Lifeboat Foundation

Let’s imagine it’s mid flu season, and a stranger at the grocery store sneezes on you.

Wouldn’t it be great to know if you’re destined for weeks of sweats and chills; or if, by the grace of your immune system, you might just make it out unscathed?

Purvesh Khatri, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Stanford, has discovered a biomarker in the blood may be able to do just that. It’s a gene that codes for a protein that lives on the surface of a type of immune cell known as a “natural killer” cell. The findings of the study, published in Genome Medicine, have been in the works for about four years, and it’s the first time (to Khatri’s knowledge) that a biomarker for flu susceptibility has been identified.

Continue reading “Will you get sick next flu season? It may depend on how many natural killer cells you have” »

Scientists used stem cells to grow a miniature model of a Neanderthal’s brain for the first time. The tiny blob of neurons reveals what makes us different.

A team of researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Basel in Switzerland and Institut Universitaire de Technologie in France has that found that embryonic kidney cells engineered to produce insulin when exposed to caffeine were able to reduce glucose levels in mouse models. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their efforts and how well it worked in the mouse models.

People with diabetes suffer from higher than normal levels of glucose in the blood, which can lead to a host of health problems. Current treatments include drugs that make cells more sensitive to insulin, or injection of insulin to make more of it available to cells that need it. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a new way to get more insulin into the body when it is needed most.

Instead of adding insulin externally, the researchers engineered embryonic kidney cells to produce it—but only when they were exposed to caffeine. The team chose caffeine because it has been so extensively studied and because the majority of people consume caffeinated beverages, such as coffee and soft drinks. They point out that caffeine is also a substance that appears very rarely in other foods, making its ingestion easy to regulate. The engineered cells were covered with a material that protected them from the immune system and were then put into a device that was implanted into the abdomens of mice that had been engineered to have diabetes. The researchers note that glucose levels tend to spike after people (and mice) eat sugar or food material that the body converts to sucrose. Thus, the optimal time for giving the mice caffeine would be after eating.

Continue reading “Kidney cells engineered to produce insulin when caffeine is present in the body” »

A revolutionary new DNA tool could help take humanity a step closer to eternal life. The device (pictured) pioneers a new technique that makes it cheaper and easier to synthesise genes ‘overnight’, say scientists — a process that normally takes several days.

Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley said it could lead to ‘DNA printers’ in research labs that work like the 3D printers in many modern workshops.

Continue reading “Genetic tool could let scientists create new DNA ‘overnight’ that may help humans live forever” »

Humanity is made of individuals; preserving the life of individuals preserves humanity. Thus, life extension and the preservation of our species aren’t incompatible.

What is it that really matters: preserving individual lives or preserving humanity? Is it more important to grant individuals the option to live as long as they’d like in good health, or is it more important to ensure the preservation of our species? This sort of question isn’t unheard of in the context of discussions of pros and cons of rejuvenation biotechnology; at times, when presented with the possibility of indefinite lifespans, some people reply that focusing on the preservation of our species is more important. This observation is reminiscent of the “other priorities” objection, and one could respond to it in the same way. However, this issue is also worth examining from other angles.

Quick comeback: the two goals aren’t incompatible

Continue reading “Humanity first, or individuals first?” »

Companies like Eli Lilly & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline PLC are investing in automation with the hope of transforming drug discovery from an enterprise where humans do manual experiments to one where robots handle thousands of samples around the clock. This automation will be key to developing better therapies more efficiently, drug companies say, as research and development becomes more labor intensive amid the push toward more-tailored…

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Robert E. Litan introduces four solutions to concerns about automation’s impact on wages.

Eating foods high in salt is known to contribute to high blood pressure, but does that linear relationship extend to increased risk of cardiovascular disease and death? Recent cohort studies have contested that relationship, but a new study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and their colleagues using multiple measurements confirms it. The study suggests that an inaccurate way of estimating sodium intake may help account for the paradoxical findings of others.

“Sodium is notoriously hard to measure,” said Nancy Cook, ScD, a biostatistician in the Department of Medicine at BWH. “Sodium is hidden—you often don’t know how much of it you’re eating, which makes it hard to estimate how much a person has consumed from a dietary questionnaire. Sodium excretions are the best measure, but there are many ways of collecting those. In our work, we used multiple measures to get a more accurate picture.”

Sodium intake can be measured using a spot test to determine how much salt has been excreted in a person’s urine sample. However, sodium levels in urine can fluctuate throughout the day so an accurate measure of a person’s sodium intake on a given day requires a full 24-hour sample. In addition, sodium consumption may change from day to day, meaning that the best way to get a full picture of sodium intake is to take samples on multiple days.

Continue reading “Accurate measurements of sodium intake confirm relationship with mortality” »