“Think of [it] as your personal team of scientists in your pocket.” That's how Lola Priego, founder and CEO of Base, describes her brainchild.
At its core Base is an at-home lab testing and smart app combo that uses your blood and saliva to determine your state of health. It identifies areas of concern and then offers ways to recover, such as through sleep, stress reduction, diet, and exercise. As a health tracker, however, it is so much more.
Priego has the perfect trifecta of experience to back her in this endeavor. Her first sights were on medicine, but after her first year of med school, she discovered a love of engineering, which led her to immigrate to the United States to earn a master's in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence. After graduation, she worked at Amazon, then Facebook/Instagram. All the while, her personal experience with the healthcare system made Priego fully cognizant of the fact that there is a lack of access to data around one’s health. After dealing with streams of paperwork, endless waiting, hidden bills, and doctor’s opinions, she knew there had to be a better way.
Vaccine for bacterial meningitis could be delivered via nose drops
By Nick Lavars
July 12, 2021
Through a world-first trial, scientists in the UK have demonstrated the potential of a new vaccine to treat a life-threatening form of meningitis, and it can be delivered via nose drops. The researchers have developed a way of preventing meningococcal meningitis by borrowing a weapon used by the bacteria that causes it, resulting in long-lasting protection that might be replicated to address other infections that work via similar mechanisms.
As a condition that causes inflammation in the fluid and membranes around the brain and spinal cord, meningitis can take hold in the body through viral, fungal and parasitic infections, though those caused by bacteria are particularly dangerous. This is because bacterial meningitis has the capacity to enter the blood stream, resulting in serious complications and with the potential to become a life-threatening condition in hours if left untreated.
Scientists develop pain-free blood sugar test for diabetics
13 Jul 2021
Australian scientists say they have developed pain-free blood sugar testing for diabetics, a non-invasive strip that checks glucose levels via saliva.
For diabetics, managing their blood sugar levels typically means pricking their fingers multiple times a day with a lancet and then placing a drop of blood on a testing strip. Understandably, some diabetes sufferers avoid the painful process by minimising their tests.
Researchers working at the Department of Public Health, McCann Healthcare Worldwide Japan Inc., has created three algorithms that can be used to detect Alzheimer's in patients as they engage in phone conversations. The group has written a paper outlining the algorithms and their effectiveness and have uploaded it to the open-access site PLOS ONE.
Despite world-wide efforts, there still is no cure for Alzheimer's disease, which impacts millions of people around the globe including approximately 5.8 million in the United States. Medical researchers have made inroads towards slowing its progression, however; which is why it is becoming more and more important to identify the disease early. Thus scientists have turned their attention to finding new ways to predict which people will get the disease. In this new effort, the researchers have turned to machine learning as an aid to diagnoses.
Prior research has shown that some of the early signs of Alzheimer's include speaking more slowly than normal and pausing more often during conversations. Some work is already being done to recognize such speech difficulties—one project by a team in Japan uses the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (TICS-J) test, where phone conversations are recorded and studied to see if there is slow or broken speech. In this new study, the researchers have replaced the humans listening and analyzing phone conversations with a computer running a machine-learning algorithm.
Research conducted at the Sharon Eccles Steele Center for Translational Medicine (SCTM) at the University of Utah's John A. Moran Eye Center explains why people carrying a block of genetic variants strongly associated with the development of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) may develop the disease and identifies a potential therapeutic pathway for slowing or even reversing disease progression.
AMD is a major cause of irreversible blindness worldwide and the leading cause of blindness for Americans aged 55 and over. Following more than 15 years of research that has employed an extensive repository of donated human ocular tissues, scientists found that HtrA1 protein normally increases with age in the eye at the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE)-Bruch's membrane interface, helping to maintain the normal function of this region. The RPE is a cell layer that delivers nutrients to and removes waste from the retina's light-sensitive photoreceptor cells.
