Let us assume that you are a technological early adopter, a maker, a hacker, a geek. Your software/hardware skills and experiences are much better than the bulk of licensed physicians. You also have a G1.
Now imagine a mobile application/gadget-in-a-belt-pouch that is the most advanced telemedicine solution in the market. With this application/gadget you were able to non-invasively monitor vital signs of the people that matter you the most at anytime from anywhere around the world. You were able to quickly recognize life threatening heart and respiratory problems of the people you care about and maybe save their lives.
The problem is that such a product exists according to this press release (via androidguys) but you are not allowed to legally use it (no information on the details of purchase yet) unless you are a registered and licensed physician. The press release does not offer any reasonable (legal?) explanation on why this is the case.
After the Nature cover article Hugh Rienhoff and the story of My Daughter’s DNA is now covered by Wired magazine. I wrote about Hugh (a fellow SciFoo Camper) as an example of any future bioDIY effort in The conditions of a mass biotech DIY movement and now the Wired piece gives us more context and details concerning how things were actually done. This is really a story that cannot be overemphasized by simply telling it again and again.
By making inquiries with local surplus brokers, Rienhoff discovered he could buy a secondhand PCR machine for less than a MacBook. He ended up purchasing a full working model for just $750. Obtaining additional supplies, like the PCR reagents, for his experiment was tougher. Some chemical companies didn’t want to ship to a private address, so Rienhoff pretended his house was the headquarters of the fictional Institute for Future Study.
While Rienhoff could spring for his own PCR machine, a used gene sequencer (assuming he could find one) would cost around $100,000. So he found a university lab (which he declines to identify) that would sequence the genes he had amplified, for $3.50 per 50-microliter sample. In spring 2007, Rienhoff mailed in more than 200 samples.
Rienhoff compared Beatrice’s DNA with the information on Ensembl, looking for any base-pair variants that hadn’t been previously recorded on Ensembl. Read the rest of this entry »
The Google Tech Talks channel on YouTube slowly but irresistibly became my private university in current tech trends. Here is a recent talk on the amazing HealthMap by its developers John Brownstein, Clark Freifeld, Mikaela Keller. According to the about page:
HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.
Last year I was probably the only SciFoo Camper with an explicit life extension commitment. I suggested & held a session which was related a bit to partial immortalization but was rather about the systems biology perspective in general, illustrated with some examples. So throughout the terrific SciFoo Camp 2007 life extension as a conversation topic remained rather implicit (ok, close to zero) and there was not much room to discuss it in the lack of other fellow life extensionists.
In my opinion the whole point of unconferences is to form the good aggregate of people with a common interest & similar/complementer message to join forces in order to draw enough (intellectual) attention for their topic. In this context, an unconference is about topics at the first place, not just about people. Idea networking is as important as social networking.
And if something fits 100% with the idea of SciFoo it is life extension/aging just as handling terrantic scientific datasets, open science or climate change as all these topics are utterly complicated and quite urgent screaming for the attention of the smartest people.
So I emailed Timo Hannay, SciFoo organizer:
“One thing I’ve noticed is that it would be very good to organize a session on scientific life extension technologies and consequences, because the SciFoo people are ideal to see and discuss all angles of this really important topic.”
The concept of decellularizing complex organs in cadavers and reseeding the remaining matrix structure with differentiated, stem or progenitor cells, growing in a bioreactor and transplanting back to the organism could turn out to be a real technological shortcut in the field of tissue engineering. It is not a brand new story on the web, but it is quite new in science and when I heard Doris Taylor at the Understanding Aging Conference talking on that….well I was really amazed.
Dr. Taylor not only showed the pictures of a complete decellularized rat heart matrix, but in fact they did it on a whole rat framework. So the obvious question is whether the technique could be extended to complete human cadavers (imagine the bone and the bone marrow situation) and if yes, when and how? I am sure if there were a useful clinical near term application of this type of tissue engineering, people would include that option too into their testaments.
And now a pop video on the topic and the abstract:
Even tech people in Silicon Valley need to join their powerful forces and sources when it is about aging related neurodegenerative diseases and help research and the clinic.
