Lifeboat Foundation

Could advances in tech and medicine provide the key to finding solutions to some of humanity’s most devastating diseases?

A compound in beets that gives the vegetable its distinctive red color could eventually help slow the accumulation of misfolded proteins in the brain, a process that is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists say this discovery could lead to the development of drugs that could alleviate some of the long-term effects of the disease, the world’s leading cause of dementia.

A recent Stanford cancer study that cured 97 percent of mice from tumors has now moved on to soliciting human volunteers for a new cutting-edge medical trial.

The trial is part of a gathering wave of research into immunotherapy, a type of treatment that fights cancer by using the body’s immune system to attack tumors.

“Getting the immune system to fight cancer is one of the most recent developments in cancer,” Dr. Ronald Levy, a Stanford oncology professor who is leading the study, told SFGATE. “People need to know that this is in its early days and we are still looking for safety and looking to make this as good as it can be.”

Continue reading “Chemotherapy-free ‘cancer vaccine’ moves from mice to human trials at Stanford” »

A lzheimer’s sufferers could once again remember the faces of loved ones, or find their way back home, after scientists developed a way to boost memories.

In a groundbreaking pilot study, US researchers recorded memories as they were being formed and then later played them back into the brains of 10 patients.

They found that it increased memory performance by up to 37 per cent.

Continue reading “Alzheimer’s memories could be switched back on with implant” »

Research from Google Cloud finds that applying AI to medicine is tricky.

A class of antibiotics heralded as an essential future weapon against drug-resistant superbugs passed an important test. There’s now evidence that they can be used to treat serious infections in live animals (in vivo) without being toxic.

Researchers created simplified, synthetic versions of teixobactin, a protein produced by certain dirt-loving bacteria that was first discovered in 2015. They tested the teixobactin in lab mice whose eyes were infected with one of several germs, including antibiotic-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus. The most successful of these analogues was found to leave animal cells alone while still wiping out more than 99 percent of the bacteria in the infected eye.

The findings were published in January in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

Continue reading “An Experimental Superbug Killer Is a Tiny Step Closer to Saving Us From the Antibiotic Apocalypse” »

Scientists are increasingly betting their time and effort that the way to control the world is through proteins. Proteins are what makes life animated. They take information encoded in DNA and turn it into intricate three-dimensional structures, many of which act as tiny machines. Proteins work to ferry oxygen through the bloodstream, extract energy from food, fire neurons, and attack invaders. One can think of DNA as working in the service of the proteins, carrying the information on how, when and in what quantities to make them.

Living things make thousands of different proteins, but soon there could be many more, as scientists are starting to learn to design new ones from scratch with specific purposes in mind. Some are looking to design new proteins for drugs and vaccines, while others are seeking cleaner catalysts for the chemical industry and new materials.

David Baker, director for the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, compares protein design to the advent of custom tool-making. At some point, proto-humans went beyond merely finding uses for pieces of wood, rock or bone, and started designing tools to suit specific needs — from screwdrivers to sports cars.

Continue reading “Protein Engineering May Be the Future of Science” »

In an era of artificial eggs and Crispr, anyone could become a biological parent to the healthiest baby.

By Jessica Hamzelou

A newly discovered network of fluid-filled channels in the human body may be a previously-unknown organ, and it seems to help transport cancer cells around the body.

This discovery was made by chance, from routine endoscopies – a procedure that involves inserting a thin camera into a person’s gastrointestinal tract. Newer approaches enable doctors to use this procedure to get a microscopic look at the tissue inside a person’s gut at the same time, with some surprising results.

Continue reading “Newly-discovered human organ may help explain how cancer spreads” »