Lifeboat Foundation

If you haven’t heard of the bionic pancreas, it’s likely you soon will. With diabetes on the rise and the demand for insulin therapies becoming a real pain point for the medical establishment, the need for innovative solutions has spiked. Back in April, we reported on the Do-It-Yourself Pancreas system, a closed-loop artificial pancreas scavenged from a Medtronic pump, Dexcom CGM, a Raspberry Pi, and CareLink USB. Now a fully bionic pancreas similar in design to the Do-It-Yourself model is being developed by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston University, with the goal of winning FDA approval. If it succeeds, this will likely be the first bionic organ to see widespread adoption.

Let’s examine some of the previous attempts at bionic organs to see if we can catch a glimpse of where things are heading and some of the societal repercussions that lay in wait. The holy grail of bionic organs is without question the human heart. Coronary artery disease being one of the principal causes of the death worldwide, a fully functioning bionic heart could radically change life expectancy and alter the demographic landscape.

The first bionic hearts, designed over 70 years ago, were plagued by problems that often resulted in thromboembolism and hemorrhage, and made this even more of a gamble than donor transplants. Recent technological advances, however — specifically the advent of bio-prosthetic materials that fool the human immune system into believing the bionic heart is an organic part of the body — could indicate a new era of artificial organs is upon us.

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Hydras, simple fresh-water animals, have the ability to live forever if kept in ideal conditions, a recent study shows.

The organisms are made mostly of stem cells that have the ability to continually divide, thus constantly renewing the body.

“The differentiated cells of the tentacles and the foot are constantly being pushed off the body and replaced with new cells migrating from the body column,” Daniel Martinez, a biologist at Pomona College, said in a statement.

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Death is a disease.

Diseases can and will be cured.

Do the math. wink

Continue reading “New genes associated with extreme longevity identified” »

A machine prototype called Farma can let you manufacture your daily prescription of drugs right in your own home. Designed by MIT Media Lab graduate Will Patrick, the concept tech features a green cylinder and uses blue-green algae that’s genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical drugs.

In the future, you might be able to skip the pharmacy and, instead, make your treatments along with your morning breakfast.

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Quoted from Richard Dawkins’ book “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”.The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (Official)

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Optogenetic laser light stimulation of the thalamus (credit: Jia Liu et al./eLife)

By flashing high-frequency (40 to 100 pulses per second) optogenetic lasers at the brain’s thalamus, scientists were able to wake up sleeping rats and cause widespread brain activity. In contrast, flashing the laser at 10 pulses per second suppressed the activity of the brain’s sensory cortex and caused rats to enter a seizure-like state of unconsciousness.

“We hope to use this knowledge to develop better treatments for brain injuries and other neurological disorders,” said Jin Hyung Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology, neurosurgery, and bioengineering at Stanford University, and a senior author of the study, published in the open-access journal eLIFE.

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We’re coming down the homestretch for 2015, and now is the time when most folks like to reflect on all of the things they’re thankful for. In the campus innovation space, that basically means MIT. Being one of the most technologically progressive universities in the world, MIT has the longstanding reputation of churning out life-changing innovations as if it were a cake walk.

This past year has been no different. Here are our picks of 5 inventions coming out of MIT that are sure to impact the world, making us very thankful to have the Cambridge-based university in our corner.

If everyone’s bodies were true to textbook anatomy, doctors’ jobs would be a breeze. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. So all patients going in for heart surgery will have slightly different nuances to their cardiac makeup. As you can imagine, these procedures present some high stakes, so it’s not great for surgeons to be surprised in the OR.

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Researchers in Japan have found that human aging may be able to be delayed or even reversed, at least at the most basic level of human cell lines. In the process, the scientists from the University of Tsukuba also found that regulation of two genes is related to how we age.

The new findings challenge one of the current popular theories of aging, that lays the blame for humans’ inevitable downhill slide with mutations that accumulate in our mitochondrial DNA over time. Mitochondrion are sometimes likened to a cellular “furnace” that produces energy through cellular respiration. Damage to the mitochondrial DNA results in changes or mutations in the DNA sequence that build up and are associated with familiar signs of aging like hair loss, osteoporosis and, of course, reduced lifespan.

So goes the theory, at least. But the Tsukuba researchers suggest that something else may be going on within our cells. Their research indicates that the issue may not be that mitochondrial DNA become damaged, but rather that genes get turned “off” or “on” over time. Most intriguing, the team led by Professor Jun-Ichi Hayashi was able to flip the switches on a few genes back to their youthful position, effectively reversing the aging process.

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Healthy living isn’t meaningless, but while all of us can make positive lifestyle modifications, genes play a massive role in longevity — or there would be no species variation. We’re still discovering exactly which genes provide a longevity boost and what they do, but we now know 7 variants could help give you an advantage.

The search for a longevity gene

Previous efforts to search out a ‘longevity gene’ have been largely unsuccessful, so researchers led by Stuart Kim at Stanford decided to focus on ‘bad’ gene variants this time — or more crucially a lack of them. They analysed 800 people over 100 and 5000 people over 90 and found that while many variants are common in the average person, possession of fewer ‘bad’ versions of 5 crucial genes was indeed associated with longevity. Many long-lived individuals are able to avoid chronic disease despite harmful lifestyle choices like smoking, and this could be one of the explanations. These confirmed 5 add to 2 already associated with longer lifespans.

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