Lifeboat Foundation

By 2034 the annual cost of diabetes in the US will be comparable to the market capitalization of Google.

Diabetes comes in two main forms, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 diabetes is caused by a failure of the body to produce the hormone insulin that helps sugar molecules to be absorbed by your cells. This type of diabetes is commonly caused by an autoimmune reaction in which the body attacks the pancreas, the gland that produces insulin, and normally occurs during childhood. The second form is when the body becomes insensitive to insulin; the hormone is still there but the cells no longer respond to it. In the Dutch language this form used to be called ‘ouderdomsdiabetes’ meaning ‘diabetes of old age’. This description is no longer accurate as even teenagers have now been diagnosed with it.

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ASCB’s Celldance Studios released Monday (Dec. 14) three new short videos made by cell scientists, featuring dramatic live cell imaging.

The videos, which take advantage of accelerating advances in super-resolution imaging, fluorescent tagging, and Big Data manipulation, where made in the labs of Douglas Robinson at John Hopkins University, John Condeelis at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Satyajit Mayor at the National Centre for the Biological Sciences (NCBS) in India.

Continue reading “ASCB Celldance 2015 premieres three videos featuring live cell imaging” »

Robot doctors, virtual reality vacations and smart toothbrushes. These are just a few of the things the world can expect to see in the not-so-distant future, says Stanford and Duke researcher and lecturer Vivek Wadhwa.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 300 people in Palm Beach in December at billionaire Jeff Greene’s “Closing the Gap” conference, which addressed the growing divide between the wealthy and poor and how the rise of machines might kill white-collar jobs, Wadhwa sketched a sci-fi vision for the future that he says will soon be a reality thanks to rapid technological innovation.

“The future is going to be happening much, much faster than anyone ever imagined,” said Wadhwa, explaining that tech growth has been exponential — meaning as technology advances it does so with increasing speed.

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Google’s verily Launches New Robotic Surgical Company called Verb Surgical by teaming up with Johnson & Johnson.

The company formerly known as Google Life Sciences is one of the firms behind Verb Surgical Inc, which will develop advanced surgical robots. This promises to be just the first of Verily’s medical and academic partnerships.

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Last week the FDA announced that they have granted permission for the TAME trial. The Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial is the first human trial specifically looking at an anti-aging drug in humans.

Repurposing An Old Medicine

Metformin is an old drug, first approved in France in 1957, for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). However extracts from the French liliac (Galega officinalis), the plant containing a precursor of metformin, has been used to treat frequent urination, a symptom of diabetes, since the Middle Ages. In 2012 in the US about 60 million prescriptions for metformin were written, making metformin the most used antidiabetic drug. Amazingly, every year about 37,000 metric tons of metformin are produced! Metformin is also a super-cheap drug, costing only cents per dose.

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This new development could help us in the fight against Parkinson’s.

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2016 will be the year of VR. Here’s how it will change everything from medicine to the military.

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C. elegans roundworm (credit: The Goldstein Lab)

When researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in California administered an antidepressant called mianserin to the Caenorhabditis elegans roundworm in 2007, they discovered the drug increased the lifespan of the “young adulthood” of roundworms by 30–40 per cent.

So, does that mean it will work in humans? Not necessarily. “There are millions of years of evolution between worms and humans,” says TSRI researcher Michael Petrascheck. “We may have done this in worms, but we don’t want people to get the impression they can take the drug we used in our study to extend their own teens or early twenties.”

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The UCHealth Eye Center implants first bionic eye in a Colorado resident.

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