Lifeboat Foundation

Today, we have part one of a two-part interview with Dr. Michael Fossel, the driving force behind Telocyte, a new company focused on telomerase therapy for various diseases, and a strong advocate of telomerase therapy to treat human disease over the past three decades.

I interviewed Dr. Fossel as an individual thought leader in this field and not in his role representing Telocyte, so the opinions stated here are purely his own.

Born in 1950, Michael Fossel grew up in New York and lived in London, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Portland, and Denver. He graduated cum laude from Phillips Exeter Academy, received a joint B.A. and M.A. in psychology in four years from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and, after completing a Ph.D. in neurobiology at Stanford University in 1978, went on to finish his M.D. at Stanford Medical School in two and a half years. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and taught at Stanford University, where he began studying aging with an emphasis on premature aging syndromes. Dr. Fossel was a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Michigan State University for almost three decades and taught the Biology of Aging at Grand Valley State University.

At MBC Biolabs, an incubator for biotech startups in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, a team of scientists and interns working for the small startup Prellis Biologics have just taken a big step on the path toward developing viable 3D-printed organs for humans.

The company, which was founded in 2016 by research scientists Melanie Matheu and Noelle Mullin, staked its future (and a small $3 million investment) on a new technology to manufacture capillaries, the one-cell-thick blood vessels that are the pathways which oxygen and nutrients move through to nourish tissues in the body.

Continue reading “Implantable 3D-printed organs could be coming sooner than you think” »

Research team successfully administers insulin to rats in capsule form, raising hopes that a version for humans could be developed.

Nicola Davis

Engineered strains of E. coli and other microbes are being tested in humans to combat a slew of illnesses.

TRX-1 inhibitor TXNIP might be implicated in increased oxidative stress as we age.

According to scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, or DKFZ), the enzyme TXNIP, which inhibits the enzyme TRX-1, might be a regulator of aging and might be a viable candidate for future interventions against age-related diseases [1].

Study summary

Continue reading “Antioxidant inhibitor might be a regulator of aging” »

An international team of researchers have developed a low-cost sensor made from semiconducting plastic that can be used to diagnose or monitor a wide range of health conditions, such as surgical complications or neurodegenerative diseases.

The sensor can measure the amount of critical metabolites, such as lactate or glucose, that are present in sweat, tears, saliva or blood, and, when incorporated into a diagnostic device, could allow health conditions to be monitored quickly, cheaply and accurately. The new device has a far simpler design than existing sensors, and opens up a wide range of new possibilities for health monitoring down to the cellular level. The results are reported in the journal Science Advances.

The device was developed by a team led by the University of Cambridge and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Semiconducting plastics such as those used in the current work are being developed for use in solar cells and flexible electronics, but have not yet seen widespread use in biological applications.

Continue reading “Low-cost plastic sensors could monitor a range of health conditions” »

This is the Freethink Dispatch, our rundown of the stories that mattered from the frontiers of a changing world. This week, engineers created brain-surgery robots that can work inside an MRI, scientists found a way to use coffee to treat diabetes, and a startup is making fresh produce that lasts twice as long. All that and more, plus a new episode of Freethink’s original hit series Superhuman about how doctors are reprogramming the immune system to kill untreatable cancers.

You didn’t think scientists would let IBM’s “world’s smallest computer” boast go unchallenged, did you? Sure enough, University of Michigan has produced a temperature sensing ‘computer’ measuring 0.04 cubic millimeters, or about a tenth the size of IBM’s former record-setter. It’s so small that one grain of rice seems gigantic in comparison — and it’s so sensitive that its transmission LED could instigate currents in its circuits.

The size limitations forced researchers to get creative to reduce the effect of light. They switched from diodes to switched capacitors, and had to fight the relative increase in electrical noise that comes from running on a device that uses so little power.

The result is a sensor that can measure changes in extremely small regions, like a group of cells in your body. Scientists have suspected that tumors are slightly hotter than healthy tissue, but it’s been difficult to verify this until now. The minuscule device could both check this claim and, if it proves true, gauge the effectiveness of cancer treatments. The team also envisions this helping to diagnose glaucoma from inside the eye, monitor biochemical processes and even study tiny snails.

Continue reading “World’s tiniest ‘computer’ makes a grain of rice seem massive” »

KrioRus charges $36,000 to cryonize a corpse, or half that for just the head. The process is fairly straightforward: First, cryonicists drain the blood of the “patient,” and pump in a solution resembling antifreeze. The body goes into a cooling chamber beneath KrioRus’s 2,000-square-foot hangar in Sergiyev Posad, a suburb north of Moscow, for roughly a week. Then it’s immersed, head first, in a double-walled dewar of liquid nitrogen, where it hangs indefinitely until scientists figure out how to revive it. In this way, KrioRus has cryopreserved 61 people and 31 pets, including a cat, a goldfinch, and a chinchilla. At least 487 others have signed up.

“Maybe in five, 30, or 300 years, there will be a way to wake her again,” Riabinina says.

Riabinina’s story is among several that Italian photographer Giuseppe Nucci documents in -196: The Pioneers of Resurrection. His ethereal, atmospheric images respectfully capture the quest for immortality in Russia, home to a visionary gaggle of cosmists, cryonicists, and transhumanists who believe in a deathless future. They preach resurrection, wear high-tech cyber-suits, and deep-freeze the corpses of loved ones they hope to meet again.

Continue reading “The Mystics Seeking Eternal Life Through Liquid Nitrogen” »