Lifeboat Foundation

NEW YORK – A collaboration between researchers at Columbia and the Icahn School of Medicine is embarking on a project that will generate comprehensive atlases of entire human brains and all their 180+ billion cells. This kind of data can help uncover how the structure and organization of the brain give rise to behavior, emotion and cognition, in sickness and in health.

Credit: Hillman Lab/Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute.

Obesity and its consequences on overall health have become a serious global problem. However, very few substances or drugs can fight obesity. In a recent study, Japanese researchers investigated the anti-obesity effects of tocotrienols, a subtype of vitamin E. Experiments showed that tocotrienols significantly reduce the weight gained by mice on a high-fat diet, while also lowering “bad” cholesterol levels. The results pave the way to efficient treatments for obesity.

Over the past few decades, obesity has become increasingly common throughout the entire world. Since obesity often causes other diseases, including diabetes and various cardiovascular disorders, it represents an alarming social problem in both developed and developing countries. Although most of us know that a balanced diet and plenty of exercise are the best ways to prevent obesity, having drugs to effectively treat it would still come in handy if necessary.

Unfortunately, there are very few known substances or drugs that can help prevent or treat obesity and its dreaded secondary diseases. One problem is that some of the mechanisms of obesity-induced diseases are unclear. For example, there is some evidence showing that obesity increases oxidative stress (oxidation) in the body. In turn, some scientists suspect that increased oxidation is the reason why obesity paves the way for neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. Taking this into account, it might be helpful if potential drugs for treating obesity also had strong antioxidant functions.

Access to an online program that provides easily accessible, interactive, tailored healthy lifestyle and behavior change techniques is associated with better health-related quality of life among adult stroke survivors, according to new research from the University of Newcastle and Flinders University.

Stroke can lead to serious consequences for those that survive in terms of physical and cognitive disability. Improving lifestyle and health risk behaviors, including tobacco and alcohol use, physical activity, diet, depression, and anxiety, has the potential to significantly enhance stroke survivors’ quality of life.

Led by Dr. Ashleigh Guillaumier from the University of Newcastle and senior author Professor Billie Bonevski from Flinders University, the study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, undertook a randomized control trial to evaluate the online program Prevent 2nd Stroke (P2S), which encourages users to set goals and monitor progress across various health risk areas.

Cigarette smoking is overwhelmingly the main cause of lung cancer, yet only a minority of smokers develop the disease. A study led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and published online on April 11, 2022, in Nature Genetics suggests that some smokers may have robust mechanisms that protect them from lung cancer by limiting mutations. The findings could help identify those smokers who face an increased risk for the disease and therefore warrant especially close monitoring.

“This may prove to be an important step toward the prevention and early detection of lung cancer risk and away from the current herculean efforts needed to battle late-stage disease, where the majority of health expenditures and misery occur,” said Simon Spivack, M.D., M.P.H., a co-senior author of the study, professor of medicine, of epidemiology & population health, and of genetics at Einstein, and a pulmonologist at Montefiore Health System.

Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria — Dr. Erin Duffy, Ph.D., Chief of Research & Development, and Kevin Outterson, ESQ., Executive Director, CARB-X.

The Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X — https://carb-x.org/) is a global non-profit partnership accelerating antibacterial products to address drug-resistant bacteria, a leading cause of death around the world. 1.27 million deaths worldwide were attributed to resistant bacterial infections in 2019.

Continue reading “Dr. Erin Duffy, Ph.D. & Kevin Outterson, ESQ — Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (CARB-X)” »

“All too often we do not recognize the connection between the way we plan our cities and urban development and the health of the citizens who live in those communities. We must connect the dots.” — Dr. Mili Roy, Co-Chair, CAPE.

A physician’ for the environment group points out the connection between planning urban development and the health of its citizens.

People with type O-blood are considered “universal donors” because their blood doesn’t have any antigens or proteins, meaning anybody’s body will be able to accept it in an emergency.

But why are there different blood types? Researchers don’t fully know, but factors such as where someone’s ancestors are from and past infections which spurred protective mutations in the blood may have contributed to the diversity, according to Dr. Douglas Guggenheim, a hematologist with Penn Medicine. People with type O blood may get sicker with cholera, for example, while people with type A or B blood may be more likely to experience blood clotting issues. While our blood can’t keep up with the different biological or viral threats going around in real time, it may reflect what’s happened in the past.

“In short, it’s almost like the body has evolved around its environment in order to protect it as best as possible,” Guggenheim says.

For the first time ever, doctors have successfully transplanted a kidney from a pig to a human — and, they say, the organ functioned normally.

The procedure occurred between a genetically-altered pig and a brain dead human patient at NYU Langone Health, according to The New York Times. The pig was genetically engineered to grow a kidney that would be accepted by a human body. The organ was then attached to the patient’s blood vessels in the upper leg, outside of the abdomen, where the researchers observed it functioning normally.

“It was better than I think we even expected,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, told the NYT. Montgomery helped perform the procedure in September and told the paper that it “looked like any transplant I’ve ever done from a living donor. A lot of kidneys from deceased people don’t work right away, and take days or weeks to start. This worked immediately.”

Genentech’s Gregory Rippon, M.D., associates a few different phrases with the challenging nature of Alzheimer’s disease drug development: “cautious optimism,” “steady progress,” “an exercise in per | Genentech has been working on gantenerumab for 20 years, and, while it’s tempting to try to rush the clinical process, the Roche unit is slowly but surely following the evidence.