Lifeboat Foundation

The Hong Kong Science Park is one example of how national planning and strategic investment have enabled China’s Pearl River Delta region to become a global leader in transformative industries like synthetic biology. Will the US follow suit?

Industry declares that it will not make DNA changes affecting future generations.

A little bit of norovirus—the highly infectious microbe that causes about 20 million cases of food poisoning in the United States each year—goes a long way. Just 10 particles of the virus can cause illness in humans. A team of University of Arizona researchers has created a simple, portable and inexpensive method for detecting extremely low levels of norovirus.

Jeong-Yeol Yoon, a researcher in the Department of Biomedical Engineering; Soo Chung, a biosystems engineering doctoral student who works in Yoon’s Biosensors Lab; and Kelly A. Reynolds, Chair of the Department of Community, Environment and Policy in the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, led the project. The team published their results in ACS Omega, the official journal of the American Chemical Society, and Yoon is presenting the research at the ACS Fall 2019 National Meeting & Exposition in San Diego this week.

Continue reading “Using a smartphone to detect norovirus” »

Stem cell biologist Hiromitsu Nakauchi has been waiting for this moment for more than a decade.

After years of planning, the persistent researcher has at last received approval from a government willing to pursue one of the most controversial scientific studies there is: human-animal embryo experiments.

While many countries around the world have restricted, defunded or outright banned these ethically-fraught practices, Japan has now officially lifted the lid on this proverbial Pandora’s box. Earlier this year, the country made it legal to not only transplant hybrid embryos into surrogate animals, but also to bring them to term.

New York, NY—August 12, 2019—A novel neck brace, which supports the neck during its natural motion, was designed by Columbia engineers. This is the first device shown to dramatically assist patients suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in holding their heads and actively supporting them during range of motion. This advance would result in improved quality of life for patients, not only in improving eye contact during conversation, but also in facilitating the use of eyes as a joystick to control movements on a computer, much as scientist Stephen Hawkins famously did.

A team of engineers and neurologists led by Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine, designed a comfortable and wearable robotic neck brace that incorporates both sensors and actuators to adjust the head posture, restoring roughly 70% of the active range of motion of the human head. Using simultaneous measurement of the motion with sensors on the neck brace and surface electromyography (EMG) of the neck muscles, it also becomes a new diagnostic tool for impaired motion of the head-neck. Their pilot study was published August 7 in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.

Continue reading “Robotic Neck Brace Dramatically Improves Functions of ALS Patients” »

Experts at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York are using gene editing tool CRISPR to alter a string of human genetic code which is known to increase the risk of developing some cancers.