Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: health – Page 292

Sanofi, GSK Pursue COVID-19 Vaccine Trials with $2.1B from “Warp Speed”

Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) will be awarded up to $2.1 billion by the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Defense (DoD) toward development and manufacturing of the recombinant protein-based COVID-19 vaccine being produced by the companies, they and the U.S. government said.

HHS and DoD are providing the funding as part of Operation Warp Speed—the program through which President Donald Trump’s administration has committed the nation to delivering 300 million vaccine doses protecting against SARS-CoV-2 by January 2021.

“The portfolio of vaccines being assembled for Operation Warp Speed increases the odds that we will have at least one safe, effective vaccine as soon as the end of this year,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar II stated.

Social bonds in adulthood don’t mediate early life trauma

When baboons experience trauma in early life, they have higher levels of stress hormones in adulthood—a potential marker of poor health—than their peers who don’t experience trauma, even if they have strong social relationships as adults, according to a study led by a University of Michigan researcher.

The study examined the links between childhood adversity, adult social relationships and glucocorticoid concentrations. The goal was to determine whether one of the reasons that baboons who experience early trauma live shorter, less healthy lives was because they fail to develop strong social relationships in adulthood, which could be beneficial to health.

U-M biological anthropologist Stacy Rosenbaum and her co-authors found that while early life adversity didn’t strongly affect baboons’ ability to have social relationships, any positive effect of those relationships was much smaller than the large negative effects of early life trauma.

Take action and join me in the fight against respiratory infections! Relative humidity of 40–60% in buildings will reduce respiratory infections and save lives

#COVID19: There is overwhelming scientific evidence that a mid-range air humidity has significant benefits for human health. It is very possible for us to be managing the indoor air quality of our public buildings in line with this evidence. The time has come for regulations on indoor air quality to include a humidity level of 40-60u0025RH. This is the optimal level for our respiratory immune system, and will reduce the spread of seasonal respiratory illnesses and their burden on society.nn

There is now overwhelming scientific evidence that a mid-range air humidity has significant benefits for human health. It is very possible for us to be managing the indoor air quality of our public buildings in line with this evidence. The time has come for regulations on indoor air quality to include a humidity level of 40–60%RH. This is the optimal level for our respiratory immune system, and will reduce the spread of seasonal respiratory illnesses and their burden on society.

I am calling on the World Health Organization to review the scientific evidence on humidity and health, and recommend a minimum lower limit of indoor humidity in public buildings to reduce respiratory infections.

Researchers discover treatment option for rare genetic disorder

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine used a novel genetic sequencing technology to identify the genetic cause of—and a treatment for—a previously unknown severe auto inflammatory syndrome affecting an 18-year-old girl since infancy.

The technology, tailored to the patient’s own genetic code at a single cell level, helped the researchers characterize an unknown mutation in a gene called JAK1 that caused the patient’s immune system to be permanently turned on, resulting in rashes over much of her skin, growth abnormalities, kidney failure, allergic hypersensitivities, and an unusual inflammatory condition throughout the digestive tract.

The study, led by Dusan Bogunovic, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Microbiology, and Pediatrics, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, faculty member of The Mindich Child Health and Development Institute and the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai, and Director of the Center for Inborn Errors of Immunity, was published in the August 3 issue of the journal Immunity. The discovery points toward new ways to study how genetic diseases manifest and presents a model of personalized diagnosis and treatment for patients with genetic diseases.

‘Smart Toilet’ Checks You for Diseases Like Cancer

A disease-detecting “precision health” toilet can sense multiple signs of illness through automated urine and stool analysis, according to a new study.

The “smart toilet” isn’t the kind that lifts its own lid in preparation for use; this toilet includes technology that can detect a range of disease markers in stool and urine, including those of some cancers, such as colorectal or urologic cancers.

The device could hold particular appeal for people genetically predisposed to certain conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, prostate cancer, or kidney failure, and want to keep on top of their health.

First Accuray CyberKnife M6 System Installed in Missouri

February 27, 2020 — Accuray Incorporated announced that Mercy Hospital St. Louis continues to demonstrate its commitment to improving patient outcomes with the installation of the first CyberKnife M6 System in Missouri at their state-of-the-art David C. Pratt Cancer Center. The next-generation CyberKnife System has been shown to deliver precise stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) treatments with ease, making it possible for the clinical team to expand access to one of the most advanced methods for administering radiation to more cancer patients.

SRS and SBRT are non-invasive forms of radiation therapy that use high doses of very targeted radiation to destroy tumors, in just a few treatment sessions (1 to 5). SRS is commonly used to treat conditions within the brain and spine, while SBRT is used for those tumors located outside these areas. The CyberKnife M6 System is equipped with sophisticated functionality that will streamline the creation of personalized treatment plans and reduce the time to deliver radiation treatments, enabling the Mercy St. Louis team to offer precision SRS and SBRT treatments to more patients each day.

The Mercy Hospital St. Louis team uses the most advanced radiotherapy technology to design and deliver an individualized treatment plan designed to help cancer patients take control of their disease and resume their lives. The hospital is part of the Mercy system, named one of the top five large U.S. health systems from 2016 to 2019 by IBM Watson Health. Mercy announced in 2018 that it intended to work with Accuray to enhance cancer care through advanced life-saving technology, including the CyberKnife System that was recently installed as well as Accuray Radixact Systems that will be installed at other Mercy hospitals.

How AI is uncovering the ‘dark matter of nutrition’

The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just transform how we work and communicate. It also accelerated the need for more proactive health measures for chronic health problems tied to diet. Such problems have emerged as a top risk factor for coronavirus and people with poor metabolic health accounted for half of COVID-19 hospitalizations in some regions around the world. The resulting high numbers led the authors of a report in The Lancet to issue a call for more resources to tackle metabolic health to avoid needless deaths.

Thankfully, new tools have been developed to offer comprehensive understanding of nutrition. This expertise and technology won’t just help us tackle metabolic health – it could help us finally fully realize the power of plants to improve health and wellness outcomes.

‘Drawn-on-skin’ electronics offer breakthrough in wearable monitors

A team of researchers led by Cunjiang Yu, Bill D. Cook Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, has developed a new form of electronics known as “drawn-on-skin electronics,” allowing multifunctional sensors and circuits to be drawn on the skin with an ink pen.

The advance, the researchers report in Nature Communications, allows for the collection of more precise, motion artifact-free health data, solving the long-standing problem of collecting precise biological data through a when the subject is in motion.

The imprecision may not be important when your FitBit registers 4,000 steps instead of 4,200, but sensors designed to check heart function, temperature and other physical signals must be accurate if they are to be used for diagnostics and treatment.

Encyclopedia Created to Detail the Inner Workings of the Human and Mouse Genomes

ENCODE Project’s third phase offers new insights into the organization and regulation of our genes and genome.

The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Project is a worldwide effort to understand how the human genome functions. With the completion of its latest phase, the ENCODE Project has added millions of candidate DNA “switches” from the human and mouse genomes that appear to regulate when and where genes are turned on, and a new registry that assigns a portion of these DNA switches to useful biological categories. The project also offers new visualization tools to assist in the use of ENCODE’s large datasets.

The project’s latest results were published in Nature, accompanied by 13 additional in-depth studies published in other major journals. ENCODE is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.