The Medical Thread

[barcode120x]

1 in 2 Canadians will get cancer, 1 in 4 will die of disease: Cancer Society


I wouldn't be surprised if the odds/% are higher for us US's peeps.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/1-2-canadi...070200446.html

[AnimeFan188]

New diabetes treatment teaches rogue immune
cells to behave:

"A treatment targeting wayward immune cells in people with type 1 or type 2 diabetes
may help even years later, a new study finds.

For the treatment, researchers take blood from a person with diabetes and separate out
the immune system cells (lymphocytes). They briefly expose those cells to stem cells
from umbilical cord blood from an unrelated infant. Then they return the lymphocytes to
the patient's body.

The researchers have dubbed this treatment "stem cell educator therapy," because when
exposed to the stem cells, the errant lymphocytes seem to re-learn how they should
behave."

See:

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2017...5361500055808/

[AnimeFan188]

A DIY Pharmaceutical Revolution Is
Coming—If It Doesn’t Kill Us First:

"Laufer has a doctorate in mathematics, not medicine. By day, he’s a math professor at
Menlo College, a small private college in the heart of Silicon Valley. He’s also a
pharmahacker, the most visible and outspoken member of a small community of hobbyist
chemists who believe that pharmaceuticals, like some software, should be open-source
and accessible to all. In 2015, he founded the Four Thieves Vinegar collective, a loose
consortium of hackers and scientists aiming to kickstart a DIY revolution for legal drugs.

“People should be able to take control of their own health choices,” he said."

See:

http://gizmodo.com/a-diy-pharmaceuti...n-t-1796865404

[AnimeFan188]

Research holds Promise for Future Clinical
Therapies to Slow Aging:

"Researchers at Houston Methodist made a surprising discovery leading to the
development of technology with the ability to rejuvenate human cells. And that couldn’t be
more important for the small population of children who are aging too quickly – children
with progeria.

Cooke studied cells from children with progeria, a rare condition marked by rapid aging
that usually robs them of the chance to live beyond their early teens. They focused on
progeria, because the condition tells them a lot about aging in general that’s ultimately
relevant to all of us."

See:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/0...low-aging.html

[AnimeFan188]

First implants of stem-cell pouches to ‘cure’ type 1 diabetes:

"Last week, two people with type 1 diabetes became the first to receive implants
containing cells generated from embryonic stem cells to treat their condition. The hope is
that when blood sugar levels rise, the implants will release insulin to restore them to
normal."

See:

https://www.newscientist.com/article...pe-1-diabetes/

[AnimeFan188]

Repairing Organs With the Touch of a Nanochip:

"Researchers at Ohio State University developed a way to change cells inside the body
from one type to another—with just one touch from a nanochip. This new technology,
called “tissue nanotransfection,” could be used to repair and regenerate body tissues,
including organs, in a way that is non-invasive and painless."

See:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/video/biome...-of-a-nanochip

[AnimeFan188]

New wonder drug hailed as biggest breakthrough in
fight against heart attacks and cancer:

"A new class of drugs which could prevent thousands of heart attacks and deaths from
cancer has been hailed as the biggest breakthrough since statins.

Scientists last night said the discovery ushered in “a new era of therapeutics” which
work in an entirely different way to conventional treatment.

As well as cutting the risk of a heart attack by one quarter, the drugs halved the chances
of dying from cancer and protected against gout and arthritis."

See:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2...against-heart/

[AnimeFan188]

Bionic lens can make vision three times better than 20-20:

"Future Bionic lens could also include projection systems that will give the user
capabilities of projecting their phone screen, or integrating NASA technologies to
allow for better focusing resolution than anything seen before, or even installing
a system that allows for slow drug delivery inside the eye."

See:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/0...han-20-20.html

[AnimeFan188]

Small RNA could be breakthrough cancer
treatment with a cancer kill switch:

"Small RNA molecules originally developed as a tool to study gene function trigger a
mechanism hidden in every cell that forces the cell to commit suicide, reports a new
Northwestern Medicine study, the first to identify molecules to trigger a fail-safe
mechanism that may protect us from cancer.

The mechanism — RNA suicide molecules — can potentially be developed into a novel
form of cancer therapy, the study authors said."

See:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/1...ll-switch.html

[AnimeFan188]

Want to ‘melt away’ fat that causes heart
attacks? This drug might do that, study finds:

"It was originally considered to treat breast cancer and diabetes, but a drug called
Trodusquemine also seems to be extremely successful at clearing out fat in arteries.

That’s according to a study from researchers at the University of Aberdeen, which found
that the drug “melts away” fatty materials that can lead to strokes and heart attacks
after forming in arteries."

See:

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nati...182603871.html

[AnimeFan188]

Old human cells rejuvenated in breakthrough discovery on aging:

"A new way to rejuvenate old cells in the laboratory, making them not only look
younger, but start to behave more like young cells, has been discovered by
researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Brighton.

A team led Professor Lorna Harries, Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University
of Exeter, has discovered a new way to rejuvenate inactive senescent cells. Within
hours of treatment the older cells started to divide, and had longer telomeres – the
‘caps’ on the chromosomes which shorten as we age.

This discovery, funded by the Dunhill Medical Trust, builds on earlier findings from the
Exeter group that showed that a class of genes called splicing factors are
progressively switched off as we age. The University of Exeter research team, working
with Professor Richard Faragher and Dr Elizabeth Ostler from the University of
Brighton, found that splicing factors can be switched back on with chemicals, making
senescent cells not only look physically younger, but start to behave more like young
cells and start dividing."

See:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/1...-on-aging.html

[MrTerrorist]

Cancer blood test ‘enormously exciting’

This is good news to hear.

[AnimeFan188]

New 'Reactionware' 3D Printing System Spits
Out Pharmaceuticals On-Demand:

"Philip Kitson and colleagues at the University of Glasgow have developed a new
framework for 3D printing drug manufacturing devices on-site on an as-needed basis.
All it requires is a $2,000 3D printer and a drug specification (the manufacturing
processes required to produce it). Given such a specification, software created by
Kitson's group dictates to the printer exactly what sort of manufacturing hardware it
needs to print that is then capable of producing a particular drug. So, it's machines
(microreactors, actually) for making specific drugs that are printed, not the drugs
themselves."


"The heart of the new system is less the hardware than the generation of standardized
recipes for manufacturing specific drugs. The drug synthesis processes usually
implemented in large-scale manufacturing schemes are instead translated into simple
step-by-step workflows that can be translated by software into small manufacturing
devices that can be cheaply 3D printed. As proof-of-concept, Kitson's team produced
baclofen, a muscle relaxant, from readily available chemical precursors (chemicals
that change into other chemicals) using a three-step process.

It'd be hard to overstate the potential of this sort of drug (or chemical, generally)
manufacturing."

See:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...cals-on-demand

[AnimeFan188]

Stanford Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates any cancer tumor
in mice and human trials are starting:

"Injecting minute amounts of two immune-stimulating agents directly into solid tumors
in mice can eliminate all traces of cancer in the animals, including distant, untreated
metastases, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of
Medicine.

The approach works for many different types of cancers, including those that arise
spontaneously, the study found.

The researchers believe the local application of very small amounts of the agents could
serve as a rapid and relatively inexpensive cancer therapy that is unlikely to cause the
adverse side effects often seen with bodywide immune stimulation."

See:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/0...-starting.html

[AnimeFan188]

Virtual Lab Rats Could Replace Living Animals in Early Drug Testing:

"On Monday, the UK-based National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement, and
Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) awarded its 2017 International award to a
team at the University of Oxford, for their research into using computer simulations in
place of living animals.

With the help of their “Virtual Assay” software, the team developed a computer model
of human cardiac cells and ran thousands of simulations to see how 62 drugs (and 15
compounds widely used in research) affected the cells. Matched up to actual clinical
data, the model was able to guess correctly whether a substance was potentially
dangerous to the heart a vast majority of the time.

Specifically, it predicted if a drug or compound could cause arrhythmia—an irregular
heartbeat—89 percent of the time. And it even seemed to outperform similar animal
research: Drug trials on heart cells taken from rabbits only matched up to the clinical
data up to 75 percent of the time, the researchers found.

The findings were published last September in Frontiers in Physiology."

