Lifeboat Foundation

Meet the Harvard genetics genius who says we can stop growing old today – even without futuristic drugs.

In regenerative medicine, scientists aim to significantly advance techniques that can control stem cell lineage commitment. For example, mechanical stimulation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) at the nanoscale can activate mechanotransduction pathways to stimulate osteogenesis (bone development) in 2-D and 3D culture. Such work can revolutionize bone graft procedures by creating graft material from autologous or allogenic sources of MSCs without chemically inducing the phenomenon. Due to increasing biomedical interest in such mechanical stimulation of cells for clinical use, both researchers and clinicians require a scalable bioreactor system to provide consistently reproducible results. In a new study now published on Scientific Reports, Paul Campsie and a team of multidisciplinary researchers at the departments of biomedical engineering, computing, physics, and molecular, cell and systems biology engineered a new bioreactor system to meet the existing requirements.

The new instrument contained a vibration plate for bioreactions, calibrated and optimized for nanometer vibrations at 1 kHz, a power supply unit to generate a 30 nm vibration amplitude and custom six-well cultureware for cell growth. The cultureware contained magnetic inserts to attach to the bioreactor’s magnetic vibration plate. They assessed osteogenic protein expression to confirm the differentiation of MSCs after initial biological experiments within the system. Campsie et al. conducted atomic force microscopy (AFM) of the 3D gel constructs to verify that strain hardening of the gel did not occur during vibrational stimulation. The results confirmed cell differentiation to be the result of nano-vibrational stimulations provided by the bioreactor alone.

The increasing incidence of skeletal injuries due to age-related conditions such as osteoporosis and osteoarthritis is a metric of the depleting quality of human life. The development of treatments for increased bone density or fracture healing are prime targets for the regenerative potential of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Researchers have demonstrated controlled osteogenesis (development of bones) of MSCs via mechanical stimulation using several methods, including passive and active strategies. Passive methods typically alter the substrate topography to influence the cell adhesion profile, while active methods include exposure to varied forces from external sources.

Researchers at Hefei University of Technology in China and various universities in Japan have recently developed a unique emotion sensing system that can recognize people’s emotions based on their body gestures. They presented this new AI- powered system, called EmoSense, in a paper pre-published on arXiv.

“In our daily life, we can clearly realize that body gestures contain rich mood expressions for emotion recognition,” Yantong Wang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Meanwhile, we can also find out that human body gestures affect wireless signals via shadowing and multi-path effects when we use antennas to detect behavior. Such signal effects usually form unique patterns or fingerprints in the temporal-frequency domain for different gestures.”

Wang and his colleagues observed that human body gestures can affect wireless signals, producing characteristic patterns that could be used for emotion recognition. This inspired them to develop a system that can identify these patterns, recognizing people’s emotions based on their physical movements.

In a study this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers describe how a cancer-linked version of the protein mitoNEET can close the primary gateways in the outer surface of mitochondria, the “power plants” that supply cells with chemical energy. These gateways, or “voltage-dependent anion channels” (VDACs), normally open and close to allow the passage of metabolites and other small molecules between mitochondria and the rest of the cell.

“The VDAC channel transports all types of metabolites between the cytosol and the mitochondria,” said study co-author José Onuchic, a physicist and co-director of Rice University’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP). “Dysfunction of this channel is involved in many diseases including cancer and fatty liver disease.”

Researchers have identified a link between traumatic brain injury and intestinal changes. A new study reports the intestinal changes may contribute to increased risk of developing infections and could worsen brain damage in TBI patients.

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s radical, alternative cancer treatment was suppressed by the FDA and Texas Medical Board, until his patients fought back. Watch more: https://bit.ly/2kRwW2e

MaraGen Aims to Detoxify the Body from Pathogens & Harmful Substances. It Is an Alternative Medicine for Incurable Diseases.

Cellular senescence, discovered in 1961 by Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead, is a state in which cells no longer perform their functions, instead emitting harmful chemicals that turn other cells senescent. Senescence is primarily caused by telomere shortening and DNA damage, and senescent cells are known to contribute to multiple diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and dementia.

One method of removing senescent cells is caloric restriction, which is a temporary reduction of food calories. This has been shown to be one of the most effective methods to decrease and slow the onset of aging phenotypes [1].

This is related to autophagy, which is the cell’s natural method of breaking down parts of itself when it doesn’t have immediate access to food [2]. Autophagy has been shown to both promote and prevent senescence. It removes damaged macromolecules or organelles, such as mitochondria, which would otherwise cause cellular senescence. However, some of the processes that cause autophagy cause cellular senescence as well [3].