Lifeboat Foundation

Many cancer treatments are notoriously savage on the body. Drugs often attack both healthy cells and tumor cells, causing a plethora of side effects.

Immunotherapies that help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells are no different. Though they have prolonged the lives of countless patients, they work in only a subset of patients. One study found that fewer than 30 percent of breast cancer patients respond to one of the most common forms of immunotherapy.

But what if drugs could be engineered to attack only tumor cells and spare the rest of the body?

From banking to communication our modern, daily lives are driven by data with ongoing concerns over privacy. Now, a new EPFL paper published in Nature Computational Science argues that many promises made around privacy-preserving mechanisms will never be fulfilled and that we need to accept these inherent limits and not chase the impossible.

Data-driven innovation in the form of personalized medicine, better public services or, for example, greener and more efficient industrial production promises to bring enormous benefits for people and our planet and widespread access to data is considered essential to drive this future. Yet, aggressive data collection and analysis practices raise the alarm over societal values and fundamental rights.

As a result, how to widen access to data while safeguarding the confidentiality of sensitive, personal information has become one of the most prevalent challenges in unleashing the potential of data-driven technologies and a new paper from EPFL’s Security and Privacy Engineering Lab (SPRING) in the School of Comupter and Communication Sciences argues that the promise that any data use is solvable under both good utility and privacy is akin to chasing rainbows.

Behold, the helicopter’s fastest and longest excursion over the Martian surface.

In April, the helicopter completed its 25th flight on Mars.

We look at the first episode of Season 3 of The Orville! Plenty of non-revealing clips! Please Subscribe!

Could Life on Earth Have a Martian Origin? — Reevaluating Panspermia. For more info, see:

Revisiting Panspermia: did life come from outside of Earth?

While Taiwan still allows Russia and Belarus to purchase CPUs from businesses within the East Asian country, there are some big caveats: their clock frequencies cannot exceed 25 MHz, and performance is limited to under 5 GFLOPS.

DigiTimes reports that Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) published a list this week of strategic high-tech commodities banned from exportation to Russia and Belarus. The latter country is included as MOEA believes it could help Russia import such goods.

Continue reading “Taiwan export ban limits Russia and Belarus to chips with frequencies under 25 MHz” »

Due to safety concerns, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has withdrawn its approval for the cancer medicine Ukoniq (umbralisib). Ukoniq was approved to treat two specific types of lymphoma: marginal zone lymphoma (MZL) and follicular lymphoma (FL).

Updated findings from the UNITY-CLL clinical trial continued to show a possible increased risk of death in patients receiving Ukoniq. As a result, we determined the risks of treatment with Ukoniq outweigh its benefits. Based upon this determination, the drug’s manufacturer, TG Therapeutics, announced it was voluntarily withdrawing Ukoniq from the market for the approved uses in MZL and FL.

Health care professionals should stop prescribing Ukoniq and switch patients to alternative treatments. Inform patients currently taking Ukoniq of the increased risk of death seen in the clinical trial and advise them to stop taking the medicine. In limited circumstances in which a patient may be receiving benefit from Ukoniq, TG Therapeutics plans to make it available under expanded access.

Using the patient’s own cellsAn American biotech company has just announced that they have successfully transplanted a 3D printed human ear into a patient, initially reported by The New York Times. The company, Queens-based 3DBio Therapeutics, printed the ear using the patient’s own cells.

In what has been described as a world first, a U.S. company has created and transplanted a 3D-printed ear made of the patient’s own cells.