Lifeboat Foundation

As a survival mechanism, some tumors, particularly many solid tumors, have evolved to express the ligands capable of turning off the immune response. While immune regulation benefits us under normal conditions, any hindrance of the immune response in the presence of cancer can become detrimental. Understanding these biological processes has led to the development of a promising immunotherapeutic modality: the immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI). ICIs work by blocking the signals that dampen the immune response.

One prominent checkpoint pathway consists of programmed death 1 (PD1), located on immune cells, and programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1), expressed on tumor cells. The FDA has approved numerous ICIs to block the interaction of PD-1 and PD-L1 for patients with various solid tumors, including skin, lung, and liver cancers.

Predicting the patients most likely to benefit from PD-1/PD-L1 interventions remains a high priority. Depending on the type of cancer, different tests can predict a patient’s likelihood of responding to ICIs. In some cancers, a readout used to access ICI responsiveness is a patient’s tumor mutational burden (TMB), an estimate of how many mutations appear in the cancer genome. However, better predictive models could help identify more patients who could benefit from these therapies.

At just 40 years old, Kristen Fortney has spent more than half of her life thinking about the science of aging. But why?

“When I get asked this question I usually blame it on reading too much science fiction,” the CEO and co-founder of the clinical-stage biotech BioAge Labs said with a laugh. “My co-founder, Eric Morgen, and I have been talking about aging since high school.”

Every year, a huge number of people get sick and die from influenza (flu). The good news is, protecting yourself from flu is easy and safe. Just get your flu vaccine!

More information: https://www.who.int/health-topics/influenza-seasonal#tab=tab_1

Backed by Google Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners and more, Chroma Medicine announced the closing of a $135 million Series B financing Wednesday.

Researchers from Southwest University in China have constructed the entire chromosomal-scale genome assembly and complete spidroin gene set of the golden orb-weaving spider, Trichonephila clavata, known for its especially strong, golden-colored webs.

They attest that their work “Provides multidimensional data that significantly expand the knowledge of spider dragline silk generation…” and the researchers plan on using this new “molecular atlas” to better understand how spiders manufacture their silk.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the paper details the steps the researchers took, from wild spider capture to multiomic analysis, in revealing the interplay of genes within the spider’s major ampullate gland, the gland responsible for producing dragline silk.

A new RMIT-led international collaboration published in February has uncovered, for the first time, a distinct disorder-driven bosonic superconductor-insulator transition.

The discovery outlines a global picture of the giant anomalous Hall effect and reveals its correlation with the unconventional charge density wave in the AV₃Sb₅ kagome metal family, with potential applications in future ultra-low energy electronics.

Superconductors, which can transmit electricity without energy dissipation, hold great promise for the development of future low-energy electronics technologies, and are already applied in diverse fields such as hover trains and high-strength magnets (such as medical MRIs).

Call it naive, call it crazy, but I think we have a real chance to tackle aging in this century. And though it’s not easy — it’s very simple.

If you have seen the banner of this channel — it says it’s all. But in this video I go deeper into my personal story and motivation. This way I hope you can understand why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Continue reading “I Want You To Live to 150… Here’s Why & How” »

What if an AI could interpret your imagination, turning images in your mind’s eye into reality? While that sounds like a detail in a cyberpunk novel, researchers have now accomplished exactly this, according to a recently-published paper.

Researchers found that they could reconstruct high-resolution and highly accurate images from brain activity by using the popular Stable Diffusion image generation model, as outlined in a paper published in December. The authors wrote that unlike previous studies, they didn’t need to train or fine-tune the AI models to create these images.

The researchers—from the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences at Osaka University—said that they first predicted a latent representation, which is a model of the image’s data, from fMRI signals. Then, the model was processed and noise was added to it through the diffusion process. Finally, the researchers decoded text representations from fMRI signals within the higher visual cortex and used them as input to produce a final constructed image.

A team of engineers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has developed a tiny, flexible robotic arm that’s designed to 3D print material directly on the surface of organs inside a living person’s body.

The futuristic device acts just like an endoscope and can snake its way into a specific location inside the patient’s body to deliver layers of special biomaterial to reconstruct tissue, clean up wounds, and even make precise incisions — an amazing jack-of-all-trades they say could revolutionize certain types of surgery.