Lifeboat Foundation

ADELPHI, Md. — A U.S. Army Research Laboratory biotechnology scientist recently published an editorial article on the future directions of synthetic biology research to meet critical Army needs in the Synthetic Biology edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

In the publication, Dr. Bryn Adams, who works in ARL’s Bio-Technology Branch, highlights examples of robust, tractable bacterial species that can meet the demands of tomorrow’s state-of-the-art in synthetic biology.

“ACS Synthetic Biology is the premier synthetic biology journal in the world, with a wide readership of biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers and computer programmers,” Adams said. “A publication in this journal allows me to challenge the leaders in the field to meet a Department of Defense specific need — the need for new synthetic biology chassis organisms, or host cell, and toolkits to build complex circuits in them.”

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Genome editing and synthetic biology are giving rise to new forms of life. But do these organisms have conservation value as part of earth’s biodiversity?

SRF Summer Scholars Program opens December 1st!

The SRF Summer Scholars Program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to conduct biomedical research to combat diseases of aging, such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s Disease. Under the guidance of a scientific mentor, each Summer Scholar is responsible for his or her own research project in such areas as genetic engineering and stem cell research. The Summer Scholars Program emphasizes development of both laboratory and communication skills to develop well-rounded future scientists, healthcare professionals, and policy makers. Students participating in the program will hone their writing skills via periodic reports, which are designed to emulate text scientists commonly must produce. At the end of the summer, students will have the opportunity to put all of their newly developed communication skills into practice at a student symposium.

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When the future of genetic engineering arrived on Sebastian Cocioba’s doorstep, it was affixed to the back of a postcard from Austria with a little bit of packing tape.

Cocioba is a 25-year-old college dropout whose primary interest is tinkering with plant genetics in a lab he cobbled together from eBay. The lab is located in the spare bedroom of his parent’s lavish apartment in Long Island City, across the river from Manhattan. A few months ago, an internet friend from an online bio-hacking forum had sent him the lab’s latest addition: attached to that postcard was Crispr-Cas9.

Scientists have been working for decades on engineered viruses that can hunt down and get inside cancer cells, cause them to burst and spur the immune system to mop up whatever malignant cells might be left behind. Only one such treatment has successfully become an FDA-approved cancer treatment.

That one drug, from Amgen, isn’t selling much. But that small victory a year ago has emboldened others to go forward with their own ideas to advance this approach to cancer therapy, known as oncolytic virus therapy.

One of the aspiring players in the oncolytic virus field, Ottawa, Canada-based Turnstone Biologics, is announcing today it has raised $41.4 million in a Series B venture financing. The round was led by OrbiMed Advisors, and included F-Prime Capital Partners and a couple of existing investors, FACIT and Versant Ventures. The new money will add on to the $11.3 million Series A round from a year ago.

Continue reading “Engineering Viruses to Kill Cancer Cells, Canada-Based Turnstone Raises $41.4M” »

Everything you wanted to know about gene editing but were affraid to ask!

Researchers at the University of California in San Diego have found a way to use gene editing technology to target RNA in living cells.

Bioquark Inc. (www.bioquark.com) Interview in MoneyWeek

Read whole story: http://moneyweek.com/who-wants-to-live-forever/

Anyone who does not have QC as part of their 5+Yr Roadmap for IT are truly exposing their company as well as shareholders and customers. China, Russia, Cartels, DarkNet, etc. will use the technology to extort victims, destroy companies, economies, and complete countries where folks have not planned, budget, skilled up, and prep for full replacement of their infrastructure and Net access. Not to mention companies who have this infrastructure will provide better services/ CCE to svc. consumers.

In a recent article, we highlighted a smart beta ETF called the “Sprott BUZZ Social Media Insights ETF” that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to select and weight stocks. If we stop and think about that for a moment, that’s a pretty cool use of AI that seems well ahead of its time. Now we’re not saying that you should go out and buy this smart beta ETF right away. It uses social media data. We know that on social media, everyone’s an expert and many of the opinions that are stated are just that, opinions. However some of the signals may be legitimate. Someone who just bought Apple is likely to go on telling everyone how bullish they are on Apple shares. Bullish behavior is often accompanied by bullish rhetoric. And maybe that’s exactly the point, but the extent to which we’re actually using artificial intelligence here is not that meaningful. Simple scripting tools go out and scrape all this public data and then we use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to determine if the data artifacts have a positive or negative sentiment. That’s not that intelligent, is it? This made us start to think about what it would take to create a truly “intelligent” smart beta ETF.

What is Smart Beta?

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The field, or at least the widely used term, of synthetic biology (synbio) started nearly two decades ago. As the field has matured, two PLoS ONE papers have analyzed the publishing data to look at trends, language, and connections among synbio researchers. This data provides snapshots of who’s publishing, what kind of research is being published, when it’s being published, and where it’s being published. The question of why is certainly open for interpretation but the growth dynamics of synthetic biology publishing can give some sense of why a the term has stuck as a useful unifying term.

In 2012, researchers used Thomson Reuters Web of Science publishing data to map where people are publishing synbio research, how those people are connected, and who’s funding it. More recently, three French researchers also used data from the Thomson Reuters Web of Science to assess how synthetic biology the different areas of synthetic biology have grown and interacted.

Both of these papers draw interesting pictures of how new terms and ideas spread within an new umbrella term for a kind of research. Together these two papers paint give us some answers to the ‘Who, What, When, Where, & Why’ of synthetic biology.