Lifeboat Foundation

This short video (with some fun integrated graphics) is from an interview I did with El Pais (the largest newspaper in Spain). It highlights some of the emerging technologies and approaches which have the potential to shift health, medicine and biopharma from its intermittent and reactive physician-centric mode, to an era of more continuous data and a proactive approach, in which the individual is increasingly empowered and integrated into personalized wellness, diagnosis and therapy. The video is below and some associated thoughts follow:

Diagnostics- Era of the digital black bag: Ranging from an eye, ear and throat exam (from connected devices designed for the patient like CellScope, MedWand and Tyto) to cardiac exams enabled by low cost EKG’s (AliveCor and Kito), digital diagnostics is coming to the home. Some will even do automated interpretations (i.e. the EKG interpreted by the app and send to the cloud), where the diagnosis and management of disease will increasingly be enabled outside of the usual clinic, ER or hospital. Wearable patches that integrate multiple vital signs, such as those developed by Vital Connect and Proteus Digital Health will enable more complex disease management and monitoring with ICU level data (EKG, respiratory rate, temperature, position and more), outside of the clinical environment.

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The first attempt at using gene therapy to prevent regular aging allegedly happened last month in what could spell the beginning of a new era in do-it-yourself genetic modification.

CEO and founder of BioViva Sciences USA Inc, Liz Parrish, claims she underwent gene therapy at an undisclosed location in Latin America where she received two forms of treatment, including muscle mass enhancement and therapy to increase the length of the telomeres, the DNA caps which protect the chromosome from deterioration and are associated with longer life span.

Parrish announced in a Reddit AMA that she had gone through the therapy and if successful she plans to roll out a public offering in three to five years despite neither treatment being FDA approved. The results of the therapy are yet unknown and she says she feels no different so far but believes it will be months before any changes occur. If successful her body, in theory, should begin to de-age.

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Electrocorticography (ECoG) was pioneered in the early 1950s by Wilder Penfield and Herbert Jasper, neurosurgeons at the Montreal Neurological Institute. The two developed ECoG as part of their groundbreaking Montreal procedure, a surgical protocol used to treat patients with severe epilepsy. The cortical potentials recorded by ECoG were used to identify epileptogenic zones – regions of the cortex that generate epileptic seizures. These zones would then be surgically removed from the cortex during resectioning, thus destroying the brain tissue where epileptic seizures had originated. Penfield and Jasper also used electrical stimulation during ECoG recordings in patients undergoing epilepsy surgery under local anesthesia. This procedure was used to explore the functional anatomy of the brain, mapping speech areas and identifying the somatosensory and somatomotor cortex areas to be excluded from surgical removal. This week we learned that Google has filed a patent relating to this medical field titled “Microelectrode Array for an Electrocorticogram.”

Google’s patent FIG. 6 noted above shows an application of the microelectrode array 1 according to the invention when recording an electrocorticogram of a human being. The microelectrode array is wirelessly connected to an electronic control device 10, which comprises in particular an amplifier for the electrode signals and a data acquisition system. The microelectrode array, implanted e.g. below the patient’s scalp, has an energy receiving coil 60 and an antenna 61 for bidirectional data transfer between the microelectrode array 1 and the electronic control device. It is also possible for the energy receiving coil simultaneously to be used as an antenna, such that no separate antenna is required.

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Brendan I. Koerner at Wired, explores the ramifications of the authorities requesting DNA from ancestry sites:

Mitch Morrissey, Denver’s district attorney and one of the nation’s leading advocates for familial DNA searching, stresses that the technology is “an innovative approach to investigating challenging cases, particularly cold cases where the victims are women or children and traditional investigative tactics fail to yield a solid suspect.” Familial DNA searches have indeed helped nab people who might otherwise have evaded justice. In the most celebrated example, Los Angeles police arrested a man believed to be the Grim Sleeper serial killer after discovering that the crime scene DNA shared a significant number of genetic markers with that of a convicted felon—who turned out to be the man’s son.

