George Church is developing better and better organs using pigs. They are working to slow or reverse the aging in the organs to be used for transplant. [about 8:40 in the video] He says the organ longvity has also been done successfully with entire mice. They have mice that live twice as long. He says …
DNA Reading has improved 3 million fold and writing of DNA has improved a billion-fold from 1980 to today. George Church predicts genetic reading and writing will improve another 1000 to 1 million times. They eliminated one codon (out of 64) through a 4 million base pair organism. They are now eliminating 6 other codons. …
Chinese scientists used CRISPR gene therapy to correct a mutation that causes Marfan syndrome, an incurable connective tissue disorder that affects about 1 in 5,000 people. A single letter mistake in the gene for FBN1, which codes for the fibrillin protein, can cause a ripple effect of problems—from loose joints to weak vision to life-threatening …
Clearing old “zombie” cells from the human body has been shown to extend the lives of mice. When cells detect that they have been irreversibly damaged, they enter a non-dividing condition known as cell-cycle arrest, or senescence. It’s believed this occurs to prevent cells from going rogue and turning cancerous. Ideally, they should die by …
Oisin Biotechnology is a leader in removing senescent cells for antiaging. They have shown p16 positive senescent cells can be killed on demand in both in vitro and in vivo environments. Now they have started on experiments that will show improvements in both healthspan and lifespan in model organisms from mice to primates. And then, …
Roving cancer tumor cells have been genetically engineered to secrete a protein that triggers a death switch in resident tumor cells they encounter. The cancer-fighting cancer cells also have a built-in suicide switch — so the weaponized cells self-destruct before they can start tumors of their own. Previous research has used circulating tumor cells to …
A team of scientists from Purdue University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has used CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology to develop a variety of rice that produces 25-31 percent more grain and would have been virtually impossible to create through traditional breeding methods. Above – Jian-Kang Zhu’s research team used CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology to silence a …
Professor, author, and comic book enthusiast E. Paul Zehr looks at how near term technology could be used to create Marvel’s Captain America. Chasing Captain America explores what the real limits of being human are, how far we should bend those limits, and how we may be forced to reshape human biology if we are …
Professor, author, and comic book enthusiast E. Paul Zehr looks at how near term technology could be used to create Marvel’s Captain America. Chasing Captain America explores what the real limits of being human are, how far we should bend those limits, and how we may be forced to reshape human biology if we are …
Canadian research (Alberta) shows that the use of bridged nucleic acids to guide Cas9 can improve its specificity by over 10,000 times in certain instances — a dramatic improvement. Basil Hubbard, Canada Research Chair in Molecular Therapeutics and an assistant professor in the U of A’s Department of Pharmacology, and his team have filed a …
Genetically modification of humans has been been approved for the first time in Europe. Swiss-based biotech company Crispr Therapeutics hope to find a way of curing blood disease beta thalassaemia. China has approved similar gene therapy trials. A trial into treating cancer patients is under way in the USA. Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist …