Lifeboat Foundation

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

Novartis is offering a $250,000 prize to fund development of pioneering innovation with great potential in advancing Assistive Tech for Multiple Sclerosis. Applications will be accepted until January 10, 2020, and the winners will be announced during a panel discussion among experts in the field at SXSW in Austin, TX.

There’s no sugar coating it—diabetes is shaping up to become one of the greatest health challenges in modern times. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in eleven individuals suffers from diabetes, and the condition was the direct cause of 1.6 million deaths in 2016, based on the latest publicly available data. WHO has since designated diabetes as one of four priority noncommunicable diseases (alongside cancer, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases) to be addressed by global health authorities.

Closer to home, more than 400,000 Singaporeans live with the diagnosis of diabetes, says the Ministry of Health. This constitutes ten percent of the local disease burden. Meanwhile, a separate study by the National University of Singapore projected that by 2050, Singapore would be home to one million diabetics if current trends continue. Wary of the insidious consequences of unchecked chronic illness, Singapore’s Health Minister Gan Kim Yong declared a “war on diabetes,” calling for a concerted national effort to prevent disease onset and better manage disease symptoms.

Last November, CHIPSA Hospital hosted a unique, first-of-its-kind event celebrating the lives of 22 late stage cancer survivors who, according to doctors, shouldn’t even be alive. Surrounded by world-renowned doctors, scientists, and researchers, these patients shared their inspiring stories of how they healed their terminal disease when conventional treatment had failed them.

CHIPSA is not an ordinary hospital. For one, we take patients who are typically told they have no other treatment options left. We then offer those patients innovative immunotherapies that aren’t available anywhere in the United States.

Continue reading “Historic Event Unites 22 Late-Stage Cancer Survivors with Top Scientists From Around the World!” »

From insilico meddicine — the beginning of an AI healthcare revolution.

Poly Mamoshina on Machine Learning for small molecule drug discovery and the beginning of an AI healthcare revolution — interviewed at the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin 2019!

Continue reading “Polina Mamoshina — The Beginning of an AI Healthcare Revolution” »

Whenever I see my 10-year-old daughter brimming over with so much energy that she jumps up in the middle of supper to run around the table, I think to myself, “those young mitochondria.” Mitochondria are our cells’ energy dynamos.

A new study shows that short-term treatment with the common organ rejection drug rapamycin reverses periodontal bone loss, attenuates inflammation, and makes the oral microbiome revert to a more youthful state in old mice.

What is rapamycin?

Rapamycin (also known as sirolimus) is a macrolide, a class of antibiotics that includes Biaxin (Clarithromycin), Zithromax (Azithromycin), Dificid (Fidoximycin), and Erythromycin. Macrolides inhibit the growth of bacteria and are often used in the treatment of common bacterial infections.

Nearly one in six deaths from prostate cancer could be prevented if targeted screening was introduced for men at a higher genetic risk of the disease, according to a new UCL-led computer modelling study.

Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in men with around 130 new cases diagnosed in the UK every day and more than 10,000 men a year dying as a result of the disease. However, unlike breast and cervical cancer there is currently no national screening programme for this disease in the UK.

A blood test that detects raised levels of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) can be used to screen for prostate cancer. However, this test is not a reliable indicator as it does not accurately distinguish between dangerous cancers from harmless ones—leading to both unnecessary operations and missed cancers that are harmful.

Every year, we’re reminded to return to the pharmacy for a flu shot. Why can’t we have a flu vaccine that offers long-term protection, like those for measles or polio? That’s because the influenza virus continuously evolves, so the immune response we build up one year might not work the next year—or even on the version of the flu you catch the same year. As a result, the virus remains dangerous: last year, it caused more than 60,000 deaths in the United States alone.

New findings, published in Cell, reveal why making a general-purpose vaccine that guards against all versions of the flu is so hard: Instead of improving its memory of the previous version of virus, the immune system develops its response to the new virus variant from scratch, mostly using immune cells that have no memory of the virus.

“If we can figure out how to help the immune system to keep building on what it has already learned, we could develop better vaccines for highly evolving viruses like the flu, or HIV, or Hepatitis C,” says Gabriel D. Victora, assistant professor at Rockefeller.