It’s my first real encounter with a situation in which the officials of the state of California are clearly against innovation for financial reasons obvious enough (is enough):
Wired.com has obtained a copy of the cease-and-desist letter sent to Navigenics by the state of California’s Public Health Department from a company spokesperson.
The letter’s strongest wording is reserved for another section of the law, Business and Professions Code Section 1288, which requires a doctor’s note for all laboratory tests, unless, like pregnancy tests, they are exempt from that law.
“Genetic tests are NOT exempt,” the letter reads. “As such, the test must be ordered by a physician or surgeon.”Read the rest of this entry »
It’s official: The California Department of Public Health wants practicing physicians (many of them prehistorically, sorry, traditionally trained) to be the patres familias in issues between personal genetic test takers and direct-to-consumer personal genetic testing start-ups while declining the test takers’ right to get familiar with their own genetic makeup and risks by their own. Calif. cracks down on 13 genetic testing startups
California health regulators have demanded that 13 direct-to-consumer genetic testing startups halt sales in the state until they prove they meet state standards. All the companies have two weeks to demonstrate to regulators that their laboratories are certified by the state and federal governments, said department spokeswoman Lea Brooks. The startups also must show the tests they are selling California residents have been ordered by a doctor as required by state law.
Sometimes in looking forward it’s good to look back. In cardiac regenerative medicine, probably the only clear success to date is heart transplantation. From the initial grant that Norman Shumway received in 1958 [to study the possibility of heart transplantation] it took more than two decades before the procedure became routine.
Shumway was a careful, thoughtful man. He not only didn’t do the first heart transplant; he didn’t do the second. He was slowed down in the United States because of the regulatory barriers and ethical concerns. Christiaan Barnard, on the other hand, went back to South Africa and decided to just go for it. Sounds familiar?
We realized very quickly that this was not working, that the science was not there. In 1968, a year after his first attempt, Barnard gave up on the procedure and considered it a failure. Everyone gave up, except Shumway. He went back to the lab and spent the next ten years figuring it out. He realized that the issue was rejection.Read the rest of this entry »
Consumer-Enabled Research, the second goal of pioneering personalized genetics company 23andMe, reached its first generation with the launch of 23andWe.
“23andWe marks a new approach to genetics research. By directly involving 23andMe customers in the company’s research projects, the goal is to conduct large-scale studies powered by a web-based community of diverse individuals who are willing to share information (on a confidential basis) about their health and other personal traits.”
A good introduction in Nature on the risks and advantages of letting people know their genetic risk information via personal genetics services. I do hope that the test-takers will finally become the risk overtakers.
Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is a rapidly growing market — the past year has seen the launch of companies, such as Navigenics and 23andMe in California and DeCODEme in Iceland, that offer DNA screening for a range of common genetic variants linked to disease. The testing outfits have created a buzz in the business and research communities as well as in the wider public: Google has invested in two of them and Navigenics briefly opened a store in New York’s hip SoHo district.
“It’s an intriguing idea that you can peel back your genome and reveal your future.”
The idea is that test-takers will be alerted to risks and so take preventive action where possible. But psychosocial scientists who study how people respond to risk information say there is scant evidence that people are affected deeply by genetic test results, or that such tests spur much change in behaviour.Read the rest of this entry »
A burning question for real: What is (or how to set up) the Google Health status/condition of deanimated, frozen people, like Dr. Steven P. Rievman:
Rievman, 64, who co-founded the Cryonics Society of South Florida in the 1960s, now resides in a deep-freeze capsule at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, awaiting the day when medical science can ”re-animate” him and cure his ills: lupus and Type I diabetes, which afflicted him starting at age 17. Read the rest of this entry »
Homeless people without proper medical insurance are the insignificant others for the health care system.
Wikipedia says but maybe it is obvious enough for everybody:
“Health care for the homeless is a major public health challenge.
Homeless people are more likely to suffer injuries and medical problems from their lifestyle on the street, which includes poor nutrition, substance abuse, exposure to the severe elements of weather, and a higher exposure to violence (robberies, beatings, and so on). Yet at the same time, they have little access to public medical services or clinics, in many cases because they lack health insurance.”
In the meantime & on the other side of life Google Health launched this week as the online personal health/medical information management system for people……with a web access, stable income, medical records, medical insurance and home.
At first sight Google Health does not seem to offer any solution for storing the health information of homeless people and thereby helping them somehow. But here there is this option:
So the idea is that social workers/caretakers are uploading and managing the Google Health profile of the homeless people they’re familiar with.
Roni F. Zeiger, MD (watch his presentation), Google Health product manager, whose PubMed profile (if he really is the very same person) gives us a very strong reason why he was hired by Google for this job (he joined Google in 2006).
The 38-year-old, who still sees patients some evenings and weekends at a nearby clinic, said: “At Google, I can use my expertise and knowledge to potentially help millions of people each day.”
Fortunately all of his 3 papers are freely accessible out of which 2 are particularly interesting and related to Google (Health). Here I just copy the abstracts and probably get back to the papers after I digested them.
We designed hedges for clinical queries sent to MEDLINE and Google in an attempt to explicitly model the relationship, such as treatment or diagnosis, between search terms. A pilot evaluation suggested that mean average precision (MAP) improved for a precomputed diagnostic query but not for a precomputed treatment query. An important limitation to this approach is that target resources do not explicitly model these relationships.
Here is a little timeline from a liveblogger for the Google Factory Tour of Search (05/19/08) including the official launch presentation of Google Health – time frame 83:35/1:23:35 – 90:45/1:30:45 -, by dr. Roni Zeiger, Google Health product manager who truly believes – & he is probably right – “that the most interesting, innovative services of Google Health are the ones that we haven’t seen or even thought of yet.”
So watch “the pivotal moment of the history of healthcare” using the words of Stephen Suffin, corporate chief medical officer from Quest Diagnostics.
People expect usually too much from Google even in the sectors, like biotechnology or medicine where Google is not native. For me the recent Google Health – which is basically an embryonic online medical health record system for users with a Gmail Account in the USA – seems to be rather about just catching up with the past than doing the future right now. That is not a criticism but rather a description. Storing/exchanging/updating individual medical records digitally is a “must-have-done-by-now” for the geeks, early technological adopters as the technology long exists, while it is still far-far away concerning current medical practices.
Google Health is really forward thinking in the way that it facilitates medical consumers/patients to upload their medical profile/conditions in the lack of institutional data thereby getting more familiar with everything health related. But Google Health is for the more or less healthy/mainstream and not for the seriously ill: in its recent form it cannot help to find a clinical trial for a rare disease, say.
For the moment, Google Health looks like a charity operation. The company won’t serve ads on the site (presumably to avoid the appearance of impropriety); nor does it plan on selling data, which would likely be extremely lucrative.
Instead, the company is focused on building out the service and growing market share. That’s a good thing, say industry watchers, because it could take years before the market matures and consumers are ready for the digital health revolution.
Yep, it is still too early and building a critical mass is a crucial thing. It is so early that most of the angles remain hidden in obligatory posts on Google Health. I suggest to read the detailed & insightful comments, for instance this one at TechCrunch by Fred Neil:Read the rest of this entry »
In 2007, Google made headlines when they invested $4.4 million in 23andMe, a genetic screening start-up company began by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and a business partner. But if you thought that was Google’s only interest in genetics and DNA, you’re wrong. Google has also been investing in a second DNA start-up called Navigenics, which for $2,500 and a small bit of saliva will provide you with genetic test results delivered securely online containing information about the likelihood for 18 medical conditions.
What’s really funny here is that I predicted this investment last Friday, on the 18th, on Twitter. The original idea was Aaron Swartz’s Google thought experiment: Imagine you were suddenly put in charge of Google. What would you spend your time doing?I came up with this answer (picking Navigenics because of ther profile and location) on behalf of Sergey Brin:
Dear Sir: I came across your blog after reading Stanley Bing’s recent article in Fortune Magazine. I will try to be brief.
I have a 4 year old son who was diagnosed 1.5 years ago with a form of Leigh’s disease; one of the most devastating forms of mitochondrial disease. While he is receiving care from some of the most experienced doctors in the area of mito disease, as you are probably aware the general approach is to prescribe a vitamin regimen and “keep him comfortable.” That is to say, there is no cure or treatment for the disease, and the few centers that are researching the disease are not close to finding one. Since the disease is degenerative, this is a hard pill to swallow.
I am writing to you in hopes that you can recommend doctors or research centers that are applying experimental techniques to treat the disease through systemic regmed, stem cell or other methods. If I wait for traditional medicine to find a treatment (and especially the FDA), I fear it may be too late for my son.
Any help or advice would be appreciated.
Best regards -
Joe Mileti [miletijoe][at][hotmail.com]
Dear Mr. Mileti,
thanks for your honest mail. The kind of organellar, mitochondrial therapy that would be needed in order to replace the Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Kingsley – diagnosed with Parkinson disease at the age 42 – wrote an utterly fatalist, sad&straight and death conscious essay entitled Mine Is Longer than Yours on the last boomer game he calls competitive longevity published in the New Yorker. This piece is the dark counterpart of the recent WiredKurzweil coverage on Mr. K.’s enormous efforts of being prospectively healthy as long as to reach next generation life extension technologies.
In contrast to that, Mr Kingsley, who underwent deep brain stimulation and lives with wires in the brain and batteries in the chest, seems to be somewhat restricted in the age of web to “switching your subscription from Newsweek to Time”. Still, “longevity is not a zero-sum game” – he admits.
Mr. Kingsley is pretty ignorant about any non-selfish motivation behind life extension (he is a political journalist by profession): Read the rest of this entry »
Last year I approached a powerful Wirededitor with the following story pitch: “A full and deep but cool report on the current (scientific) life extension technologies, persons, battles, camps, grants, problems, perspectives.”
His reply was a diplomatic and definite naysaying:
“Thanks for the idea. Alas, we’ve done *way* too many stories on life-extension over the years, from profiles of the singularity guys and Aubrey De Gray (sic) to shorter takes on various startups and stuff. There may be cool stuff out there, but I’m afraid we’ve exhausted our appetite on the subject.”
However the life extension appetite is not something that could be exhausted until the problem is solved systematically and the Wired guys’ appetite seems to be restored and healthy again as in the April Wired issue (not online yet) there is a full story (or rather followup) on the No.1 singularity guy and baby boomer escapist artist Ray Kurzweil called Stayin’ Alive by senior Wired contributing editor Gary Wolf (whose book Wired – A Romance is a good reading).
What is interesting in Kurzweil for experimental scientists/robust life extension supporters is not his meditations on singularity, accelerating change and mind uploading (see the counterarguments by Mark Anderson in the same Wired issue), but his experimental, futuristic, life extensionist lifyestyle:
Kurzweil takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that doesn’t have time to organize them all himself. So he’s hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses. K. also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim.
“We at Life Extension Foundation are pleased to help finance BioTime‘s entry into the field of regenerative medicine. We believe that one of the most important applications of embryonic stem cell technology is the slowing and reversing of aging and age-related disease. Read the rest of this entry »
To learn more, researchers need to collect thousands of genetic profiles – and the health data connected with each of them – to find correlations between the two. That leads to a second goal of 23andMe – to collect a large database of genetic information and then come back to you over time with invitations to provide specific health data and participate in research.
We’re not asking you to do this for purely altruistic reasons – either on our part or on yours. We’re a profit-seeking company, even though our founders and employees – and directors! – all share the vision of better understanding of everyone’s genomic make-up. As for you, the research results your data help produce could translate directly into benefits for you, or at least for your children, grandchildren and friends.
Now imagine a world (2009?) in which 23andMe genotype profiles could be uploaded to your Google Health profile with one click (see picture).
…that can be realistically met, most of them early in this century according to the Committee on Grand Challenges for Engineering with members such as Larry Page, Dean Kamen, Craig Venter, Robert Langer and …lifestyle life extensionist, nanovisionary Ray Kurzweil. There is a challenge though called Engineer better medicines and the essay behind looks as if it had been hacked together by Kurzweil and Venter themselves during a sunny Californian Soy Beer Baby Boomer Beach Party. It is about personalized medicine in large and the only hint – I was able to find – to a recent discipline named regenerative medicine is: Read the rest of this entry »
I found this quote in John Battelle’s blog from a recent CNET article on ex-Googlers by Stephanie Olsen, but I’d like to repeat it just with a different emphasis as I found all the other parts interesting for the biotech community except the one sentence bolded by Battelle. So I bolded those parts: Read the rest of this entry »
This is exactly the type of clinical trial news that should be taken extremely carefully with all due respect and grief.
