Technology & Society
I’ll be moderating a longevity panel tomorrow at VLAB. VLAB is the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum, a global non-profit organization dedicated to connecting Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs, industry experts, venture capitalists, private investors and technologists
From MIT Tech Review: “The treatment is different than any that’s come before because it appears to be an outright cure carried out through a genetic repair. The therapy was tested on 18 children, the first of them 15 years
Another great article by the WAPO’s Ariana Eunjug Cha. Here’s a small excerpt from the piece: “As a tidal wave of new health-related gadgets, apps and tests hits the market, government agencies like the FDA, Federal Trade Commission and others
From the Washington Post. “Scientists reported Tuesday on two new studies showing that the medications, which marshal the body’s own immune defenses, are now proving effective against recurrent, difficult-to-treat head and neck cancer and an extremely lethal skin cancer called
Here’s some interesting news from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the Mayo Clinic. Researchers found that a combination of two drugs — cancer drug dasatinib and quercetin — “dramatically slows the aging process (in animal models)—alleviating symptoms of frailty,
A new study shows that, for a small number of lucky individuals, it is possible to have a faulty gene that causes severe disease and not get that disease (think cystic fibrosis, etc). The problem though is that researchers don’t
From the Telegraph: “Researchers from Orlando Health in Florida detected a biomarker released by the brain during injury. They found that the biomarker can stay in the bloodstream for up to a week – which means patients who suffer delayed
The idea behind the company is to expel toxic, worn-out cells called “senescent cells.” Here’s the story in Fortune.
Remember the horrific Thalidomide disaster when babies were being born without limbs? Well, turns out the drug might have a happier purpose. Researchers have figured out how to use it to bioengineer a way to kill cancer. Here’s the story.
From TechCrunch: “From Google[x]’s cancer-seeking nanopills to Atomwise, a machine-learning platform working on finding the cure to orphan diseases, the Bay Area offers several startups and organizations coming at the problem in a different way.Incubators such as Y Combinator, IndieBio
From New Scientist: “One-year-old Layla was dying from leukaemia after all conventional treatments failed. “We didn’t want to give up on our daughter, though, so we asked the doctors to try anything,” her mother Lisa said in a statement released
From ScienceMag.org: “Harvard stem cell biologist Amy Wagers, cardiologist Richard Lee of the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and their colleagues claim that a specific protein, GDF11, may explain young blood’s beneficial effects. They have reported that blood
According to Nature, researchers are poised to meet with the FDA this month to discuss “medicines that delay ageing-related disease as legitimate drugs.” This makes sense, given that there are a number of scientific teams working on such compounds. Nir
A huge advance. Here’s the story from Discover Mag: “A team of regenerative scientists and surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital successfully grew a semi-functional rat forelimb in the lab, employing a technique previously used to build bio-artificial organs. If someday
From ScienceDaily.com: “Scientists have found a new family of molecules that kill cancer cells and protect healthy cells, which could be used to treat a number of different cancers. Research shows that as well as targeting and killing cancer cells,
From the New Scientist: “Over the past few years, researchers have reversed muscle atrophy, memory loss, heart degradation and some of the effects of cognitive decline by pumping the blood of young mice into old mice. The results from these
From Business Insider: “It can take weeks to identify drugs targeting cancer-causing mutations. Watson can do it in minutes and has in its database the findings of scientific papers and clinical trials on particular cancers and potential therapies.”
From Phys.org: “What do you do when a patient needs a blood transfusion but you don’t have their blood type in the blood bank? It’s a problem that scientists have been trying to solve for years but haven’t been able
Here’s the story from Forbes. “The company has hired Richard Scheller, who led drug discovery at biotech icon Genentech for 14 years before announcing he would retire in December, and who has won some of science’s top awards, including the
A great story. And another example of how man is blending with machine. From the NY Daily News: “Zderad became the 15th person in the country, and the first in his home state, to receive the implanted sight device created