Lifeboat Foundation

Dr Michael Fossel is a PhD and MD heading up telomerase research and therapy and has kindly written a blog article for Bioviva detailing the work both they and his company Telocyte are doing to fight back against Alzheimer’s.

How Alzheimer’s Can Be Prevented and Cured…

Michael Fossel, MD, PhD

As I said in my medical textbook on aging, “If age is a thief, then the greatest treasure we lose is ourselves.” We fear Alzheimer’s not simply because it takes away our health, but because it steals our souls.

Continue reading “Curing Alzheimer's” »

A report from DARPA’s Wait, What? conference.

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One of gene therapy’s major challenges is getting a gene sequence into a cell without damaging it. Traditional methods are often inefficient and unreliable, but this nano-device from Brigham Young University may offer a solution.

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A 28 year old man who has been paralysed has been given a new sense of touch following a new breakthrough that saw electrodes places directly into the man’s brain.

The research and clinical trial has been carried out by DARPA, the US Military’s research agency. Essentially, the man (who has not been named) is now able to control his new hand and feel people touching it because of two sets of electrodes: one array on the motor cortex, the part of the brain which directs body movement, and one on the sensory cortex, which is the part of the brain which feels touch.

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DARPA promised prosthetic limbs that produce realistic sensations, and it’s making good on its word. The agency’s researchers have successfully tested an artificial hand that gave a man a “near-natural” level of touch. The patient could tell when scientists were pressing against specific fingers, even when they tried to ‘trick’ the man by touching two digits at once. The key was to augment the thought-controlled hand with a set of pressure-sensitive torque motors wired directly to the brain — any time the hand touched something, it sent electrical signals that felt much like flesh-and-bone contact.

There’s still a lot of work left to go before this hardware is truly realistic, of course. The sensors don’t cover the entire hand, and they don’t account for temperature or other factors you’ll likely worry about when grabbing objects. Still, this should represent a big step forward. Provided the technology takes off, both amputees and paralysis victims could regain some of the tactility they once had.

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Why is cancer so deadly? It spreads and consumes in a process called metastasis. If it stayed put we’d have an easier fight on our hands. Researchers hope this sponge-like implant could offer an intriguing solution, sucking up circulating cancer cells and warning you of their presence early on.

9 out of 10 cancer deaths are caused by spreading to other organs

Time is often cited as ‘our most precious resource’. Beating cancer is no exception to this; if we caught every cancer early success rates would be vastly improved. Curing cancer therefore requires more than simply destroying these cells. It also means improving diagnosis.

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Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School are the first to show that it’s possible to reverse the behavior of an animal by flipping a switch in neuronal communication. The research, published in PLOS Biology, provides a new approach for studying the neural circuits that govern behavior and has important implications for how scientists think about neural connectomes.

New technologies have fueled the quest to map all the neural connections in the brain to understand how these networks processes information and control behavior. The human brain consists of 10¹¹ neurons that make 10¹⁵ connections. The total length of neuronal processes in the human brain is approximately 4 million miles long, similar in length to the total number of roads in the U.S. Along these networks neurons communicate with each other through excitatory and inhibitory synapses that turn neurons on or off.

The neuronal roadmap, or connectome, however, doesn’t include information about the activity of neurons or the signals they transmit. How stable are these neural circuits in the brain? Does their wiring constrain the flow of information or the behaviors they control? The complexity of the human brain makes it almost impossible to address these questions.

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This particular giant virus won’t kill you, but climate change means that something deadly could one day emerge.

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Cancer claimed Kim Suozzi at age 23, but she chose to have her brain preserved with the dream that neuroscience might one day revive her mind.

By AMY HARMON SEPT. 12, 2015.

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