A girl enrolled in a stem-cell trial for a fatal disease has died. In January, the nine-year-old received a brain transplant of neural stem cells derived from fetal tissue. She was one of six children in the trial for Batten disease, in which children rarely live into their teens. An independent group monitoring the trial decided that the death was due to the disease not the experimental treatment and said the trial could continue.
From the press release on StemCells Incorporation’s Phase I clinical trial of its proprietary HuCNS-SC®product candidate (purified human neural stem cells):
The trial is designed to evaluate the safety and preliminary efficacy of HuCNS-SC cells as a potential treatment for infantile and late infantile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (NCL). NCL, which is often referred to as Batten disease, is a rare and fatal neurodegenerative condition afflicting infants and children.
The patient, a nine-year-old girl, was transplanted with HuCNS-SC cells in January 2007 and was due to return this month to the trial site, Oregon Health & Science University’s (OHSU) Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, for her 12 month follow-up. She was hospitalized nearly two weeks ago, suffering from an apparent viral infection, seizures and respiratory distress before succumbing earlier this week. Read the rest of this entry »
“I’ve changed my mind about the use of enhancement drugs by healthy people. A year ago, if asked, I’d have been against the idea, whereas now I think there’s much to be said for it.”
Before citing further the argument of Campbell I’d like to remind the analogous problems of biotechnological life extension products targeted for healthy people in a “normal” physiologic state. Good example are the resveratrol-like but more effective sirtuin activators with a probably positive healthy lifespan extension effects developed by David Sinclair and his group at Sirtris. The trick is to market Sirtuin activators as anti-diabetes drugs, or find other registered diseases to target with the drugs. According to Mass High Tech:
“Aging is not a disease to the FDA,” Sirtris co-founder Christoph Westphal said, so Sirtris is focusing on drugs to treat ailments of old age.
With this story in our changed and future focused mind it is very promising to read for healthy life extension supporters what Campbell, a mainstream academic science representative has to say on cognitive enhancement drugs:
New cognitive enhancing drugs are being developed, officially for therapy. And the therapeutic importance — both current and potential — of such drugs is indeed significant. But manufacturers won’t turn away the significant revenues from illegal use by the healthy.
That word ‘illegal’ is the rub. Off-prescription use is illegal in the United States, at least. But that illegality reflects an official drugs culture that is highly questionable. It’s a culture in which the Food and Drugs Administration seems reluctant generally to embrace the regulation of enhancement for the healthy, though it is empowered to do so. It is also a culture that is rightly concerned about risk but wrongly founded in the idea that drugs used by healthy people are by definition a Bad Thing. That in turn reflects instinctive attitudes to do with ‘naturalness’ and ‘cheating on yourself’ that don’t stand up to rational consideration. Perhaps more to the point, they don’t stand up to behavioral consideration, as Viagra has shown.
Research and societal discussions are necessary before cognitive enhancement drugs should be made legally available for the healthy, but I now believe that that is the right direction in which to head.
Have you ever asked any important but infrequently asked questions? Have you ever heard about the first personal genome service by the biotech startup 23andMe? Here is an inF.A.Q. addressed to this company:
According to the cool 23andMe genetics educator:
According to the peer review literature this is not necessarily the case and sometimes (rarely I admit) things in your cells can happen otherwise or more scientifically (mitochondrial recombination can occur):
When 23andMe’s Maternal Ancestry Tree service is tracing the genetic path of their customers, the microarray employees are identifying their haplotypes based on the differences in the mitochondrial DNA. The company is using SNPs (single nucleotide variants) unusually both from genes in the compact mitochondrial coding region (around 15.5kb) as well as within the circa 1kb large hypervariable region to give a detailed ancestry assignment. 23andMe examines few thousand places (over 2000 says Mr. Bettinger) on the mitochondrial DNA out of the total 600,000 SNPs.
But.
