Lifeboat Foundation

Analyst Salveen Richter and colleagues laid it out:

The potential to deliver “one shot cures” is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically engineered cell therapy, and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies… While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90 percent. In 2015, the company’s hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less than $4 billion this year.

Continue reading “‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ Goldman Sachs analysts ask” »

The Pentagon is also looking at living camouflage, self-healing paint, and a variety of other applications of engineered organisms, but the basic science remains a challenge.

How do you detect submarines in an expanse as large as the ocean? The U.S. military hopes that common marine microorganisms might be genetically engineered into living tripwires to signal the passage of enemy subs, underwater vessels, or even divers.

It’s one of many potential military applications for so-called engineered organisms, a field that promises living camouflage that reacts to its surroundings to better avoid detection, new drugs and medicines to help deployed forces survive in harsh conditions, and more. But the research is in its very early stages, military officials said.

Continue reading “The US Military Is Genetically Engineering New Life Forms To Detect Enemy Subs” »

Last week Chinese researchers rocked the world with reports that twin babies whose genes the scientists’ edited prior to birth had been born, the product of secret experiments that are being widely decried as unethical. Even as that story plays out, it is true that CRISPR gene editing is already being used in humans, in ways that illustrate just how unethical this recent use was.

“Patients’ parents have been emailing me a lot,” says Hye Young Lee, a researcher at the University of Texas San Antonio whose work looks at alternative delivery methods for CRISPR. Lee says she normally gets a few emails a month from the parents of the patients she works with, but that the number of emails went up recently—in relation, she suspects, to the news of the CRISPR babies, which is creating the illusion that CRISPR and other gene editing techniques are ready for extensive use in humans.

The scientific community’s current consensus is that they’re far from being at that stage—and it’s impossible to know now when or if they will be. But gene editing is being used in adult humans, to early trials to treat genetic diseases. In terms of gene editing for adults, “I know that there are things going on,” Lee says, but it’s nothing like this week’s news. Although her own work is at least a few years away from being ready for human testing, there are some cautiously progressing trials at drug companies using CRISPR in adult humans who have diseases that are the result on mutations in a single gene.

Two institutions collaborate for first time in setting up new laboratory in Hong KongFocus will be on inventing means of improving diagnosis of diseases so treatment can start earlier.

Biotechnology
Genome editing through CRISPR-Cas systems has the potential to correct genetic mutations that occur in diseased cells, such as cancer cells. However, the ability to selectively activate CRISPR-Cas systems in diseased cells is important to ensure that gene editing only occurs where it is wanted. Zhu et al. developed a system whereby gene editing could be activated by a magnetic field, thus allowing spatial control. The use of nanomagnets in their system also improved transduction into target cells in tumor-bearing mouse models. This approach could potentially allow the translation of CRISPR-Cas systems into therapeutic agents.

Nat. Biomed. Eng. 10.1038/s41551-018‑0318-7 (2018).

Very excited to join IdeaXme (http://radioideaxme.com/) as Longevity Ambassador, utilizing this wonderful media platform to help expand global awareness of the people engineering a future free of aging, disease, degeneration, and suffering.

He Jiankui has now presented his controversial work at a gene editing summit in Hong Kong. CRISPR expert Helen O’Neill of University College London was there.

The introduction of the gene editing tool CRISPR in 2007 was a revolution in medical science and cell biology. But even though the potential is great, the launch of CRISPR has been followed by debate about ethical issues and the technology’s degree of accuracy and side effects.

However, in a new study published in Cell, researchers from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research have described how Cas12a, one of the CRISPR technologies, works at the molecular level. This makes it possible to fine-tune the gene-editing process to achieve specific desired effects.

“If we compare CRISPR to a car engine, what we have done is make a complete 3D map of the engine and thus gained an understanding of how it works. This knowledge will enable us to fine-tune the CRISPR engine and make it work in various ways—as a Formula 1 racer as well as an off-road truck,” says Professor Guillermo Montoya from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research.

Showrunner Jeff Buhler has built a fascinating world around Martin’s story seeds, starting by setting the action within the foreseeable future, rather than in an incomprehensibly distant one. The invented technologies here are particularly intriguing, like the genetic modifications first officer Melantha Jhirl (Jodie Turner-Smith) has to make her better suited for space travel, or the cybernetics technician Lommie (Maya Eshet) uses to interface with machinery. Given the state of real-world technological developments in genetic engineering and research into brain-machine interfaces, the series feels plausible and grounded, even though it’s set in a spacefaring future.

The 10-episode space series adapts a 40-year-old George R.R. Martin novella.

Continue reading “Syfy’s Nightflyers asks whether humanity deserves to be saved” »