These new data show this is not the case in individuals with AMD-associated risk variants located on chromosome 10. These variants were found to impair expression of the HTRA1 gene by the RPE, resulting in an approximately 50 percent reduction of HtrA1 protein levels at the RPE-Bruch's membrane interface during aging. The failure to produce adequate levels of HtrA1 protein disrupts this key region of the eye and is associated with AMD-associated pathologies, including the deposition of abnormal deposits and the development of abnormal blood vessels.
An experimental drug reported in Nature Communications suggests that a "path is clearly achievable" to treat currently untreatable cases of cystic fibrosis disease caused by nonsense mutations. This includes about 11 percent of cystic fibrosis patients, as well as patients with other genetic diseases, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy, β-thalassemia and numerous types of cancers, that are also caused by nonsense mutations.
The drug is a small molecule with a novel mechanism of action, say David Bedwell, Ph.D., and Steven Rowe, M.D., MSPH, co-senior authors. Bedwell is professor and chair of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, and Rowe is a professor in the UAB Department of Medicine.
To understand how a nonsense mutation causes disease—and how the experimental drug works to suppress the mutation—requires a close look at the biological machinery that makes proteins inside a cell.
A protein is a chain of hundreds of amino acids that then folds to its proper shape and moves to its proper place to perform its function. The chain is made, link by link, by ribosomes that read a sequence for the protein carried on messenger RNA. That sequence instructs which of the 20 different amino acids to add at each link, one by one.
For children with Type 1 diabetes, the risk of experiencing a severe hypoglycemic episode is especially common—and for parents, the threat of that happening in the middle of the night is especially frightening. Sudden and critical drops in blood sugar can go undetected overnight when the child is asleep, resulting in coma and death—an event known as "dead in bed syndrome."
"A parent can check their child's glucose levels right before they go to bed and everything looks fine, then around 2 a.m. their blood sugar is dangerously low—near comatose level," said Matthew Webber, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Notre Dame.
Webber has listened to parents of diabetic children describe the fear of such an episode—waking up several times a night to check glucose levels and the panic of emergency situations and rushing children to the hospital in the middle of the night.
Driven by covid deaths, U.S. life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years in 2020
Source: Washington Post
Life expectancy in the United States dropped by a year and a half in 2020 — a continuation of a worrisome decline that was observed in the first half of last year as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the country, according to federal data released Wednesday.
The decline, which is the largest seen in a single year since World War II, reflects the pandemic’s sustained toll on Americans, particularly the disproportionate impact of covid-19 on communities of color. Black Americans lost 2.9 years of life expectancy while Latinos, who have longer life expectancy than non-Hispanic Blacks or Whites, saw a drop of three years. There was a decrease of 1.2 years among White people.
“It’s horrific,” said Anne Case, a professor emeritus of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. “It’s not entirely unexpected given what we have already seen about mortality rates as the year went on, but that still doesn’t stop it from being just horrific, especially for non-Hispanic Blacks and for Hispanics.”
The provisional data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shows that life expectancy at birth — a generally reliable measure of the nation’s health — for the total population declined from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.3 years in 2020. Almost three-fourths of that decline is attributed to deaths from covid-19, according to the report. The report did not include data for Asian Americans or other racial groups.
Trial Looking To Bring Clinically Dead ‘Back To Life’
July 7, 2021
It is sometimes frightening how well classic fiction predicts the future. For instance, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury described earbuds well before they were ever developed. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is another terrifying example. In the book, Dr. Frankenstein experimented with resuscitation using dead tissue reanimation, a treatment that was experimented with by real scientists in the 1800s. Recently, researchers are once again looking for ways to reverse death, and they may have found the solution.
A New Trial May Bring the Dead Back to Life: The ReAnima Project
For this study, the researchers will use stem cells as a “reset button” for the body to erase cell damage and stimulate tissue regeneration. According to those involved, the research may lead to “complex tissue and organ regeneration, disease reversion, and even biological age reversal.”
