Lifeboat Foundation

A UC Davis Health study found that a single dose of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), the vaccine for tuberculosis (TB), reduced liver tumor burden and extended the survival of mice with liver cancer. The study, published in Advanced Science, is the first to show the promising effects of the vaccine in treating liver cancer.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common type of liver cancer. It is also the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Current therapies include surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy and liver transplant. Yet, the therapy outcomes for liver cancer remain bleak.

BCG, the century-old TB vaccine, is derived from the live bacteria Mycobacterium bovis. It is considered safe and widely used around the world.

“South San Diego County is in a total state of emergency related to transboundary pollution, and this is a public health ticking time bomb,” Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre told ABC News. “We are living in conditions that nobody in this great nation should be living in.”

The Tijuana River – which has been classified as an impaired water body, according to the U.S. Clean Water Act — flows north for 120 miles from Mexico to California before reaching the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side of the border in the Imperial Beach, San Ysidro and Coronado coastal areas.

Over the last five years, 100 billion gallons of untreated sewage, industrial waste and urban runoff have been dumped into the Tijuana River, according to the International Boundary and Water Commission.

Although people of European descent account for less than one-quarter of the world’s population, their DNA disproportionately drives genetics research. Between 2005 and 2018, the majority of genome-wide association studies were conducted with data from people living in just three countries — the United Kingdom, the United States, and Iceland.

“The paradox of precision medicine is that you have to have a ton of different kinds of people to figure out one person really well,” said Josh Denny, CEO of the All of Us research program. “There’s still so much we don’t understand about the human genome, especially about rare variation. Huge projects like ours are really helping to accelerate that understanding.”

All of Us has recruited more than 750,000 volunteers to provide survey responses about their health, medical records, and if they’re willing, biological samples for molecular and genetic testing. Genetic data from some participants have been available for researchers since 2020, but the new release this week includes the whole genome sequences of nearly 250,000 participants — half of whom are of non-European ancestry.

Ever wonder what it’s like to live on Mars? Now, you could try out life on the Red Planet – in a simulation run by NASA. The space agency is looking for participants to live on a fake Mars for a full year to help them prepare for human exploration of the planet.

This is the second of three missions, which will have four volunteers living in a 1,700-square-foot Mars simulation, NASA has announced. The missions, called CHAPEA, for Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, take place in a 3D-printed Mars habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

The simulation, called the Mars Dune Alpha, simulates a future Mars habitat with separate areas for living and working. It includes four living quarters for each volunteer, a workspace, a medical station, lounge areas and a galley and food growing stations.

Lung cancer is the deadliest of cancers. Screening could save thousands of lives, so why is it not the norm?

https://econ.st/2VAzFNX

Continue reading “How to detect the deadliest form of cancer” »

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center made waves earlier this year when it announced the completion of a clinical trial that saw colorectal cancer in 18 patients disappear.

The patients received a drug that helped their immune system target and attack cancer cells, driving their cancer into remission and rendering it undetectable within six months.

Now, Lehigh Valley Health Network has joined a select group of networks and hospitals participating in the expanded clinical trial of the drug.

CHICAGO, Feb 19 (Reuters) — A study that analyzed the genetic code of a quarter of a million U.S. volunteers found more than 275 million entirely new variants that may help explain why some groups are more prone to disease than others, researchers reported on Monday.

The whole genome sequencing data from a wide range of Americans aims to address the historical lack of diversity in existing genomic datasets by focusing on previously under-represented groups. The U.S. National Institutes of Health-funded “All of Us” study turned up 1 billion genetic variants in total.

“Sequencing diverse populations can lead to new drug targets that are relevant to everyone,” said Dr. Josh Denny, a study author and its chief executive. “It can also help uncover disparities that lead to specific treatments for people that are experiencing higher burdens of disease or different disease.”

Intuitive Machines said its team programmed the lander’s wide and narrow field-of-view cameras “to take five quick images every five minutes for two hours, starting 100 seconds after separating from SpaceX’s second stage,” adding that “out of all the images collected, Intuitive Machines chose to show humanity’s place in the universe with four wonderful images we hope [will] inspire the next generation of risk-takers.”

In a mission update, Intuitive Machines said that Odysseus “continues to be in excellent health” as mission IM-1 makes its way toward the moon for a touchdown scheduled to take place on Thursday. “Flight controllers are preparing planned trajectory correction maneuvers to prepare the lander for lunar orbit insertion,” the company added in its message.

If Intuitive Machines manages to perform a successful soft landing with Odysseus, it will become the first private company to achieve the feat. It will also mark the first soft lunar landing by a U.S. spacecraft since the final Apollo mission in 1972.

University of Melbourne researchers are leading a new push to address the growing harm of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as more humans and animals become seriously ill or die from infections that medicine once treated easily.

Over-use and misuse of microbe-killing drugs – including antibiotics, antivirals and antifungals – is the main driver accelerating the evolution of resistance to these drugs in bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites around the world.

The World Health Organisation calls AMR a top global public health threat that was directly responsible for 1.27 million deaths and contributed to 4.95 million deaths in 2019.