published in Nature, scientists from Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF) focused on T cells—which serve a vital role in the immune system—and pinpointed how a network of different proteins controls rest and activation.

The arrival of Paxlovid in December 2021 marked another turning point in the COVID-19 pandemic—an effective antiviral that has since successfully treated millions. But like many antivirals before it, scientists know that at some point, Paxlovid is likely to lose some efficacy due to drug resistance. Researchers working to stay ahead of such emerging threats have now identified a wholly new way to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections—work that may have even broader implications.

In fact, a new study by the Tuschl laboratory introduces a proof-of-concept for a novel class of antivirals that would target a type of enzyme essential not just to SARS, but also many RNA viruses, including Ebola and dengue, as well as cytosolic-replicating DNA viruses, including Pox viruses. The findings may pave the way for a faster and more robust response to future pandemics.

“Nobody has found a way to inhibit this enzyme before,” says Thomas Tuschl, the F. M. Al Akl and Margaret Al Akl professor at Rockefeller. “Our work establishes cap methyl transferase enzymes as therapeutic targets and opens the door to many more antiviral developments against pathogens that until now we’ve had only limited tools to fight.”