Lifeboat Foundation

A trio of researchers from the U.S. and the UK has won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine, the first of five prizes to be announced this week. On Monday in Sweden, the Nobel committee announced that Americans William Kaelin Jr. and Gregg Semenza, along with Peter Ratcliffe, would split the nearly million-dollar prize for their work in unraveling a fundamental aspect of life: how our cells keep track of and respond to fluctuating oxygen levels.

This year’s prize was decades in the making.

Though we’ve long known that our cells need oxygen to produce energy and keep us alive, we were largely in the dark on how cells sensed oxygen, or how they managed to adapt in times of low oxygen, a state known as hypoxia. In the early 1990s, Gregg Semenza, currently of Johns Hopkins University, and his team discovered some of the key genetic machinery that cells use to detect hypoxia and then respond by producing a hormone called erythropoietin (EPO).

William Kaelin, Sir Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza worked out how cells adapt to oxygen availability.

A series of clinical trials have tested an experimental treatment for Parkinson’s disease that uses a novel approach: administering the drug straight into the brain via implanted ports. The leading researchers believe this may be a “breakthrough” therapeutic strategy for neurological conditions.

Newly trialed therapy could launch a fresh chapter in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.

In a new series of studies that culminated with an open-label trial (where participants were aware of what treatment they would receive), scientists have begun testing the effectiveness of a new treatment — and method of delivery — for Parkinson’s disease.

Circa 2017

The cells are converted by a small microchip, similar in size to a penny, which injects genetic code into skin cells, transforming them into other types of cell.

ROBOTS will be assisting surgeons to carry out complex medical procedures within ten years, offering just one example of how the rapidly evolving scientific field will change the world as the 21st century progresses, a robotic engineer has predicted.

William G. Kaelin, Jr., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe, of Oxford University and the Francis Crick Institute, and Gregg L. Semenza, of Johns Hopkins University were jointly awarded the prize.

The complex interplay of various processes and mechanisms that contribute to aging means it’s unlikely we’ll discover a single “magic bullet” to prevent age-related diseases. But new research led by University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Biology and Ageing is potentially as close as anything we’ve seen. The scientists have been able to extend the lifespan of fruit flies by 48 percent using a triple drug combination made up of drugs already used in people.

“As life expectancies increase, we are also seeing an increase of age-related diseases so there is an urgent need to find ways to improve health in old age,” says study co-lead author, Dr Jorge Castillo-Quan. “Here, by studying fruit flies which age much more rapidly than people, we have found that a combination drug treatment targeting different cellular processes may be an effective way to slow down the aging process.”

The three drugs making up the combo include lithium, which is used as a mood stabilizer, trametinib, a cancer drug that inhibits MEK1 and MEK2 enzymes, and rapamycin, an immune system regulator produced by bacteria that was first found in a soil sample from Easter Island and has been found to improve learning and memory in mice.

More than 100 people in North Carolina were sickened with Legionnaires’ disease and Pontiac fever last month. One person died.

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