But the well-publicized success stories obscure the fact that familial DNA searches can generate more noise than signal. “Anyone who knows the science understands that there’s a high rate of false positives,” says Erin Murphy, a New York University law professor and the author of Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA. The searches, after all, look for DNA profiles that are similar to the perpetrator’s but by no means identical, a scattershot approach that yields many fruitless leads, and for limited benefit. In the United Kingdom, a 2014 study found that just 17 percent of familial DNA searches “resulted in the identification of a relative of the true offender.”

Continue reading “Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers’ DNA” »

In the last few years, the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) has been thrust into the mainstream. No longer just the domain of sci-fi fans, nerds or Google engineers, I hear people discussing AI at parties, coffee shops and even at the dinner table: My five-year-old daughter brought it up the other night over taco lasagna. When I asked her if anything interesting had happened in school, she replied that her teacher discussed smart robots.

The exploration of intelligence — be it human or artificial — is ultimately the domain of epistemology, the study of knowledge. Since the first musings of creating AI back in antiquity, epistemology seems to have led the debate on how to do it. The question I hear most in this field from the public is: How can humans develop another intelligent consciousness if we can’t even understand our own?

It’s a prudent question. The human brain, despite being only about 3 pounds in weight, is the least understood organ in the body. And with a billion neurons — with 100 trillion connections — it’s safe to say it’s going to be a long time before we end up figuring out the brain.

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Unfortunately, the answer is no. At least for now. But that’s not to say this isn’t important, promising new research.

The reports centre on the supposedly serendipitous discovery of a link between an experimental malaria vaccine for pregnant women and a molecule that sits on the surface of cancer cells.

So what did the study – published in the journal Cancer Cell – actually show?

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When a team of Dutch scientists unveiled the world’s first stem cell beef burger in 2013, it carried a $300,000 price tag. Worse, it was dry and tasteless. But since the initial lackluster reviews, Mark Post and his colleagues have been hard at work. Now, they say they hope to have a commercially saleable cow-less patty on the market in five years.

Until very recently, lab-grown beef sounded like science fiction. But rapid advances in molecular biology and stem cell technology have placed the futuristic concept within reach. And the arguments for removing animals from the meat equation are practically endless: The meat industry as it exists today swallows an enormous fraction of our land and natural resources, produces vast quantities of greenhouse gases, has contributed to the rise of antibiotic resistant infections, and in many cases, is downright cruel. If test tube burgers can eliminate or diminish even a fraction of these problems, then this seems like one crazy idea worth pursuing.

And pursue it scientists have. In addition to Mark Post’s stem cell burger effort, a team of Israeli researchers under the banner Future Meat are now trying to grow whole chicken breasts in the lab. Meanwhile, efforts to culture fish protein have cropped up intermittently over the years.

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We all have different circadian rhythms but they slow down during aging, and we may be able to do something about it.

Your body is in a state of constant flux and the circadian rhythm is its master regulator, controlling everything from sleep cycles to appetite and beyond. Jet lag is a side effect of a confused internal cycle as it adjusts to a new timetable. Shift work and irregular patterns of activity can also potentially cause some serious problems if sustained for a long period, including raising risk of type 2 diabetes, dementia and all cause mortality.

When researchers studied aging mice, they saw a progressive decline in levels of molecules called polyamines. These are involved with a number of processes, but particularly in cell growth and circadian rhythm. The drop in polyamines also coincided with a slowing of their circadian cycle — which increased disease risk.

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We shall see…

Scientists might have accidentally made a huge step forward in the search for a cure for cancer — discovering unexpectedly that a malaria protein could be an effective weapon against the disease.

Danish researchers were hunting for a way of protecting pregnant women from malaria, which can cause huge problems because it attacks the placenta. But they found at the same time that armed malaria proteins can attack cancer, too — an approach which could be a step towards curing the disease.

Continue reading “Cure for cancer might accidentally have been found, and it could be malaria” »