Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine this scenario: Annual physical examinations are supplemented by an affordable home diagnostic chip, allowing you to regularly monitor your baseline health with just a simple urine sample. Though outwardly you appear to be in good health, the device reveals a fluctuation in your biomarker profile, indicating the possible emergence of early stage cancer development or presence of a virus.

Diagnostic devices like a home pregnancy test have been around since the 1970s. It revolutionized a woman’s ability to find out if she was pregnant without having to wait for a doctor’s appointment to confirm her suspicions. The test relies on detecting a hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin, present in urine. But could detecting cancer, or a deadly virus, from a similar kind of sample and device be as simple and non-invasive?

Researchers estimate that driverless cars could, by midcentury, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent. Which means that, using the number of fatalities in 2013 as a baseline, self-driving cars could save 29,447 lives a year. In the United States alone, that’s nearly 300,000 fatalities prevented over the course of a decade, and 1.5 million lives saved in a half-century. For context: Anti-smoking efforts saved 8 million lives in the United States over a 50-year period.

The life-saving estimates for driverless cars are on par with the efficacy of modern vaccines, which save 42,000 lives for each U.S. birth cohort, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Globally, there are about 1.2 million traffic fatalities annually, according to the World Health Organization. Which means driverless cars are poised to save 10 million lives per decade—and 50 million lives around the world in half a century.

Continue reading “Will Uber’s Fleet of Self-Driving Cars Save Lives?” »

NASA’s Multigenerational Independent Colony for Extraterrestrial Habitation, Autonomy, and Behavior Health (MICEHAB) would give scientists the ability to study the effects of long-duration space exploration on mice.

Credit: NASA Langley Research Center

Tempol is a synthetic compound that can be used to lower stress, prevent oxidative damage, and improve heart disease and diabetes. Read more to find about this chemical antioxidant.

Contents.

In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a monster that is part lion, part goat and part snake. Far from reality, sure, but the idea of mixing and matching creatures is real — and has ethicists concerned.

That’s because last week, the National Institutes of Health proposed a new policy to allow funding for scientists who are creating chimeras — the non-mythological kind. In genetics, chimeras are organisms formed when human stem cells are combined with tissues of other animals, with the potential for creating human-animal hybrids.

Continue reading “The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?” »

With only 9 days left on the SENS cancer fundraiser here is an article from Fightaging! that explains why finding novel solutions to treating cancer is critical in the roadmap to longer healthier lives.

This year’s SENS rejuvenation research crowdfunding event puts the spotlight on the SENS Research Foundation’s cancer program. So far more than 300 people have donated, and more than $26,000 has been raised; with ten days left to go, it won’t take that much more of an effort to reach the same number of donors and the same level of support given to last year’s fundraiser, and which led to the success in that research program. As for all of the SENS research initiatives in the science of aging, the SENS Research Foundation’s work on cancer aims to support a big, bold goal in medicine: to build a single type of therapy that can be used to effectively treat all forms of cancer. When achieved, that will greatly increase the pace of progress towards control of cancer, the goal of finally ending cancer as a threat to health. At present the cancer research community spends much of its time and funding on approaches that are highly specific to only one or only a few of the hundred of subtypes of cancer. That is no way to win any time soon, as even with the vast funding devoted to cancer research, there are just too many forms of cancer and too few researchers. What is needed is to change the strategy, to focus on approaches to the treatment of cancer that are no more expensive to develop, but that far more patients can benefit from.

The most promising approach to a universal cancer therapy is to block telomere lengthening in cancerous tissues. Telomeres are a part of the mechanism that limits cell division in all human cells other than stem cells, repeating DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes that shorten every time a cell divides. In order to achieve unfettered growth all cancers must bypass this limit by continually lengthening their telomeres, a goal that is achieved through mutations that allow cancer cells to use telomerase or the alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT) processes. If both telomerase and ALT can be blocked in cancer tissue, then the cancer will wither; this is such a fundamental piece of cellular machinery that there is no expectation that cancer cells could find a way around it. Block only one of these two methods of telomere lengthening, however, and the cancer will probably switch to use the other. This has been observed in mice.

Continue reading “Crowdfunding a Universal Cancer Treatment: Only a Few Days Left in the Fundraiser” »

The main goal of a tumour cell is, above all, to survive, even at the cost of damaging the health of the organism to which it belongs.

To do this, it is equipped with skills that healthy cells do not have, including the ability to continue surviving when glucose levels are very low.

This could be one of the reasons why widely-used anti-angiogenic agents often fail to eliminate cancer, no matter how much they starve it by hindering the development of the blood vessels that provide nutrients in general and glucose in particular.

Continue reading “Cancer cell survival without glucose illucidated” »

Posting for the friends who hasn’t heard about the US funding the new program to grow half human and half animal embryos. Part of the goal is to enable organs to be made available for transplants, etc…

The federal government is planning to lift a moratorium on funding of controversial experiments that use human stem cells to create animal embryos that are partly human.

The National Institutes of Health has unveiled a new policy to permit scientists to get federal money to make the embryos, known as chimeras, under certain carefully monitored conditions.

Continue reading “US Government gives go-ahead to research to grow part-animal part-human organs for transplants” »

The benefits of the technology for humans, while still largely hypothetical, are promising. The sensors could allow physicians to monitor the health of organs, create new therapies for neurological disorders, and help the physically impaired to control prosthetics.

While chips have been implanted in humans and other animals before, these sensors mark a significant improvement because they are small, wireless, batteryless, and could last in the body for years without degrading, said Michel Maharbiz, the associate professor who devised and studied the sensors alongside neuroscientist Jose Carmena.

“Hopefully the [tiny sensors] demonstrate a new direction for the field, and then you could build the consensus that’s needed to drive these forward,” Maharbiz said.

Continue reading “Engineers implanted tiny sensors in rats’ nerves and muscles. Are humans next?” »