Researchers hope mobile devices can capture signs of imminent risk that a doctor’s questionnaire can’t.
BERKELEY, Calif., Aug. 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a new patent (U.S. 10,385,360) to the University of California (UC), University of Vienna, and Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier covering nucleic acid molecules encoding single-molecule guide RNAs, as well as CRISPR-Cas9 compositions comprising single-molecule guide RNAs or nucleic acid molecules encoding single-molecule guide RNAs.
Over the past six months, UC’s U.S. CRISPR-Cas9 portfolio has sharply increased, and to date includes 11 separate patents for methods and compositions related to the gene-editing technology. Looking ahead, UC anticipates at least six additional related patents issuing in the near future, bringing UC’s total portfolio to 17 patents and spanning various compositions and methods including targeting and editing genes in any setting, such as within plant, animal, and human cells. The portfolio also includes patents related to the modulation of transcription.
“The USPTO has continually acknowledged the Doudna-Charpentier team’s groundbreaking work,” said Eldora L. Ellison, Ph.D., lead patent strategist on CRISPR-Cas9 matters for UC and a Director at Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox. “True to UC’s mission as a leading public university, the patent granted today and others in its CRISPR-Cas9 portfolio will be applied for the betterment of society.”
After 10 years in remission, Derek Ruff’s cancer returned, this time as stage IV colon cancer. Despite aggressive rounds of chemotherapy, palliative radiotherapy and immunotherapy, his disease progressed. In February 2019, as part of a phase I clinical trial at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health, Ruff became the first patient in the world to be treated for cancer with a human-induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cell therapy called FT500.
Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health treats the first patient treated for cancer with a human-induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cell therapy called FT500. Dan Kaufman collaborated with Fate Therapeutics to bring the iPSC-derived natural killer cell cancer immunotherapy to patients.
The leaves of a variety of medicinal plants can stop the growth of breast, cervical, colon, leukemia, liver, ovarian, and uterine cancer, a new study shows.
Researchers found the effects in leaves of the bandicoot berry (Leea indica), South African leaf (Vernonia amygdalina), and simpleleaf chastetree (Vitex trifolia). Three other medicinal plants also demonstrated anti-cancer properties.
“Medicinal plants have been used for the treatment of diverse ailments since ancient times, but their anti-cancer properties have not been well studied,” says Koh Hwee Ling, associate professor from the National University of Singapore’s pharmacy department.
Circa 2017
Efficient intracellular delivery of biologically active macromolecules has been a challenging but important process for manipulating live cells for research and therapeutic purposes. There have been limited transfection techniques that can deliver multiple types of active molecules simultaneously into single-cells as well as different types of molecules into physically connected individual neighboring cells separately with high precision and low cytotoxicity. Here, a high frequency ultrasound-based remote intracellular delivery technique capable of delivery of multiple DNA plasmids, messenger RNAs, and recombinant proteins is developed to allow high spatiotemporal visualization and analysis of gene and protein expressions as well as single-cell gene editing using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated protein-9 nuclease (Cas9), a method called acoustic-transfection. Acoustic-transfection has advantages over typical sonoporation because acoustic-transfection utilizing ultra-high frequency ultrasound over 150 MHz can directly deliver gene and proteins into cytoplasm without microbubbles, which enables controlled and local intracellular delivery to acoustic-transfection technique. Acoustic-transfection was further demonstrated to deliver CRISPR-Cas9 systems to successfully modify and reprogram the genome of single live cells, providing the evidence of the acoustic-transfection technique for precise genome editing using CRISPR-Cas9.
In the 2015 movie “Chappie”, which is set in the near future, automated robots comprise a mechanised police force. An encounter between two rival criminal gangs severely damages the law enforcing robot (Agent 22). His creator Deon recommends dismantling and recycling the damaged police droids. However, criminals kidnap Deon and force him to upload human consciousness into the damaged robot to train it to rob banks. Chappie becomes the first robot with the human mind who can think and feel like a human. Later, in the movie when his creator Deon is dying, it’s Chappie’s turn to upload Deon’s consciousness into a spare robot through a neural helmet. Similarly, in the “Avatar” a 2009 Hollywood science fiction, a character in the film by name Grace connects with Eiwa, the collective consciousness of the planet and transfers her mind to her Avatar body, while another character Jake transfers his mind to his Avatar body rendering his human body lifeless.
Mind uploading is a process by which we relocate the mind, an assemblage of memories, personality, and attributes of a specific individual, from its original biological brain to an artificial computational substrate. Mind uploading is a central conceptual feature of many science fiction novels and films. For instance, Hanson’s book titled “The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth” is a 2016 nonfiction book which explores the implications of a future world when researchers have learned to copy humans onto computers, creating “ems,” or emulated people, who quickly come to outnumber the real ones.
Machines on display at World Robot Conference in China can fly, swim and even do brain surgery…
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It seems that billionaire biotech investor Jim Mellon is the flavor of the month as he continues the drive to create a rejuvenation biotech industry. Jim and his colleagues at Juvenescence have announced that they have secured another $100M for the company, and it will be used to invest and support the growth of promising biotech companies working in this field.
Juvenescence has a varied investment portfolio of companies that range in potential usefulness, depending on your point of view, and they mostly favor the more traditional small molecule drug approach. There are a few companies that are of particular interest.
By his late 20s, Moe had attained the young adult dream. A technology job paid for his studio apartment just blocks from the beach in Santa Barbara, California. Leisure time was crowded with close friends and hobbies, such as playing the guitar. He had even earned his pilot’s license. “There was nothing I could have complained about,” he says.
Yet Moe soon began a slide he couldn’t control. Insomnia struck, along with panic attacks. As the mild depression he’d experienced since childhood deepened, Moe’s life collapsed. He lost his job, abandoned his interests, and withdrew from his friends. “I lost the emotions that made me feel human,” Moe says. (He asked that this story not use his full name.)
Although many people with depression respond well to treatment, Moe wasn’t one of them. Now 37, he has tried antidepressant drugs and cycled through years of therapy. Moe has never attempted suicide, but he falls into a high-risk group: Though most people with depression don’t die by suicide, about 30% of those who don’t respond to multiple antidepressant drugs or therapy make at least one attempt. Moe was desperate for relief and fearful for his future. So when he heard about a clinical trial testing a new approach to treating depression at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, near his home, he signed up.
‘It was mesmerizing to watch her stop’: Four-year-old girl with a rare disease is captivated by a beauty advertisement featuring a model in a wheelchair — just like her own
