Lifeboat Foundation

Just in time for Halloween, doctors in France say they witnessed a real-life horror tale involving an antibiotic-resistant superbug. In less than a month, their patient’s infection evolved resistance to the last-resort drug they had used to treat it. Thankfully, the doctors were still able to defeat the microscopic threat—and the case may have uncovered a peculiar weakness in the germ.

According to the report, published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a young child had been dealing with recurrent infections of the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa for over two years. P. aeruginosa is an opportunistic infection that sickens tens of thousands of already weakened people in hospitals and other health-care settings in the U.S. a year. In these people, it can cause serious infections.

Cells are the fundamental “building blocks” that make up living organisms. Yet, we don’t know exactly how cells were formed in the first place. We also don’t know what all the molecules that make up any natural cell do. Finally, we can’t yet put molecules together ourselves to make new synthetic cells.

Addressing the questions and challenges posed above requires significant collaboration and cooperation. The Build-a-Cell community welcomes all who wish to learn about and cooperate in the work of fully understanding and engineering a diversity of synthetic cells.

The future of biotechnology is in realizing fully understood, lineage agnostic organisms, beginning with single cells.

Researchers at Australia’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience are exploring new frontiers in healthcare and energy storage. Bec Crew reports.

United Parcel Service Inc. is striking a series of drone-delivery agreements with health-care groups as it develops new technology pitched to the growing medical market.

The plans include expanding the use of drones to deliver cargo such as medical samples and supplies on hospital campuses in Utah and elsewhere, and an agreement with CVS Health Corp. to evaluate the use of drones for home delivery of prescriptions and other products, UPS said Monday.

The agreements are the first UPS has announced since the package delivery giant won U.S. regulatory approval to operate commercial drone flights through the company’s Flight Forward subsidiary. The nod from the Federal Aviation Administration paves the way for UPS to scale up operations as it competes with FedEx Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and others vying to develop drone delivery services in the U.S.

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CRISPR therapy — Injecting the gene-editing tool CRISPR into the brains of mice may reverse the effects of an autism mutation at any age.

At stake is not just the well-being of millions of Chinese people, but the future of the global healthcare industry. China has set its sights on creating a holy grail healthcare system that satisfies patients’ needs and control costs while still encouraging cutting-edge research—and the world is watching.

Whether it succeeds will affect the future of the global industry.

H/T Dr. Jason Williams

Creatine, the organic acid that is popularly taken as a supplement by athletes and bodybuilders, serves as a molecular battery for immune cells by storing and distributing energy to power their fight against cancer, according to new UCLA research.

The study, conducted in mice and published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, is the first to show that creatine uptake is critical to the anti-tumor activities of CD8 T cells, also known as killer T cells, the foot soldiers of the immune system. The researchers also found that creatine supplementation can improve the efficacy of existing immunotherapies.

“Because oral creatine supplements have been broadly utilized by bodybuilders and athletes for the past three decades, existing data suggest they are likely safe when taken at appropriate doses,” said Lili Yang, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and the study’s senior author. “This could provide a clear and expedient path forward for the use of creatine supplementation to enhance existing cancer immunotherapies.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hw4GWnM2VXY

Brain-connected machines that capture and translate electrical signals are showing great promise across a number of areas, but one with massive potential is the world of prosthetics. Scientists exploring these possibilities at Johns Hopkins University are now reporting a big breakthrough, demonstrating a system that enables a quadriplegic to control two prosthetics arms at once using only his thoughts, and also feel a sense of touch coming back the other way.

The team at Johns Hopkins University has been making some exciting progress in this area through its Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which was launched by DARPA in 2006. In 2016, we saw a double amputee use his brain to control two of the team’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs (MPLs), bilateral shoulder-level prosthetics that enabled him to do things like move cups between shelves, a first for this kind of research.

Continue reading “First bilateral brain implant gives paraplegic a two-handed sense of touch” »