Lifeboat Foundation

Dreaming about Immortality has a long history, almost as long as the failed quests to achieve it. And during all these years and years, the solutions for achieving immortality can fall in several categories. The first is to take some kind of “magic pill” – be it the fountain of youth, the elixir of life, the holy grail, till modern medicine of genetic engineering. After the magic “pills” proved to be a failure, the second attempt was through more creative endeavours, such as building a monastery, a temple, making a sculpture or painting, till nowadays when we talk about digital immortality and I guess soon about virtual immortality. And, of course, there were always the “party-spoilers”, the ones asking: why to be Immortal?

Humanity has changed in many ways, but the hope of the dream of Immortality remained and generation after generation, trying to find it in different ways or forms. So, keep with us as we travel alongside the deepest human dream, to see all (the failed) trials.

Say hello to artificial bacterium syn-3, now with “swimming” powers thanks to genetic tinkering.

Artificial intelligence would be used to detect changes in the vocals of each patient after a laryngectomy.

Researchers from Kaunas University of Technology Faculty of Informatics (KTU IF) and Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU) in Lithuania have created a new substitute voice evaluation index that can detect pathologies in patients’ voices more quickly and efficiently. Voice pathologies include a variety of disorders such as growths on the vocal cords, spasms, swelling or paralysis in the vocal cords.

AI could be used to determine changes in voice after laryngectomy.

Continue reading “Researchers use AI to assess patients’ vocals after surgery on the larynx” »

The solution to our carbon problem is floating in the oceans.

Phytoplankton are microscopic organisms (can be bacteria, algae, or plants) that perform photosynthesis in oceans and eliminate excess carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere. They sequester about 40 percent of the total carbon produced every year globally and, therefore, also play a major role in mitigating global warming.

Continue reading “Engineered nanoparticles can help phytoplankton kidnap the excess CO2 on Earth” »

A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Los Angeles, working with a colleague from Vilnius University, has found evidence of thousands of phages with DNA strands that should allow them to conduct gene editing on other viruses or bacteria. Their paper has been published in the open-access journal Cell.

In 2012, some of the researchers on this same team discovered that CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed using RNA to edit targeted DNA strands from other organisms (and won a Nobel prize for it). Their work emerged from findings that many types of bacteria use CRISPR-Cas systems to defend against viral attacks. Using such systems, bacteria can cut and remove strands of DNA from viruses and store them in their own genomes to combat the same viral strain should it attack again.

Since that time, researchers have found that some viruses have similar machinery, but it was deemed to be rare. In this new effort, the researchers sought to determine actual prevalence.

Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool grew up surrounded by scientific activities carried out at home by her mother—who went to university a few years after Tunyasuvunakool was born. One day a pendulum hung from a ceiling in her family’s home, Tunyasuvunakool’s mother standing next to it, timing the swings for a science assignment. Another day, fossil samples littered the dining table, her mother scrutinizing their patterns for a report. This early exposure to science imbued Tunyasuvunakool with the idea that science was fun and that having a career in science was an attainable goal. “From early on I was desperate to go to university and be a scientist,” she says.

Tunyasuvunakool fulfilled that ambition, studying math as an undergraduate, and computational biology as a graduate student. During her PhD work she helped create a model that captured various elements of the development of a soil-inhabiting roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans, a popular organism for both biologists and physicists to study. She also developed a love for programming, which, she says, lent itself naturally to a jump into software engineering. Today Tunyasuvunakool is part of the team behind DeepMind’s AlphaFold—a protein-structure-prediction tool. Physics Magazine spoke to her to find out more about this software, which recently won two of its makers a Breakthrough Prize, and about why she’s excited for the potential discoveries it could enable.

All interviews are edited for brevity and clarity.

Engineered immune cells, known as CAR T cells, have shown the world what personalized immunotherapies can do to fight blood cancers. Now, investigators have reported highly promising early results for CAR T therapy in a small set of patients with the autoimmune disease lupus. Penn Medicine CAR T pioneer Carl June, MD, and Daniel Baker, a doctoral student in Cell and Molecular Biology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, discuss this development in a commentary published today in Cell.

“We’ve always known that in principle, CAR T therapies could have broad applications, and it’s very encouraging to see early evidence that this promise is now being realized,” said June, who is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Penn Medicine and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center.

T cells are among the immune system’s most powerful weapons. They can bind to, and kill, other cells they recognize as valid targets, including virus-infected cells. CAR T cells are T cells that have been redirected, through genetic engineering, to efficiently kill specifically defined cell types.

A small human trial has tested CRISPR gene editing technology in the treatment of solid cancer tumors, including breast, colon, and lung cancer, with promising results.

A new technique has been added to the CRISPR gene-editing toolbox. Known as PASTE, the system uses virus enzymes to “drag-and-drop” large sections of DNA into a genome, which could help treat a range of genetic diseases.

The CRISPR system originated in bacteria, which used it as a defense mechanism against viruses that prey on them. Essentially, if a bacterium survived a viral infection, it would use CRISPR enzymes to snip out a small segment of the virus DNA, and use that to remind itself how to fight off future infections of that virus.

Over the past few decades, scientists adapted this system into a powerful tool for genetic engineering. The CRISPR system consists of an enzyme, usually one called Cas9, which cuts DNA, and a short RNA sequence that guides the system to make this cut in the right section of the genome. This can be used to snip out problematic genes, such as those that cause disease, and can substitute them with other, more beneficial genes. The problem is that this process involves breaking both strands of DNA, which can be difficult for the cell to patch back up as intended, leading to unintended alterations and higher risks of cancer in edited cells.