Lifeboat Foundation

Wilmington, DE, April 19, 2018 — Scientists at Christiana Care Health System’s Gene Editing Institute have developed a potentially breakthrough CRISPR gene-editing tool. It could allow researchers to take fragments of DNA extracted from human cells, put them into a test tube, and quickly and precisely engineer multiple changes to the genetic code, according to a new study published today in the CRISPR Journal.

Investigators at the Gene Editing Institute, which is part of the Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute at Christiana Care, said their new “cell-free” CRISPR technology is the first CRISPR tool capable of making multiple edits to DNA samples “in vitro,” which means in a test tube or petri dish. The advance could have immediate value as a diagnostic tool, replicating the exact genetic mutations found in the tumors of individual cancer patients. Mutations that cause cancer to spread can differ from patient to patient, and being able to quickly identify the correct mutation affecting an individual patient can allow clinicians to implement a more targeted treatment strategy.

“With this new advance, we should be able to work with laboratory cultures and accomplish gene edits in less than a day, significantly reducing the time required for diagnostics compared to other CRISPR tools, and with much greater precision,” said Eric Kmiec, Ph.D., director of the Gene Editing Institute and principal author of the study. “This is particularly important for diagnostics linked to cancer care where time is critical.”

https://theglowingskinseries.com/day-15/

Follow us on Twitter ▶ https://goo.gl/8m1wbv

A young man with a violent past enters a mysterious clinic where the patients wildly transform their bodies and minds using genetic engineering.

Continue reading “PERFECT Official Trailer (2018) Abbie Cornish Sci-Fi Movie HD” »

Read more

In a big win for the biotech industry, the US Department of Agriculture says once and for all it won’t regulate plants whose genomes have been altered using gene-editing technology.

Why it’s a field day: The decision means that we could see a boom in newfangled plants from firms like Monsanto, universities, and startups like Calyxt, whose oil-altered soybeans featured in our cover story late last year.

Here’s the logic: The USDA says gene editing is just a (much) faster form of breeding. So long as a genetic alteration could have been bred into a plant, it won’t be regulated. That includes changes that create immunity to disease or natural resistance to crop chemicals, as well as edits to make seeds bigger and heavier. It doesn’t include transgenic plants (those with a gene from a distant species)—those will still be regulated.

Continue reading “CRISPR plants won’t be regulated” »

• Basic income will be widespread by the 2030s, according to Google futurist and director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.
• Kurzweil is known for making seemingly wild predictions. In 2016, he predicted that by 2029, medical technology will add an extra year to human life expectancies on an annual basis.
• ” We’re going to have more and more powerful technology to keep our physical bodies going. We’ll think, ‘Wow, back in 2018, people only had one body, and they couldn’t back up their mind file,’” he said onstage at TED.

As it becomes apparent that artificial intelligence will replace ever-more jobs in the coming years, a growing number of politicians, nonprofits, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have started thinking about how we’ll cope with a world in which not everyone can — or needs to — work.

Basic income experiments, in which people are given a regular salary just to live, no strings attached, are popping up all over Europe, Africa, and North America.

Imagine a future where a guided biomachine put into your body seeks out defective gene sequences in each cell and edits in the correct information with precision accuracy.

It’s called gene editing, and University of Alberta researchers have just published a game-changing study that promises to bring the technology much closer to therapeutic reality.

“We’ve discovered a way to greatly improve the accuracy of gene-editing technology by replacing the natural guide molecule it uses with a synthetic one called a bridged nucleic acid, or BNA,” said Basil Hubbard, Canada Research Chair in Molecular Therapeutics and an assistant professor in the U of A’s Department of Pharmacology, who led the study.

Continue reading “Breakthrough brings gene-editing medicine one step closer to patient applications” »