Lifeboat Foundation

Two new studies by researchers in Tel Aviv University and Harvard University on the subject were published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering on Monday.

Organs-on-a-chip were first developed in 2010 at Harvard University. Then, scientists took cells from a specific human organ — heart, brain, kidney and lung — and used tissue engineering techniques to put them in a plastic cartridge, or the so called chip. Despite the use of the term chip, which often refers to microchips, no computer parts are involved here.

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UC San Francisco researchers have discovered how a mutation in a gene regulator called the TERT promoter—the third most common mutation among all human cancers and the most common mutation in the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma—confers “immortality” on tumor cells, enabling the unchecked cell division that powers their aggressive growth.

The research, published September 10, 2018 in Cancer Cell, found that patient-derived glioblastoma cells with TERT promoter mutations depend on a particular form of a protein called GABP for their survival. GABP is critical to the workings of most cells, but the researchers discovered that the specific component of this protein that activates mutated TERT promoters, a subunit called GABP-ß1L, appears to be dispensable in normal cells: Eliminating this subunit using CRISPR-based gene editing dramatically slowed the growth of the human cancer cells in lab dishes and when they were transplanted into mice, but removing GABP-ß1L from healthy cells had no discernable effect.

“These findings suggest that the ß1L subunit is a promising new drug target for aggressive glioblastoma and potentially the many other cancers with TERT promoter mutations,” said study senior author Joseph Costello, Ph.D., a leading UCSF neuro-oncology researcher.

Networks are at the heart of everything from communications systems to pandemics. Now researchers have found that a unique type of network also underlies the structures of critical cellular compartments known as membraneless organelles. These findings may provide key insights into the role of these structures in both disease and cellular operations.

“Prior to this study, we knew the basic physical principle by which these protein-rich compartments form — they condense from the cytoplasm into liquid droplets like dew on a blade of grass,” said David Sanders, a post-doctoral researcher in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University. “But unlike dew drops, which are composed of a single component (water), cellular droplets are intimidatingly complex. Our work uncovers surprisingly simple principles that we think are universal to the assembly of liquid organelles, and opens new frontiers into studying their role in health and disease.”

Sanders is the lead author in an article in the journal Cell describing a blueprint for the assembly of these liquid structures, also called condensates. The researchers looked closely at two types of condensates, stress granules and processing bodies (“P-bodies”). In the Cell paper, researchers directed by Clifford Brangwynne, a professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, combined genetic engineering and live cell microscopy approaches to reveal the rules underlying the assembly and structure of stress granules, and why they remain distinct from their close relatives, P-bodies.

A desirable option would be to use CRISPR gene editing to essentially cut out the unwanted gene. There are, however, many challenges ahead.

If you want to remove an undesirable gene from a population, you have a couple theoretical options — one that most people might find unthinkable, and one that lies outside our current scientific abilities.

Continue reading “We can identify ‘bad’ genes. Why can’t we use CRISPR gene editing to get rid of them?” »

Researchers have used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to delete a segment of DNA associated with autism and schizophrenia from mouse brain cells.

The technique has only proven effective in mice so far but may eventually be suitable for treating brain conditions in people, says Xiao-hong Lu, assistant professor of pharmacology and neuroscience at Louisiana State University Health in Shreveport.

Unlike techniques used to manipulate DNA in the mouse brain, CRISPR can be applied to people. He says, “We need a tool to help us to carry the genetic elements into the [human] brain.”

Circa 2017

Insulin-producing cells have been restored in mouse models of type 1 diabetes using a new genetic engineering technique.

American scientists adapted the gene editing technology known as CRISPR (clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeat) to successfully treat mouse models of type 1 diabetes, kidney disease and muscular dystrophy.

Continue reading “CRISPR has success in treating mice with type 1 diabetes” »

The Harvard University offshoot i20 Therapeutics is setting the goal of one day having those who suffer from diabetes to be able to treat it with pills rather than injections with a syringe when they need to take their medications.

Bioengineering researchers began to publish their methods in 2018 for turning liquid medications into encapsulated easy to swallow forms, which has demonstrated some early success with insulin in animal models.

Starting out with $4 million in seed money from Sanofi Ventures and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s T1D Fund, i20 Therapeutics plans to take that technology to GLP1 analogs, these are the glucagon like peptides that help to maintain blood sugar levels; i20 is focused on creating the next generation of oral peptide and protein based therapies.

If you’ve been interested in nanotech, but have been too afraid to ask, here is an introductory and interesting article that I’d like to recommend.

My interest in nanotech is based on my hope that nanotech can lead to methods of constructing substrates that are suitable for mind uploading. It may lead to a technique to create duplicate minds.

“These ‘biological engineering’ technologies have made real one of the dreams of the nanotechnology pioneers: the deployment of molecular assemblers able to construct any shape with atomic precision, following a rational design.”

Continue reading “The future is nano, and it will revolutionise medical science Essays” »

Scientists can identify pathogenic genes through genetic engineering. This involves adding human-made DNA into a bacterial cell. However, the problem is that bacteria have evolved complex defense systems to protect against foreign intruders — especially foreign DNA. Current genetic engineering approaches often disguise the human-made DNA as bacterial DNA to thwart these defenses, but the process requires highly specific modifications and is expensive and time-consuming.

In a paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, Dr. Christopher Johnston and his colleagues at the Forsyth Institute describe a new technique to genetically engineer bacteria by making human-made DNA invisible to a bacterium’s defenses. In theory, the method can be applied to almost any type of bacteria.

Johnston is a researcher in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and lead author of the paper. He said that when a bacterial cell detects it has been penetrated by foreign DNA, it quickly destroys the trespasser. Bacteria live under constant threat of attack by a virus, so they have developed incredibly effective defenses against those threats.