Lifeboat Foundation

When Lady Meherbai Tata died of leukaemia on 18 June 1931, her husband, Sir Dorabji Tata, Jamsetji Tata’s son and a key figure of the Tata Group endowed the Lady Tata Memorial Trust with a corpus for research into leukaemia in memory of his wife. He set out to establish high-quality facilities for cancer treatment in India.

(Images above of Dr. Indraneel Mittra and a representational photo of middle-aged women.)

Out of this humanitarian commitment emerged the now well-renowned Tata Memorial Hospital, commissioned by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust on 28 February 1941.

Continue reading “Indian Surgeon’s Groundbreaking Cancer Research Saves the Lives of 1000s of Women” »

A chemical called kynurenic acid may play a role in diseases characterised by cognitive impairments or psychosis, including schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and bipolar disorder. Newly developed drugs that reduce this acid in the brain show promise in reducing symptoms of these conditions.

A new technique has been added to the CRISPR gene-editing toolbox. Known as PASTE, the system uses virus enzymes to “drag-and-drop” large sections of DNA into a genome, which could help treat a range of genetic diseases.

The CRISPR system originated in bacteria, which used it as a defense mechanism against viruses that prey on them. Essentially, if a bacterium survived a viral infection, it would use CRISPR enzymes to snip out a small segment of the virus DNA, and use that to remind itself how to fight off future infections of that virus.

Over the past few decades, scientists adapted this system into a powerful tool for genetic engineering. The CRISPR system consists of an enzyme, usually one called Cas9, which cuts DNA, and a short RNA sequence that guides the system to make this cut in the right section of the genome. This can be used to snip out problematic genes, such as those that cause disease, and can substitute them with other, more beneficial genes. The problem is that this process involves breaking both strands of DNA, which can be difficult for the cell to patch back up as intended, leading to unintended alterations and higher risks of cancer in edited cells.

Scientists in Berlin have been studying a strange hereditary condition that causes half the people in certain families to have shockingly short fingers and abnormally high blood pressure for decades. If untreated, affected individuals often die of a stroke at the age of 50. Researchers at the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) in Berlin discovered the origin of the condition in 2015 and were able to verify it five years later using animal models: a mutation in the phosphodiesterase 3A gene (PDE3A) causes its encoded enzyme to become overactive, altering bone growth and causing blood vessel hyperplasia, resulting in high blood pressure.

“High blood pressure almost always leads to the heart becoming weaker,” says Dr. Enno Klußmann, head of the Anchored Signaling Lab at the Max Delbrück Center and a scientist at the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK). As it has to pump against a higher pressure, Klußmann explains, the organ tries to strengthen its left ventricle. “But ultimately, this results in the thickening of the heart muscle – known as cardiac hypertrophy – which can lead to heart failure greatly decreasing its pumping capacity.”

DNA can be utilized to reliably store massive amounts of digital data. However, it has hitherto proven challenging to retrieve or manipulate the specific data embedded in these molecules. Now, scientists from the CNRS and the University of Tokyo have developed the use of a novel enzyme-based technique, providing the initial clues as to how these technical obstacles may be overcome. Their research was recently published in the journal Nature.

Nature has unquestionably developed the best method for massive data storage: DNA. Based on this knowledge, DNA has been used to store digital data by translating binary (0 or 1) values into one of the four different DNA “letters” (A, T, C, or G).

But how can one search through the database of data encoded in DNA to discover a certain datum? And how is it possible to execute computations using DNA-encoded data without first transforming it into electronic form? These are the questions that research teams from the LIMMS (CNRS / University of Tokyo) and Gulliver (CNRS / ESPCI) laboratories have attempted to answer. They are experimenting with a new approach using enzymes and artificial neurons and neural networks for direct operations on DNA data.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Found a Way To Manipulate Digital Data Stored in DNA” »

21 oct 2022.

Adolescent (or juvenile) delinquency is defined as the habitual engagement in unlawful behavior of a minor under the age of majority. According to studies, the likelihood of acquiring a deviant personality increases significantly during adolescence. As a result, identifying deviant youth early and providing proper medical counseling makes perfect sense. Due to the scarcity of qualified clinicians, human appraisal of individual adolescent behavior is subjective and time-consuming. As a result, a machine learning-based intelligent automated system for assessing and grading delinquency levels in teenagers at an early stage must be devised.

Building on the CRISPR gene-editing system, MIT researchers have designed a new tool that can snip out faulty genes and replace them with new ones, in a safer and more efficient way.

Using this system, the researchers showed that they could deliver genes as long as 36,000 DNA base pairs to several types of human cells, as well as to liver cells in mice. The new technique, known as PASTE, could hold promise for treating diseases that are caused by defective genes with a large number of mutations, such as cystic fibrosis.

“It’s a new genetic way of potentially targeting these really hard to treat diseases,” says Omar Abudayyeh, a McGovern Fellow at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “We wanted to work toward what gene therapy was supposed to do at its original inception, which is to replace genes, not just correct individual mutations.”

Some neuroscience studies suggest that distinct human emotional states are associated with greater activity in different regions of the brain. For instance, while some parts of the brain have been associated with all emotional responses, the hypothalamus has often been linked to sexual responses and feelings of intimacy, the hippocampus to the retrieval of emotion-eliciting memories, and the amygdala to fear and anger.

Humans can experience emotional responses to an extremely wide range of sensory and environmental stimuli, including the food they consume. So far, however, relatively few studies have explored the link between emotional states elicited by different food flavors and activity in different parts the cortex (i.e., the part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive processes).

Researchers at Niigata University, Hyogo College of Medicine, Meiji University, the Sakagami Dental Clinic and Otemae Junior College have recently carried out a study investigating the emotional responses elicited by differently flavored chewing gums and the cortical activity associated with these responses. Their findings, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, highlight the potential role of the left prefrontal cortex in eliciting emotional states during the consumption of palatable (i.e., pleasant-tasting) or less flavorful foods.

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Today, with the rampant spread of cybercrime, there is a tremendous amount of work being done to protect our computer networks — to secure our bits and bytes. At the same time, however, there is not nearly enough work being done to secure our atoms — namely, the hard physical infrastructure that runs the world economy.

Nations are now teeming with operational technology (OT) platforms that have essentially computerized their entire physical infrastructures, whether it’s buildings and bridges, trains and automobiles or the industrial equipment and assembly lines that keep economies humming. But the notion that a hospital bed can be hacked — or a plane or a bridge — is still a very new concept. We need to start taking such threats very seriously because they can cause catastrophic damage.

Continue reading “How to fix insecure operational tech that threatens the global economy” »