Lifeboat Foundation

Implantable electronics are among the most promising healthcare technologies, as they can help to remotely monitor specific biological processes associated with a patient’s health. While researchers have developed a variety of implantable devices over the past decade or so, existing technologies have several limitations that can prevent their widespread use in clinical settings.

The first factor preventing the large-scale implementation of existing implantable technologies is the structural mismatch between these devices and most organs/tissues in the body, which typically have complex 1D or 3D structures. Secondly, reliably fixing soft electronic devices on organs that are moving or pulsating has so far proved to be highly challenging.

Researchers at Daegu-Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST) in South Korea and ETH Zürich have recently developed a new fiber-based strain-sensing device that could overcome the limitations of existing implantable electronics. This sensor, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, comprises a capacitive fiber strain sensor with an inductive coil for wireless readout.

These findings may have implications for brain disease, disorders.

Scientists at the Krembil Brain Institute, part of University Health Network (UHN), in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), have used precious and rare access to live human cortical tissue to identify functionally important features that make human neurons unique.

This experimental work is among the first of its kind on live human neurons and one of the largest studies of the diversity of human cortical pyramidal cells to date.

In diabetic nephropathy—a common cause of kidney disease—levels of NEDD4-2 are severely reduced. This is the case even when salt is not a factor.

University of South Australia researchers have identified an enzyme that may help to curb chronic kidney disease, which affects approximately 700 million people worldwide.

Continue reading “The enzyme that could help 700 million people worldwide” »

Summary: Morning bright light therapy improved both physical and mental health symptoms, including cognitive function and sleep quality, in veterans who suffered TBI.

Source: Experimental Biology.

A new study by researchers at the VA Portland Health Care System in Oregon found that augmenting traditional treatment for traumatic brain injury (TBI) with morning bright light therapy (MBLT) improved physical and mental symptoms for participants.

“In atopic dermatitis, the itching can be horrific, and it can aggravate disease,” said co-corresponding author K. Frank Austen, MD, a senior physician in the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at the Brigham.

Scientists pinpointed a key molecular player that could represent a new therapeutic target for intractable chronic itch.

Muscle stem cells enable our muscle to build up and regenerate over a lifetime through exercise. But if certain muscle genes are mutated, the opposite occurs. In patients suffering from muscular dystrophy, the skeletal muscle already starts to weaken in childhood. Suddenly, these children are no longer able to run, play the piano or climb the stairs, and often they are dependent on a wheelchair by the age of 15. Currently, no therapy for this condition exists.

“Now, we are able to access these patients’ gene mutations using CRISPR-Cas9 technology,” explains Professor Simone Spuler, head of the Myology Lab at the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint institution of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association and Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin. “We care for more than 2000 patients at the Charité outpatient clinic for muscle disorders, and quickly recognized the potential of the new technology.” The researchers immediately started working with some of the affected families, and have now presented their results in the journal JCI Insight. In the families studied, the parents were healthy and had no idea they possessed a mutated gene. The children all inherited a copy of the disease mutation from both parents.

Scientists around the world have been bamboozled this week by a fictitious asteroid heading toward Earth.

A group of experts from US and European space agencies attended a week-long exercise led by NASA in which they faced a hypothetical scenario: An asteroid 35 million miles away was approaching the planet and could hit within six months.

Yes, but they wont be trusted til 2035.

Current trends in AI use in healthcare lead me to posit that this market will significantly grow in the coming years. So, should leaders in healthcare expect the emergence of a fully automated electronic physician, sonographer or surgeon as a replacement for the human healthcare professional? Can the development of AI in healthcare help overcome the difficulties the industry faces today? To figure all this out, I would like to analyze the current challenges of using AI in healthcare.

Let’s discuss two promising examples: the application of AI in diagnosis and reading images, and the use of robotic systems in surgery.

Continue reading “AI Challenges For The Health IT Industry: Should We Expect Electronic Doctors?” »

Between 19:39 and 24 minutes we have Aubrey giving a list of companies and stating that investing is now taking off. Project 21 seems to be on track to start next year, and therapies available in 10–15 years will add 30 years to life and really be indefinite beyond that.

Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging.
People are living longer — no longer because of reduced child mortality, but because we are postponing the ill-health of old age. But we’ve seen nothing yet: regenerative medicine and other new medicines will eventually be so comprehensive that people will stay truly youthful however long they live, which means they may mostly live very long indeed.

Continue reading “GFS 2020 — Aubrey de Grey — Rejuvenation Biotechnology: why age may soon cease to mean aging” »