Lifeboat Foundation

Despite efforts to raise public awareness about the disease, cases of melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, have been on the rise in the United States for years. Now, scientists have discovered a new drug that can stop metastasis of the disease, that is, the development of melanoma cells elsewhere in the body — by as much as 90 percent.

The findings are courtesy of a new study published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. For the study, researchers injected immuno-compromised mice with human melanoma cells and exposed them to a man-made, small-molecule drug that targets a gene’s ability to produce RNA molecules (one of the major building blocks of life) and certain proteins found in melanoma tumors. Those genes typically cause the disease to spread, but when they were exposed to the compound, up to 90 percent of the cells were prevented from metastasizing.

The potential drug, known as CCG-203971, is the same as the one the researchers have been studying as a potential treatment for scleroderma, a rare and often fatal autoimmune disease that causes the hardening of skin tissue, lungs, heart, kidneys, and other organs.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover New Drug That Stops the Spread of 90% of Melanoma Cells” »

“By comparing clonal and sexual daughters from the same mothers, we found sexually produced offspring get less sick,” Auld said.

PARIS – From an evolutionary perspective, sexual reproduction could be seen as a nonstarter. Compared to cloning, which also exists in nature, it is a major waste of time and energy.

Think of the ungainly, preening peacock — an easy snack for tigers and wild dogs — strutting his stuff to impress the ladies.

Continue reading “Sex exists to avoid disease, study demonstrates” »

Last year – although a rather grim one by other measures – was a splendid one for research. From gravitational waves to cooing dinosaurs, we’ve uncovered a lot about the world around us, but as a remarkable new study has revealed, there’s a lot within us we’ve yet to discover too.

Writing in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, scientists have officially announced the discovery of a new organ inside the human body. That’s right, there’s a brand new organ hiding in our abdomen and it’s only just been classified.

Known as the mesentery (meaning “in the middle of the intestines”), it can be found in our digestive systems. Leonardo da Vinci actually gave one of the first descriptions of it back in the day, but until around 2012 it was thought to be a series of separate structures keeping the intestines attached to the abdominal wall, like a series of support girders.

Continue reading “A Completely New Human Organ Has Just Been Officially Discovered” »

Scientists are close to bringing back a huge ancient cattle species called an auroch.

Aurochs roamed Europe for thousands of years until the last of their kind died in the Jaktorow Forest in Poland in 1627.

They were 7 ft (2.13 m) tall and weighed around 1,000kg.

Continue reading “Scientists Are Attempting to Bring Back an Enormous Ancient Cow” »

The incidence of thyroid cancer has tripled in the past three decades, yet the reason for this is not clear.

Dr. David Goldenberg, chief of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, notes the diagnostic tools are better, but he can’t get behind recent talk of over-diagnosis as the sole cause for the increase.

“The press that has been given to this is an oversimplification,” Goldenberg said. “What we should be concentrating on is not only why we are discovering more of it, but also which of these newly discovered thyroid cancers are the ones that will kill someone.”

In recent research published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, Northwestern Medicine scientists identified a new pathway in the brain that can be manipulated to alleviate depression.

The pathway offers a promising new target for developing a drug that could be effective in individuals for whom other antidepressants have failed.

New antidepressant options are important because a significant number of patients don’t adequately improve with currently available antidepressant drugs.

Continue reading “Scientists find new path in brain to ease depression” »

For the first time since the advent of stem cell therapy, a team of scientists from the North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, was able to implant synthetic cardiac stem cells which effectively repaired muscle tissue that got damaged by a heart attack. Typically, heart muscles that get scarred from a heart attack will either stay as is or get worse, but not improve. With the synthetic stem cell implant done, however, the result was a remarkable contradiction. Details about this new technique that is supposedly less risky than traditional stem cell procedures were recently published in the ‘Nature Communications’ journal.

Stem cell therapy works by helping damaged tissue repair itself. Although this type of treatment can be effective, it comes with certain types of risks, most notably, immune system rejection and cancerous growths. And, the process itself is very delicate because natural stem cells are quite fragile, have to be stored carefully, and must undergo a series of typing and matching prior to being used.

It is these limitations that have prompted scientists to come up with a different approach to make stem cell therapy work better. And what they developed was a procedure involving synthetic stem cells.

Continue reading “World’s First Synthetic Stem Cells Were Just Successfully Implanted” »

New version of this out: https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2017/01/02/americas-r…-cold-war/ #transhumanism #biohacking

Unlike other epic scientific advances…the immediate effect of genetic editing technology is not dangerous. Yet, it stands to be just as divisive to humans as the 70-year proliferation of nuclear weaponry.

The playing field of geopolitics is pretty simple: If China or another country vows to increase its children’s intelligence via genetic editing, and America chooses to remain “au naturel” because they insist that’s how God made them, a conflict species-deep will quickly arise.

Continue reading “America’s refusal to embrace gene editing could start the next Cold War” »

In a breakthrough for regenerative medicine, scientists have grown intestinal tissues with functional nerves in a laboratory setup using human pluripotent stem cells. The synthesized tissue was used to study Hirschsprung’s disease, a congenital condition where nerve cells are missing from the colon, causing complications in passing stool. The research is detailed in Nature Medicine.

A pluripotent stem cell is a precursor cell to all the other types of cells in the body. In a petri dish, the stem cells were treated in a biochemical bath that triggered the formation into intestinal tissue. The novel part of the study was the construction of a nervous system on the intestinal organoid. The researchers manipulated neural crest cells to grow a system of nerves. By putting together the neural crest cells and the intestinal tissue at the exact time, they successfully grew together into a complex functional system.

The tissues were transplanted into mice. They worked successfully and showed a structure “remarkably similar” to that of a natural human intestine.

Continue reading “Regenerative Medicine: Scientists Have Successfully Engineered Functioning Human Nerves” »