In the above case the 28 year old man’s blood and muscle differed at 18 positions which allowed assignment of the two sequences to separate European mtDNA haplogroups, H and U5, former being the same as the mother’s haplotype, while the haplotype of the patient’s muscle mtDNA was identical to that of his father’s and uncle’s blood. I wonder whether 23andMe’s Illumina chips can help make things clear in cases like this. (solution: let’s sequence the whole mito genome instead of a couple thousand basepairs). So as the first step in my mission to support the mission of 23andMe to support the mission of academic research I’d like to suggest putting a short tail on the possibility of paternally inherited mtDNA in the cool 23andMe genetics education material. Read the rest of this entry »
After all, what customers can really expect of personal genome services that companies like 23andMe can offer beyond knowing whether they have a perfect pitch or not? If the service can really help in minimizing the risk of life threatening diseases, than the real expectation is to live longer by using those personalized/commercialized genome data. The future will answer this question, but it seems pretty sure that robust life extension (more than, say 100 extra productive and healthy years) is not within range just by knowing your predisposed genetic makeup in details. At the present moment the life extension bonus effect for using those services cold be around a decade and this guess is coming from Thomas Goetz‘s article in Wired on 23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics:
And, yes, we will know whether our children are predisposed to certain traits or talents — athletics or music or languages — and encourage them to pursue certain paths. In short, life will become a little more like a game of strategy, where we’re always playing the percentages, trying to optimize our outcomes. “These are enormously large calculations,” says Leroy Hood, a pioneer of genomic sequencing and cofounder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, who suggests that if we pay attention and get the math right, “it’s not a stretch to say that we could increase our productive lifespans by at least a decade.”
Detailed article in the New York Times on the early experience of decoding the genetic code and interpreting the customers’ DNA via the service of 23andMe. The buzz name of the project: personalized genetics/genomics. Although other companies are mentioned briefly, the focus is clearly on 23andMe. The basics: get rid of a thousand bucks (sorry, just $999 per person) by build your order online, spit a big (2.5 mls) in a plastic tube in the postal delivered Saliva Kit, FedEx your saliva back to Mountain View (plus shipping and handling cost), wait a couple of weeks for an email and then use the company’s in-built Genome Explorer to find out the surprising details of your genetic makeup online.
From the NYT article: I soon found that I might well be sight impaired during those extra years. According to the five SNPs for macular degeneration I fed into the “Genome Explorer,” I was nearly 100 times more likely to develop the disease than someone with the most favorable A-C-G-T combination.
a past presentation by Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President for Search Products & User Experience, on health information. Sarah Milstein says: “They’re also interested in helping you store and access your own health records. While giving people more control over their own data is an important idea, not to mention a trend we hope to see more of, Google may have to build (or rebuild?) user trust before people make it the repository of their most sensitive information.”
From the Wired post: “Mayer mentioned that 2 billion x-rays are taken every year, each of which would take 10 megabytes of data. That’s 200 petabytes of info. “The word petabytes gets us really excited,” says Mayer, “because that’s what we’re good at: handling large amounts of information, organizing and storing it.”
This reminds me of another Google project, nicknamed Palimpsest.
Bill Dye has a serious muscle-tendon damage and is looking for an experimental regenerative medicine therapy (stem cells or tissue engineering or both) after 2 years and many surgical interventions. If any out of the expert readers of this blog can help or knows someone, who can help, please do comment or email Mr. Bill Dye. For details, please read the emails below:
Subject: Tore my right pec major sternal head off of my humerus
Hi, my name is Bill Dye. I live in Louisville Ky. I had a very bad injury on 3/17/2005, while doing the decline bench press, and completely tore my right pec major sternal head from my humerus. It was initially misdiagnosed as a partial tear. I had my 1st failed surgery on 7/26/2205 in Birmingham Alabama. The doctor did not even reattach my tendon, which I did not realize till a few months after the surgery.
I did some more research online, and came across Dr C. B., who was then at Duke University Med Center. On 9/6/2006, Dr B. did successfully reattach my tendon to my humerus, but there is so much scar damage from the original injury, that my muscle is still extremely disfigured.
