Lifeboat Foundation

Regular infusions of an antibody that blocks the HIV binding site on human immune cells may have suppressed levels of HIV for up to four months in people undergoing a short-term pause in their antiretroviral therapy (ART) regimens, according to a report published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine. Results of the Phase 2, open-label study indicate the antibody, known as UB-421, was safe and did not induce the production of antibody-resistant HIV. The study was supported in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a component of the National Institutes of Health, and United Biopharma, Inc.

The study was conducted in Taiwan and led by Chang Yi Wang, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Chairperson of United BioPharma, Inc. Twenty-nine volunteers with well-controlled HIV discontinued their normal regimens of daily oral ART at the time of their first infusion or one week later, depending on their ART regimen. Fourteen study participants received eight regular weekly infusions of UB-421, while 15 received eight higher-dose infusions every other week. At the end of the 8- or 16-week treatment period, all volunteers restarted their previous ART regimen and were evaluated in follow-up visits up to eight weeks later. Apart from a single participant who discontinued the study because of a mild skin rash, volunteers in both groups maintained HIV suppression (plasma HIV RNA levels under 20 copies/mL) throughout the treatment period in the absence of ART.

Previous experimental infusions of broadly neutralizing antibodies, or bNAbs, have suppressed HIV for about two weeks by targeting proteins on the virus itself, but the rapid mutation rate of HIV induces antibody-resistant strains that render the treatment ineffective. UB-421 theoretically avoids this possibility by blocking a stable human protein that HIV uses to infect T cells. Indeed, resistance to UB-421 was not seen in this study. Because the small study did not include a comparator group receiving a placebo infusion, further studies have been planned in Taiwan and Thailand to evaluate the safety and efficacy of UB-421 as a treatment for HIV. In a related study, NIAID investigators currently are evaluating the safety of regular infusions of two highly potent bNAbs that may prevent the development of resistant HIV strains by targeting two distinct areas of the virus.

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A recent news topic that raised some eyebrows was the revelation that the human brain can literally reprogram itself. The brain is such a complex piece of hardware that there’s practically no way we’ll ever understand it without using a greater intelligence. This is one of the reasons why the emergence of artificial intelligence is so disruptive. Startups like Kernel are actually using AI to “read/write” long term memories directly from the brain. Amazing technological advances like these should adorn the front page of every news paper out there. Instead, we opt for mind-numbing “facts” like this:

As a nod to World Mental Health Day today, what we’d like to do is put together an exhaustive list of every single neurotech related company out there. To get this started, let’s turn towards an article published on the Crunchbase blog which lists 23 different neurotech companies (it’s actually 22 because one was an impostor). To that list, we then added 7 names from our own research. What we end up with is a list of 29 different neurotech companies (the companies we’ve already covered are linked to the relevant articles on this site below):

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Pig Brains Partly Revived By Scientists Hours After Animals Died : Shots — Health News The cells regained a startling amount of function, but the brains didn’t have activity linked with consciousness. Ethicists see challenges to assumptions about the irreversible nature of brain death.

There have been a number of efforts to increase genome diversity. In 2010, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wellcome Trust in London launched the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) initiative, which supports Africa-led genome research. And last year, the NIH started enrolment for the All of Us research programme, which plans to collect DNA and health data from hundreds of thousands of people of varying ethnicities in the United States.

Researchers from under-represented groups are making genomics more inclusive by working with communities that have been overlooked or abused.

• In the future, going to the doctor’s office might start to feel different, with you or your insurer paying a monthly fee for routine access to your doctor without paying a copay.
• It’s the model for Iora Health, a startup that works with “sponsors” — mainly employers or private health plans for the elderly (known as Medicare Advantage) — that cover the monthly fee. Iora also built out care teams of nurses and other health professionals that can help the doctors within the practice.
• We spoke with Iora’s CEO Rushika Fernandopulle about how he built a company that’s raised more than $250 million with plans to grow to 50 practices around the US by the end of 2019.
• Fernandopulle is one of Business Insider’s 10 people transforming healthcare.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

Fifteen years ago, Rushika Fernandopulle had a radical idea.

A primary care doctor by training, he had been treating patients in the standard, insurance-backed way. But he started to realize that wasn’t working, and insurance wasn’t covering what he wanted to do for patients.

CRISPR Research Moves Out Of Labs And Into Clinics Around The World : Shots — Health News This could be a crucial year for the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR as researchers start testing it in patients to treat diseases such as cancer, blindness and sickle cell disease.

Pets in a British animal hospital have been found to be harbouring potentially lethal drug-resistant bugs that could be transferred to owners.

Tests by Public Health England (PHE) revealed three cats a dog were colonised by bacteria able to fend off Linezolid, a “last-resort” antibiotic used to treat superbugs such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

No staff or owners are known to have been taken ill as a result, however the agency last night warned veterinary surgeries to enforce proper cleaning practices after this first discovery of its kind.

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Drug-resistant fungi are appearing around the globe, and some are known to cause illness in humans.