Lifeboat Foundation

“This inverse association was robust, consistently seen across current, past, and never smokers, as well as men, women, and individuals with different backgrounds,” she adds.

Shu says the health benefits may be rooted in their prebiotic (nondigestible food that promotes growth of beneficial microorganisms in the intestines) and probiotic properties. The properties may independently or synergistically modulate gut microbiota in a beneficial way.

The research appears in JAMA Oncology. Additional coauthors are from Seoul National University and Vanderbilt.

Last week, the BBC reported on the plight of axolotls in Mexico City, which are under threat of extinction. [1] The risk to these creatures is made doubly concerning when you consider their incredible ability to regenerate and apparent immunity to cancer, which is of great interest to scientists and companies working in the Longevity sector. One such company is Bioquark, a Philadelphia-based life sciences company that is working on the development of combinatorial biologics for the rejuvenation and repair of human organs and tissues. Among its clinical plans, it lists the development of therapeutic products for cancer reversion, organ repair and regeneration, and even brain death resuscitation. Nothing major then!

Bioquark has developed a novel combinatorial biologic called BQ-A, which mimics the regulatory biochemistry of the living human egg (oocyte) immediately following fertilization. While ooplasm-based reprogramming has been studied in experiments such as in-vitro fertilization and cloning, Bioquark claims it is the first company to apply it to somatic tissue in mammals.

We spoke with Bioquark’s CEO, Ira Pastor, a 30-year veteran of the pharmaceutical industry, to find out more about the company and where it’s headed.

Statistically, it’s unlikely that most of us will ever reach our 110th birthday, so scientists are fascinated by those few that do. In a new study, researchers looked at the immune systems of people who have hit the milestone, and found that they have a high number of a particular type of immune cell that’s rare even in healthy, younger people.

Even in our world of modern medicine, supercentenarians (people over the age of 110) are extremely rare, with estimates saying there are less than 1,000 such people worldwide. Perhaps not surprisingly, previous studies have shown that people who make it to 110 years old generally seem to avoid illnesses like cancer or infections throughout their whole lifetimes.

So for the new study, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Science (IMS) and Keio University set out to examine the immune systems of supercentenarians and compare them to younger people. They took over 40,000 cells from seven supercentenarian subjects, and about 20,000 cells from five control subjects, aged in their 50s to 80s.

While Intermittent fasting may sound like another dieting craze, the practice of routinely not eating and drinking for short periods of time has shown again to lead to potentially better health outcomes.

In a new study by researchers at the Intermountain Healthcare Heart Institute in Salt Lake City, researchers have found that cardiac catheterization patients who practiced regular intermittent fasting lived longer than patients who don’t. In addition, the study found that patients who practice intermittent fasting are less likely to be diagnosed with heart failure.

“It’s another example of how we’re finding that regularly fasting can lead to better health outcomes and longer lives,” said Benjamin Horne, Ph.D., principal investigator of the study and director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology at the Intermountain Healthcare Heart Institute.

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have developed a technique to operate on dying patients by putting them in a state of suspended animation.

You found the Chris Beat Cancer blog! I created this resource to help you heal or prevent cancer holistically. Welcome to the Chris Beat Cancer family!

Synthetic protocells can be made to move toward and away from chemical signals, an important step for the development of new drug-delivery systems that could target specific locations in the body. By coating the surface of the protocells with enzymes—proteins that catalyze chemical reactions—a team of researchers at Penn State was able to control the direction of the protocell’s movement in a chemical gradient in a microfluidic device. A paper describing the research appears November 18, 2019 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“The futuristic vision is to have drugs delivered by tiny ‘bots’ that can transport the drug to the specific location where it is needed,” said Ayusman Sen, the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Chemistry at Penn State and the leader of the research team. “Currently, if you take an antibiotic for an infection in your leg, it diffuses throughout your entire body. So, you have to take a higher dose in order to get enough of the antibiotic to your leg where it is needed. If we can control the directional movement of a drug-delivery system, we not only reduce the amount of the drug required but also can increase its speed of delivery.”

One way to address controlling direction is for the drug-delivery system to recognize and move towards specific chemical signals emanating from the infection site, a phenomenon called chemotaxis. Many organisms use chemotaxis as a survival strategy, to find food or escape toxins. Previous work had shown that enzymes undergo chemotactic movement because the reactions they catalyze produce energy that can be harnessed. However, most of that work had focused on positive chemotaxis, movement towards a chemical. Until now, little work had been done looking at negative chemotaxis. “Tunable” chemotaxis—the ability to control movement direction, towards and away from different chemical signals—had never been demonstrated.

At the start of this decade, the federal government called out consumer DNA testing as a burgeoning scam industry. Little did we know how it would explode in popularity.

In 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published an investigative report that bashed consumer DNA test companies for misleading the public. It accused them of deceptively claiming their products could predict the odds of developing more than a dozen medical conditions; some even went as far to offer equally dubious dietary supplements. The report had followed a similar lambasting of the industry by the GAO in 2006.

New Scientist.

The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive.