Lifeboat Foundation

Guest: David Shumaker, USA

Three professors at the University of Southampton school of medicine have this week made a “major breakthrough” in the treatment of coronavirus patients and become paper millionaires at the same time.

Almost two decades ago professors Ratko Djukanovic, Stephen Holgate and Donna Davies discovered that people with asthma and chronic lung disease lacked a protein called interferon beta, which helps fight off the common cold. They worked out that patients’ defences against viral infection could be boosted if the missing protein were replaced.

The academics created a company, Synairgen, to turn their discoveries into treatments. It floated on the stock market in 2004, but a deal with AstraZeneca to treat viral infections in asthmatics fell through, and the shares collapsed.

Tai Ding

A revolutionary innovation in corneal replacement therapy.

Did you know there was a natural treatment for herpes “that has no treatment”. People have been treating disease for centuries. Just because something is not approved does not mean it does not work, it only means it is not approved. Even corruption can stall the approval process.

TMR5 (Zedupex^TM) is a product of a Kenyan medicinal plant, prepared as a lyophilized extract and a cream. The products have been evaluated for preclinical safety and efficacy in suitable in vitro and in vivo systems of herpes infections. Herpes is a viral infection affecting over 60% of the sub-Saharan Africa young adult population. It is caused by two similar viruses, HSV-1 and HSV-2 which share 50% gene sequence homology. The infection in a major cause of genital ulcer disease, associated with increased risks of HIV acquisition and transmission. The aim is to develop TMR5 as an alternative anti-herpes agent, this being necessitated by increased resistance to available drugs and the cost of the drug of choice, acyclovir, in the region. Using the trypan blue exclusion test, plaque inhibition and viral yield reduction assays for assessment of cytotoxicity (CC₅₀) and efficacy (EC₅₀), and Mice and guinea pig cutaneous and genital HSV infection models respectively following oral and topical treatments, TMR5 exhibited no cytotoxicity in mammalian cell lines with a wide therapeutic index (CC₅₀ ≥ 58.5 ± 4.6µg/ml). An EC₅₀ of ≤ 14.7 ± 3.7µg/ml for both wild type and resistant strains of HSV was realised in plaque and viral yield assays. Oral (250 mg/kg) and topical (10% cream) administrations exhibited significant delay in onset of infections, hindered progression of infection to lethal forms with increased mean survival times and low mortality in both mice and guinea pig models. No acute toxicity has been realised at the therapeutic concentrations. TMR5 has demonstrated a high potential as an anti-herpes agent and arrangements are presently underway to evaluate its efficacy and safety in human clinical trials. A pilot production scheme supported by the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation (NCSTI) of Kenya has been undertaken as means of developing TMR5 as an alternative management therapy for herpes infections.

Performance of photon-based neural network processor is 100-times higher than electrical processor.

When NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover launches to the Red Planet, an innovative experiment will ride along: the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter — the first aircraft to attempt controlled flight on another planet.

Get up to speed with these key facts about its plans: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/6-things-to-know-about-nasa…helicopter #CountdownToMars

Land Life Company ❤

Boosting seedling survival rates from 10% to at least 90%.

For more on the Trillion Trees Challenge, visit UpLink: https://buff.ly/2O5nd3j

As Fifi the llama munches on grass on a pasture in Reading, her immune system has provided the template for a coronavirus treatment breakthrough.

Scientists from the UK’s Rosalind Franklin Institute have used Fifi’s specially evolved antibodies to make an immune-boosting therapy.

The resulting llama-based, Covid-specific “antibody cocktail” could enter clinical trials within months.

Just over a month after announcing its latest generation Ampere A100 GPU, Nvidia said this week that the powerhouse processor system is now available on Google Cloud.

The A100 Accelerator Optimized VM A2 instance family is designed for enormous artificial intelligence workloads and data analytics. Nvidia says users can expect substantive improvements over previous processing models, in this instance up to a 20-fold performance boost. The system maxes out at 19.5 TFLOPS for single-precision performance and 156 TFLOPS for AI and high performance computing applications demanding TensorFloat 32 operations.

The Nvidia Ampere is the largest 7 nanometer chip ever constructed. It sports 54 billion transistors and offers innovative features such as multi-instance GPU, automatic mixed precision, an NVLink that doubles GPU-to-GPU direct bandwidth and faster memory reaching 1.6 terabytes per second.