Jane McLelland beat cervical, lung, and blood cancers using the missing link to defeat cancer: starving it. She is partnering with Life Extension® to help other patients achieve the same results.
By Laurie Mathena.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,607
Aubrey de Grey, CSO, SENS, “Scientists, check — Investors, check — Next up, policy makers”
After getting a considerable success in convincing scientists and investors, in the last decades, that undoing aging through a damage repair approach is possible and desirable, Aubrey de Grey is turning his advocacy efforts to politicians. In this video, he explains why.
Aubrey de Grey delivers a keynote on the next steps for longevity for policy makers.
Dr Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501©(3) biomedical research charity that performs and funds laboratory research dedicated to combating the ageing process. He is also VP of New Technology Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics, a biotechnology start up developing new therapies in the field of biomedical gerontology. In addition, he is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in ageing. He received his BA in computer science and Ph.D. in biology from the University of Cambridge. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the types of self-inflicted cellular and molecular damage that constitute mammalian ageing and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. Dr de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations. He is a highly sought-after speaker who gives 40–50 invited talks per year at scientific conferences, universities, companies in areas ranging from pharma to life insurance, and to the public.
Israel launches its first AI-powered flu vaccination campaign
The company’s machine learning-based tool applies advanced algorithms to Maccabi’s existing electronic patient data to identify unvaccinated individuals at highest risk of developing serious flu-related complications. These could include elderly people; those with uncontrolled chronic diseases or respiratory diseases; long-term smokers; those that are immunodeficient or have diabetes; or children, explained Dr. Jeremy Orr, CEO of EarlySign.
The EarlySign investigational algorithm flags these individuals, who are then contacted by their healthcare providers and encouraged to come into the clinic and be vaccinated. Patients can be contacted by phone, text message or even snail mail, depending on their communication preferences and the methods offered by their clinics.
Orr noted that the program is especially important this year when many people have already died from the flu in Israel and the virus is expected to take an exceptionally heavier toll than usual this year.
How science is changing the nature of families | The Economist
Science is enabling women to have children later in life as new technologies transform IVF success rates. But an increasingly globalised IVF trade also poses dangers.
Science is changing how and when families are made. Women are going to be able to have both career and family in a way that we’ve never seen before. New technologies are transforming IVF success rates. AI allows us to look at features of the embryo invisible to the human eye.
Dawn and her husband, Mike, who is 66 are proud first-time parents in Nova Scotia, Canada. They married in 1977 and tried for a baby for decades. Attempts to conceive naturally and to adopt failed. So five years ago Dawn turned to IVF and donor eggs for help.
In Canada, as in America, industry guidelines discourage embryo transfers to women over 55 who face a higher risk of prenatal health conditions including pre-eclampsia, hypertension and diabetes. Dawn considered surrogacy. She looked abroad to developing countries with less restrictive guidelines and legislation.
International fertility consultant, Crystal Travis directed the couple towards Georgia, one of the world’s least regulated fertility markets and one of the few countries that allows surrogates and donors of eggs and embryos to be paid. After medical tests, Dawn had an embryo made with a donor egg and donor sperm implanted.
The total number of fertility clinics around the world is estimated to have increased by almost 70% in the last ten years. The value of the global fertility industry is predicted to rise from $25bn today, to $41bn by 2026. Many believe there needs to be more regulation of an increasingly globalised IVF trade including Dr Danielle Lane, a fertility specialist based in San Francisco.
A human-in-the-loop deep learning paradigm for synergic visual evaluation in children | Article
Recently published an article on Deep Learning.
Examining the visual acuity of children who are younger than three years old is important for the early discovery of abnormal visual development, potential ophthalmic diseases, and neurological disease.
If the visual abnormal development is not diagnosed in time, later development will be affected, but performing visual examination in children is challenging due to their lack of understanding of instructions. Evaluating the visual acuity of children remains difficult since many children are unable to effectively express their understanding, especially with respect to directions (i.e., up, down, left and right). In addition, it is difficult for children to concentrate for a long time during the vision examination. The Teller visual acuity (TVA) card can be used to evaluate the visual acuity of children, but not all the operations are recorded and can be reviewed.
Abstract
Cheap drug may alleviate treatment-resistance in leukemia
A common and inexpensive drug may be used to counteract treatment resistance in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), one of the most common forms of blood cancer. This is the conclusion of a study in mice and human blood cells performed at Karolinska Institutet and SciLifeLab and published in the medical journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. The researchers will now launch a clinical study to test the new combination treatment in patients.
Leukemia is a group of blood cancers that results in excess amounts of white blood cells. There are both chronic forms of leukemia that progress slowly over many years and acute types of leukemia that evolve rapidly. AML affects more than 20,000 people in the United States each year, and the mortality rate is high especially in older patients.
One of the most common drugs to treat AML is cytarabine (ara-C), a cytotoxic drug that interferes with DNA replication. However, many patients do not respond to the treatment because their leukemic cells express high levels of the enzyme SAMHD1, which breaks down the active metabolite of cytarabine, ara-CTP. These patients have a significantly worse survival rate than patients with low leukemic levels of SAMHD1. Therefore, one promising strategy to improve the treatment of AML is to inhibit the effects of this enzyme on cytarabine.