Lifeboat Foundation

Opening up the blood-brain barrier to deliver drugs (credit: Focused Ultrasound Foundation)

The blood-brain barrier has been non-invasively opened in a human patient for the first time. A team at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto used focused ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier (BBB), allowing for effective delivery of chemotherapy into a patient’s malignant brain tumor.

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Resetting Your Biological Clock: New Enzyme Found To Repair Telomeres.

The telomere caps on the end of your chromosomes unravel bit by bit with every cell division, and if they’re not repaired division eventually stops altogether. Cells like stem cells express special enzymes to lengthen these caps, and we’ve now found another one that does the job.

A key player in aging?

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I had read about Singapore in genetic engineering way back in the 90’s. I think they were 1st or 2nd in making immortal skin cells at the time.

Singapore scientists have unravelled a mystery that could pave the way for turning back the clock on ageing.

A recent study led by Dr Ng Shyh Chang of the Genome Institute of Singapore at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) has found a gene in human egg cells that suppresses an enzyme causing cells to age.

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Biotech company Editas Medicine is planning to start human trials to genetically edit genes and reverse blindness.

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This animation depicts the CRISPR-Cas9 method for genome editing – a powerful new technology with many applications in biomedical research, including the potential to treat human genetic disease. Feng Zhang, a leader in the development of this technology, is a faculty member at MIT, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and a core member of the Broad Institute. Further information can be found on Prof. Zhang’s website at http://zlab.mit.edu.

Images and footage courtesy of Sputnik Animation, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Justin Knight and pond5.

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Treating the brain often requires invasive surgery, but a new technique involving ultrasound and air bubbles has now shown promise at delivering drugs through the blood-brain barrier.

One of the biggest challenges of medicating brain tumours is actually getting drugs into the organ. Your brain is well protected from invasion by untoward substances or life forms, and this protection limits what will enter from the bloodstream. There have been previous efforts to open up the barrier, but they often involve a surgical approach that is far from ideal.

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New article for Vice Motherboard on why society should support legalization of all drugs–and a short video of the Immortality Bus in Arkansas talking to marijuana supporters (a state where it’s totally illegal):

The “Mount Rushmore of the Drug War” featuring founding prohibitionists Harry Anslinger, Billie Holiday, and Arnold Rothstein. Image: Donkey Hotey/Flickr

Continue reading “Legalization of Drugs Should Be Part of a Transhumanist Agenda” »

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Sugars may taste divine, but they’re also highly reactive molecules that progressively stiffen your body in a process called glycation. Scientists have now synthesised the primary molecule formed in glycation for the first time, leading to hope that drugs can be designed to break them apart.

What is glycation?

In our bodies sugars continuously react with proteins in an unregulated manner in a process known as glycation. This leads to the formation of abnormal chemical modifications of the protein which may impair its normal function. These sugar-modifications are collectively known as advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and can be subdivided in two main categories. First are the modifications that affect a single amino acid. The second category consists of modifications that link two amino acids together in a structure called a crosslink.

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