I came across an article on Acell Inc, and got to researching more online about Regenerative Medicine. I was wondering if you knew of any new technology in Regenerative Medicine, that could regenerate my muscle and tendon, to pre injury, such as the “concept” behind the Urinary Bladder Matrix that Acell has, and is attempting to market in the near future. Thanks. Read the rest of this entry »
In order to slow the progress of aging and prevent age-related disease (which is not the same as figuring out a robust engineering plan for unlimited healthy life extension) biological measures (biomarkers) of aging or disease mechanisms are needed that anticipate clinical disease and are sensitive to functional organism aging.
The American Federation for Aging Research is the organizer of a one-day conference on October 2 in Manhattan focusing on current and future status of biomarkers as identifiers of rates of biological aging, predictors of longevity and predictors of susceptibility to disease.
A supercentenarian is anyone with the chronological age of 110 years or older. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group kindly sent me his slides of the presentation he held last week on SENS3 entitled the Secrets of the oldest old and he gave a permission to publish these slides here in the form of a slideshow. The readers can now gain now some scholarly insights on what it is to be a supercentenarian. I cut out the autopsy slides (1 week after death) showing the pretty healthy organs (brain, liver, spinal cord, heart…) of the recently died 106 yo centenarian but all slides can be viewed at the GRG homepage (click Resources). Long live the 75 validated supercentenarians and all the unvalidated ones!
J. Schloendorn, M. Hamalainen, S.K. Kemmish, L. Jiang, J. Rebo, B. Turner, B.E. Rittmann
Center for Environmental Biotechnology, Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, 1001 South McAllister Ave., Tempe, AZ 85287-5701, USA
Medical bioremediation is the proposal to utilize the catabolic diversity of environmental microbes to treat all conditions associated to catabolic insufficiency in aging humans. Here we report on our progress towards medical bioremediation. We have isolated several bacteria degrading 7-ketocholesterol and other oxysterols implicated in atherosclerosis. We also present a method to determine the early steps in the biochemical pathway of 7-ketocholesterol degradation, which may be used to screen different species for therapeutically interesting reactions. We have also recently begun work on other targets, such as lipofuscin components and advanced glycation end-products. We hope that enzymes derived from our work can be used to put the role of catabolic insufficiency in aging to a final test, and if such a relationship exists, provide a therapeutic opportunity. Unconventional interdisciplinary collaborations will be required to make this possible.
Key words: medical bioremediation, catabolic insufficiency, aging, atherosclerosis, 7-ketocholesterol
John Schloendorn is one out of the new wave of researchers and life scientists who can perfectly fit their scientific drive and skills with his serious life extension commitment. In fact, I dare to say that John would not be involved in life sciences if he did not have the chance to explore a healthy life extension technology.
When Anna and me are looking for something interesting, but not too lengthy and detailed quality video content on the web our frequent destination is TED Talks. These videos are ideal during a lunch, or just before bedtime. In the newest TED sequence inventor Dean Kamen previews the extraordinary prosthetic arm his team is developing.
It is a tech-savvy project: besides reaching the degrees of freedom of the human arm, they’re using PET scan, MRI in order to make a realistic rubber/silicon coat for the prostethic arm.
Let’s give a chance to audio articles, a new initiative being trialed by Nature Clinical Practice. “These are FREE full-text audio versions of printed content from the March 2007 issue of Nature Clinical Practice Rheumatology. The aim of the Nature Clinical Practice journals is ‘to translate the latest findings into clinical practice’ by highlighting important original research papers so that busy doctors don’t have to read every journal associated with their specialty. The unabridged audio articles will extend this concept by enabling on-the-go doctors to make the most of their time through learning by listening, for example when commuting, exercising or driving.”
Ok, that’s the theory so far, but what is the practice behind? I listened to the demos (via iPhone on an airplane) and filled out a Surveymonkeysurvey.
For protocols, research and practical articles (full with numbers) it is not a good format as you cannot turn your eye back checking the earlier information (usually people are not reading scientific articles in a linear way but in circles, for instance reading abstracts firsts, than scanning figures and conclusion, then going into details in results, materials, methods, discussion and so on). Shorter, opinionated, journalistic pieces are preferred for audio content like the editorial, and viewpoints formats.
However the life extension appetite is not something that could be exhausted until the problem is solved 