The trial will be run by Indian specialist Dr. Himanshi Bansal and biotech companies called Revita Life Sciences and Bioquark Inc.
Twenty patients are the subjects of this study. They are all braindead, which is considered clinical death, and are only kept alive through life support. The test will involve injecting brain stem cells and peptides into their brains bi-weekly over six weeks and a series of other treatments including lasers and nerve stimulation techniques, which have brought patients out of comas in the past.
The researchers believe the stem cells will follow a similar process salamander cells use to regrow limbs, that is, differentiating into functional brain cells.
I haven’t been this excited about a discovery since CRISPR. We found something enigmatic that, like CRISPR, is associated with microbial genomes. We have named these unique entities BORGs.
"Borgs" are extrachromosomal elements, meaning that these DNA sequences are found outside the chromosomes that lie within the nucleus of most cells and that contain the majority of an organism’s genetic material. Examples of extrachromosomal elements include plasmids, which can replicate outside of a host’s chromosomes, and some viruses.
Exactly what Borgs are remains a mystery at this point, but it is clear that they share genes and proteins with organisms that oxidize methane, called methanotrophs, that belong to the genus Methanoperedens, suggesting that they acquired these elements through past gene transfers. Methanotrophs are of immense interest to climate change researchers because they reduce atmospheric emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to rising global temperatures.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
A new tool that enables thousands of tiny experiments to run simultaneously on a single polymer chip will let scientists study enzymes faster and more comprehensively than ever before.
For much of human history, animals and plants were perceived to follow a different set of rules than rest of the universe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this culminated in a belief that living organisms were infused by a non-physical energy or “life force” that allowed them to perform remarkable transformations that couldn’t be explained by conventional chemistry or physics alone.
Scientists now understand that these transformations are powered by enzymes – protein molecules comprised of chains of amino acids that act to speed up, or catalyze, the conversion of one kind of molecule (substrates) into another (products). In so doing, they enable reactions such as digestion and fermentation – and all of the chemical events that happen in every one of our cells – that, left alone, would happen extraordinarily slowly.
The neurotransmitters GABA and glutamate have complementary roles — GABA inhibits neurons, while glutamate makes them more active. Published today (July 22nd, 2021) in PLOS Biology, researchers led by Roi Cohen Kadosh and George Zacharopoulos from the University of Oxford show that levels of these two neurotransmitters in the intraparietal sulcus of the brain can predict mathematics ability. The study also found that the relationships between the two neurotransmitters and arithmetic fluency switched as children developed into adults.
An intriguing new study from researchers in the United Kingdom is proposing an innovative method to treat age-related memory loss. The preclinical research shows memory decline in aging mice can be reversed by manipulating the composition of structures in the brain known as perineuronal nets.
Perineuronal nets (PNNs) are structures in the brain that envelop certain subsets of neurons, helping stabilize synaptic activity. They essentially put the brakes on the neuroplasticity seen in the first few years of life.
While type-2 diabetes is largely preventable, type-1 diabetes is a disruptive autoimmune disorder that was once thought incurable. ‘Once’ is the keyword here, as a new and uncontroversial form of stem cell treatment should be able to cure the disease once and for all.
Relying on transforming a small piece of adult skin tissue into beta-cells in the pancreas— the ones which produce the insulin hormone illusive in diabetics—the treatment bypasses the genetic mutation that causes the immune system to attack these cells which creates the disease.
Diabetes, especially type-1, severely limits quality of life, and if not carefully managed can result in serious complications like foot amputations and early mortality.
Furthermore, it costs the U.S. medical care industry around $85,000 per patient per lifetime’s worth of treatment—an enormous burden that if lifted could save the entire sector hundreds of millions.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Researchers have identified a rare class of genetic differences transmitted from parents without autism to their affected children with autism and determined that they are most prominent in "multiplex" families with more than one family member on the spectrum. These findings are reported in "Recent ultra-rare inherited variants implicate new autism candidate risk genes," a new study published in Nature Genetics.