See:

https://gizmodo.com/virtual-lab-rats...rly-1823713204

[AnimeFan188]

Have we got the causes of type 2 diabetes wrong?:

"The latest research, published in Cell Metabolism, suggests that a molecule called methylglyoxal (MG) may cause many of the defects
associated with type 2 diabetes."


"These new findings might help explain why, even with good control of blood-sugar levels, diabetic complications still develop. There
are important implications from this work, as this suggests that it might be possible to slow down – or even prevent – diabetes
complications from developing through a combination of good glucose control along with MG reduction."

See:

https://theconversation.com/have-we-...es-wrong-93326

[AnimeFan188]

George Church: there is eye-popping anti-aging results in mice and age
reversing tests on dogs:

"The prolongation of human lifespan is “the biggest thing that is going to happen in the 21st
century,” says David Sinclair, a Harvard biologist who collaborates with the Church lab. “It’s going
to make what Elon Musk is doing look fairly pedestrian.”

Rejuvenate Bio has met with investors and won a grant from the US Special Operations Command
to look into “enhancement” of military dogs while Harvard is seeking a broad patent on genetic
means of aging control in species including the “cow, pig, horse, cat, dog, rat, etc.”

The team hit on the idea of treating pets because proving that it’s possible to increase longevity in
humans would take too long. “You don’t want to go to the FDA and say we extend life by 20 years.
They’d say, ‘Great, come back in 20 years with the data,’” Church said during the event in Boston.

The lab started working through a pipeline of more than 60 different gene therapies, which it is
testing on old mice, alone and in combinations. The Harvard group now plans to publish a
scientific report on a technique that extends rodents’ lives by modifying two genes to act on four
major diseases of aging: heart and kidney failure, obesity, and diabetes. According to Church, the
results are “pretty eye-popping.”"

See:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/0...s-on-dogs.html

[AnimeFan188]

Microbots Deliver Stem Cells in the Body:

"The astonishing thing about stem cells is that they can be coaxed, in the laboratory,
into becoming nearly any kind of cell—from bone marrow to heart muscle. That
remarkable capability has for years kept scientists busy tinkering with stem cells and
injecting them into animal models in an attempt to grow and replace damaged tissue.

Such scientists have received a ton of attention in that line of work. But there’s a
smaller group of researchers working, to far less fanfare, on a different part of the
stem cell challenge: how to deliver those cells to the body’s hard-to-reach places.

Researchers typically deliver stem cells via injection—a needle. But that method can
damage healthy tissue, especially when the target is a deep brain structure, or
delicate vasculature, or the inner ear.

A group out of Hong Kong announced this week that they had invented a new delivery
tool using tiny, magnetically-controlled robots. The cell-carrying machines move
noninvasively through the body to a target site and deliver their stem cell cargo.

The researchers, led by Dong Sun, a professor at City University of Hong Kong,
demonstrated their device in zebrafish and mice, and reported their success in the
journal Science Robotics."

See:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-...ls-in-the-body

[AnimeFan188]

Swift Gene-Editing Method May Revolutionize Treatments
for Cancer and Infectious Diseases:

"For the first time, scientists have found a way to efficiently and precisely remove genes
from white blood cells of the immune system and to insert beneficial replacements, all in
far less time than it normally takes to edit genes.

If the technique can be replicated in other labs, experts said, it may open up profound
new possibilities for treating an array of diseases, including cancer, infections like H.I.V.
and autoimmune conditions like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis."

See:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/h...ng-cancer.html

[AnimeFan188]

Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine:

"With a shaved head, dark beard, and an ever-present camo jacket, Laufer doesn’t look
like the type of person you’d seek out for medical advice—but that’s exactly his point. As
the founding member of Four Thieves Vinegar, a volunteer network of anarchists and
hackers developing DIY medical technologies, Laufer has spent the last decade working
to liberate life-saving pharmaceuticals from the massive corporations that own them.
Laufer has no formal training in medicine and he’ll be the first to tell you he’s not a
doctor. In fact, from a regulatory standpoint he’s more qualified to do mathematical
work on nuclear weapons than treat patients. But Laufer’s never really been the type to
let rules and regulations stand in his way."

See:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...gar-collective