Lifeboat Foundation

The birth of the first baby born using a technique called mitochondrial replacement, which uses DNA from three people to “correct” an inherited genetic mutation, was announced on Sept. 27.

Mitochondrial replacement or donation allows women who carry mitochondrial diseases to avoid passing them on to their child. These diseases can range from mild to life-threatening. No therapies exist and only a few drugs are available to treat them.

There are no international rules regulating this technique. Just one country, the United Kingdom, explicitly regulates the procedure. It’s a similar situation with other assisted reproductive techniques. Some countries permit these techniques and others don’t.

Continue reading “The next frontier in reproductive tourism? Genetic modification” »

New technology driving down the cost of research and therapies!

New technology arriving that will help drive down the costs of gene therapies.

“The researchers were able to use a closed, semi-automated benchtop system to produce genetically-modified HSCs in just one night and hope that such systems will increase the availability and affordability of cell therapies”.

Continue reading “A Semi-Automated Benchtop System to Produce Genetically Modified Stem Cells: Interview with Professor Jennifer Adair” »

I have been evangelizing this for a while and glad to see others chiming in.

London, Nov 26 (IANS) Researchers have engineered cells with a “built-in genetic circuit” that produces a molecule that impairs the ability of cancer cells to survive and grow in their low oxygen environment.

The genetic circuit produces the machinery necessary for the production of a compound that inhibits a protein which has a significant and critical role in the growth and survival of tumours.

Continue reading “Human cells with ‘built-in circuit’ can kill cancer cells” »

WASHINGTON – Scientists believe genetic engineering experiments have the potential to wipe out malaria and other illnesses that kill millions of people every year.

But they also acknowledge they could have unintended consequences that could be catastrophic.

So, over the next four years, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, dubbed DARPA, plans to develop a cleanup crew for engineered genes deemed harmful to the eco-system.

You get out what you put in.

You are what you eat, the old saying goes, but why is that so? Researchers have known for some time that diet affects the balance of microbes in our bodies, but how that translates into an effect on the host has not been understood. Now, research in mice is showing that microbes communicate with their hosts by sending out metabolites that act on histones—thus influencing gene transcription not only in the colon but also in tissues in other parts of the body. The findings publish November 23 in Molecular Cell.

“This is the first of what we hope is a long, fruitful set of studies to understand the connection between the microbiome in the gut and its influence on host health,” says John Denu, a professor of biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and one of the study’s senior authors. “We wanted to look at whether the gut microbiota affect epigenetic programming in a variety of different tissues in the host.” These tissues were in the proximal colon, the liver, and fat tissue.

Continue reading “Changes in the diet affect epigenetics via the microbiota” »

In Brief

• Researchers have discovered that placing synthetic genetic circuits in liposomes prevents them from interfering with one another, while still allowing them to communicate.
• Not only could this new form of “modular” genetic circuits lead to more complex engineered circuits, it could also provide insight as to how the earliest life on Earth formed.

By applying engineering principles to biology, researchers can create biological systems that don’t exist naturally. A problem of synthetic biology, however, is that these engineered genetic circuits can interfere with each other. While beneficial on their own, some of these man-made circuits become useless when they come in contact with each other, and this bars them from being used to solve complex biological problems.

Continue reading “Researchers Just Solved One of the Biggest Problems in Synthetic Biology” »

SENS makes official comment on the excellent news about Mitochondrial repair from UCLA and Caltech.

So the big news is progress has been made on Mitochondrial repair. Our resident expert at the SENS Research Foundation, Dr. Matthew O’Connor of the MitoSENS project had this to say about the exciting news:

“New work from UCLA and Caltech has shown that a genetic pathway can be harnessed to selectively remove mutant mitochondria from the muscles of fruit flies. This work from Kandul et al is exciting because it raises the possibility of someday finding a way to control this genetic pathway in such a way to selectively delete mutant mitochondria. Further they did it in live flies in a tissue (muscle) where we are especially concerned about the impact of mitochondrial DNA mutations. Our ability to selectively control genetic pathways in non-genetically engineered animals (such as humans) is, however, extremely limited so it may be a long time before any clinical benefits can be realized from this research.” — Dr. Matthew O’Connor SRF

Continue reading “Turning back the aging clock” »

In China, there are fewer regulations and ethical quandaries standing in the way of genetic progress.

As the price of DNA sequencing drops, a new wave of consumer genomics companies is taking the science mainstream. Are you ready?