The hunt is on in earnest for the genes involved in autism, now that technology and vastly lower costs allow the aggregation of thousands of genomes of people with autism and their family members. Knowing precisely which genes are at play will enable greater understanding of the condition known as autism and may ultimately lead to treatments for those who desire them.
Researchers from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital and the University of Queensland have developed a new formulation based on regulatory T-cell exosomes (rEXS) to deliver vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibodies for choroidal neovascularization therapy.
The study was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering on July 26.
Ocular neovascularization is often associated with age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and other ocular diseases, which can cause severe vision loss.
The present treatment for ocular neovascular disease in clinic is intravitreal injection of VEGF antibodies (aV) to block the activity of VEGF and suppress pathogenic angiogenesis. However, this therapy alone faces problems of fast metabolism with the aqueous humor, poor accumulation in lesions and limited efficacy. A considerable proportion of patients still show incomplete response to above aV treatment.
(TechCrunch) The whole human proteome may be free to browse thanks to DeepMind, but at the bleeding edge of biotech new proteins are made and tested every day, a complex and time-consuming process. Glyphic Biotechnologies accelerates the critical but slow sequencing step, potentially cutting drug development times down by a huge amount, and the startup just raised a $6 million seed to bring its clever solution to market.
FDA allows automatic 'generic' swap for brand-name insulin
Source: Associated Press
U.S. regulators took action Wednesday that will make it easier to get a cheaper, near-copy of a brand-name insulin at the drugstore.
Doctors now have to specifically prescribe what’s called a biosimilar or OK substituting it for a more expensive brand-name insulin.
Wednesday’s move by the Food and Drug Administration will allow pharmacists to automatically substitute the cheaper version, just as they do with generic pills for other kinds of drugs.
It’s the FDA’s first approval of an “interchangeable” biosimilar, a near-copy of an injected biologic medicine that’s manufactured inside living cells. It could save diabetics and health plans millions of dollars annually and encourage other drugmakers to create more biosimilar medicines. Health data firm IQVIA projects U.S. savings from increasing use of biosimilars from 2020 through 2024 will top $100 billion.
Five public research institutions in France imposed a 3-month moratorium on the study of prions – a class of misfolded infectious proteins that cause fatal brain diseases – after a retired lab worker who manipulated prions in the past has been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob prion disease (CJD), the most common prion disease in humans. An investigation is underway to find out whether the patient, who worked in a laboratory managed by the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE), contracted the disease at work.
If this were the case, it would be the second such case in France for a few years. In June 2019, an employee of the INRAE laboratory named Émilie Jaumain died at the age of 33, 10 years after having pricked her thumb during an experiment with mice infected with prions. His family is now suing INRAE for manslaughter and endangering life; his illness had already led to reinforced security measures in French prion laboratories.
The objective of the moratorium, which concerns nine laboratories, is “to study the possibility of a link with the [new patient’s] former professional activity and if necessary to adapt the preventive measures in force in research laboratories, ”according to a joint statement released yesterday by the five establishments.
Émilie Jaumain in 2010, the year she was exposed to prions during a laboratory accident. She died in 2019 at the age of 33.
ARMEL HOUEL
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Manipulating RNA can allow plants to yield dramatically more crops, as well as increasing drought tolerance, announced a group of scientists from the University of Chicago, Peking University and Guizhou University.
In initial tests, adding a gene encoding for a protein called FTO to both rice and potato plants increased their yield by 50% in field tests. The plants grew significantly larger, produced longer root systems and were better able to tolerate drought stress. Analysis also showed that the plants had increased their rate of photosynthesis.
“The change really is dramatic,” said University of Chicago Prof. Chuan He, who together with Prof. Guifang Jia at Peking University led the research. “What’s more, it worked with almost every type of plant we tried it with so far, and it’s a very simple modification to make.”
The researchers—along with other leading experts—are hopeful about the potential of this breakthrough, especially in the face of climate change and other pressures on crop systems worldwide.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
