Lifeboat Foundation

The largest drone delivery network in the world has been launched in Ghana, which experts say will save lives and transform the developing nation’s healthcare sector.

The drone network is set to deliver blood, essential medicines and vaccinations across the middle-income, West African country.

Speaking about the official launch of the service on April 24, Ghana’s President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said it was part of a drive to ensure universal access to lifesaving medicine in Ghana.

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Researchers close in on how low levels of a kind of RNA may trigger lupus — offering hope for future treatments for the autoimmune disease.

In a recent study in mice, researchers found a way to deliver specific drugs to parts of the body that are exceptionally difficult to access. Their Y-shaped block catiomer (YBC) binds with certain therapeutic materials forming a package 18 nanometers wide. The package is less than one-fifth the size of those produced in previous studies, so it can pass through much smaller gaps. This allows YBCs to slip through tight barriers in cancers of the brain or pancreas.

The fight against cancer is fought on many fronts. One promising field is gene therapy, which targets genetic causes of diseases to reduce their effect. The idea is to inject a nucleic acid-based drug into the bloodstream—typically small interfering RNA (siRNA)—which binds to a specific problem-causing gene and deactivates it. However, siRNA is very fragile and needs to be protected within a nanoparticle or it breaks down before reaching its target.

“siRNA can switch off specific gene expressions that may cause harm. They are the next generation of biopharmaceuticals that could treat various intractable diseases, including cancer,” explained Associate Professor Kanjiro Miyata of the University of Tokyo, who jointly supervised the study. “However, siRNA is easily eliminated from the body by enzymatic degradation or excretion. Clearly a new delivery method was called for.”

Continue reading “New nanomedicine slips through the cracks” »

After 20 years of dedicated research, scientists have cracked the chemical code of an incredibly complex ‘anti-tumor antibiotic’ known to be highly effective against cancer cells as well as drug-resistant bacteria, and have reproduced it synthetically in the lab for the first time.

This major breakthrough and world-first could hail a new era in the design and production of new antibiotics and anticancer agents.

The ‘super substance’ — kedarcidin — was discovered in its natural form by a pharmaceutical company when they extracted it from a soil sample in India almost 30-years-ago. Soil is the natural source of all antibiotics developed since the 1940s but in order for them to be developed as potential drug treatments they must be produced via chemical synthesis.

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Now, a pair of research papers published the week of April 22 from the University of Washington — one in the Journal of Neuroscience, the other in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — use functional MRI to identify two differences in the brains of blind individuals that might be responsible for their abilities to make better use of auditory information.

“There’s this idea that blind people are good at auditory tasks, because they have to make their way in the world without visual information. We wanted to explore how this happens in the brain,” said Ione Fine, a UW professor of psychology and the senior author on both studies.

Instead of simply looking to see which parts of the brain were most active while listening, both studies examined the sensitivity of the brain to subtle differences in auditory frequency.

Continue reading “Brains of blind people adapt to sharpen sense of hearing, study shows” »

For the first time, researchers have successfully 3D printed chalcogenide glass, a unique material used to make optical components that operate at mid-infrared wavelengths. The ability to 3D print this glass could make it possible to manufacture complex glass components and optical fibers for new types of low-cost sensors, telecommunications components and biomedical devices.

In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optical Materials Express, researchers from the Centre d’Optique, Photonique et Laser (COPL) at Université Laval in Canada, Patrick Larochelle and his colleagues, describe how they modified a commercially available 3D printer for glass extrusion. The new method is based on the commonly used technique of fused deposition modeling, in which a plastic filament is melted and then extruded layer-by-layer to create detailed 3D objects.

“3D printing of optical materials will pave the way for a new era of designing and combining materials to produce the photonic components and fibers of the future,” said Yannick Ledemi, a member of the research team. “This new method could potentially result in a breakthrough for efficient manufacturing of infrared optical components at a low cost.”

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Dr. Sandra Kaufmann

Continue reading “The Kaufmann Protocol: Why we age and how to stop it” »

Researchers say a new video game can tell researchers whether someone is at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

You are probably familiar with graphics depicting the double helix structure of DNA. But have you ever seen a single DNA molecule standing straight?