You heard about reversing the epigenetic clock 2.5 years? Living drugs? CAR T cells? Fight cancer? Here ya go.
Vision Weekend is the annual member gathering of Foresight Institute, a non-profit for advancing beneficial technologies for the long-term flourishing of life.
Research led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has uncovered a new process that may help explain how Type 2 diabetes develops. In tests on live mice and human cells in the lab, the team found a new mechanism besides insulin resistance and high glucose levels that triggers pancreatic cells to begin overproducing insulin.
Type 2 diabetes is the form of the disease that’s usually a result of lifestyle choices, such as poor diet and not enough exercise. It involves a kind of vicious cycle of insulin – beta cells in the pancreas produce too much insulin, which causes the body to become resistant to it. That in turn means the beta cells could produce even more to compensate.
It was long thought that high glucose levels – most commonly caused by eating too much sugary and fatty foods – was the trigger for the beta cells to begin overproducing insulin. But it’s also been shown in the past that even beta cells isolated in a lab dish can over-secrete insulin, without glucose playing a part.
An Ontario woman who was part of a U.S. study on experimental spinal stimulators similar to the device implanted in a paralyzed Humboldt Broncos player in Thailand says the device should be tested in Canada where it is not approved for use.
Researchers from MIT have revealed the very first images of a human generated through a novel laser ultrasound imaging technique. Unlike conventional ultrasound, the new technique does not require any skin contact with the body, dramatically amplifying the range of uses for doctors in clinical environments.
A conventional ultrasound is one of the cheapest and easiest imaging methods clinicians currently have in their arsenal. Unlike X-ray or CT scans, an ultrasound does not involve harmful radiation, and unlike PET or MRI scans, there is no need for large expensive machines. Of course, ultrasound does have a number of limitations, from the need for significant bodily contact in the process of imaging, to a variability in imaging results.
A new non-contact ultrasound method involving lasers has now been effectively demonstrated by a team of researchers from MIT. The challenge in developing the new method has been figuring out a way to use a laser to produce sound waves. Traditional ultrasound uses sound waves to penetrate a human body and bounce back off different tissues. Light, of course, cannot penetrate a human body as deeply as sound.
Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.
Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.
Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.
Novartis is offering a $250,000 prize to fund development of pioneering innovation with great potential in advancing Assistive Tech for Multiple Sclerosis. Applications will be accepted until January 10, 2020, and the winners will be announced during a panel discussion among experts in the field at SXSW in Austin, TX.
There’s no sugar coating it—diabetes is shaping up to become one of the greatest health challenges in modern times. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in eleven individuals suffers from diabetes, and the condition was the direct cause of 1.6 million deaths in 2016, based on the latest publicly available data. WHO has since designated diabetes as one of four priority noncommunicable diseases (alongside cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases) to be addressed by global health authorities.
Closer to home, more than 400,000 Singaporeans live with the diagnosis of diabetes, says the Ministry of Health. This constitutes ten percent of the local disease burden. Meanwhile, a separate study by the National University of Singapore projected that by 2050, Singapore would be home to one million diabetics if current trends continue. Wary of the insidious consequences of unchecked chronic illness, Singapore’s Health Minister Gan Kim Yong declared a “war on diabetes,” calling for a concerted national effort to prevent disease onset and better manage disease symptoms.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BLJkX_RGpk0
Last November, CHIPSA Hospital hosted a unique, first-of-its-kind event celebrating the lives of 22 late stage cancer survivors who, according to doctors, shouldn’t even be alive. Surrounded by world-renowned doctors, scientists, and researchers, these patients shared their inspiring stories of how they healed their terminal disease when conventional treatment had failed them.
CHIPSA is not an ordinary hospital. For one, we take patients who are typically told they have no other treatment options left. We then offer those patients innovative immunotherapies that aren’t available anywhere in the United States.
From insilico meddicine — the beginning of an AI healthcare revolution.
Poly Mamoshina on Machine Learning for small molecule drug discovery and the beginning of an AI healthcare revolution — interviewed at the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin 2019!
Continue reading “Polina Mamoshina — The Beginning of an AI Healthcare Revolution” »
Whenever I see my 10-year-old daughter brimming over with so much energy that she jumps up in the middle of supper to run around the table, I think to myself, “those young mitochondria.” Mitochondria are our cells’ energy dynamos.
