Science and Health News

HLI Introduces a Whole Exome Sequencing Product for $250 USD (SAN DIEGO, CA and SANDTON, SOUTH AFRICA)—September 22, 2015—Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI), the genomics-based, technology-driven company, and Discovery Ltd, a pioneering insurer dedicated to making people healthier, announced today that the two companies have entered into a multi-year agreement to offer whole exome, whole genome and cancer genome sequencing to Discovery’s clients in South Africa and the United Kingdom.

A sticky, protein-rich gel created by Johns Hopkins researchers appears to help stem cells stay on or in rat hearts and restore their metabolism after transplantation, improving cardiac function after simulated heart attacks, according to results of a new study. The findings, described in the December 2015 issue of Biomaterials, offer a potential first step to a new way to heal human hearts after heart attacks as well. The experiments build on the idea that although stem cells have shown enormous promise in repairing organs after injury, using them in the heart itself has not yielded the expected results because very few of the transplanted cells survive in the heart, says M. Roselle Abraham, M.B.B.S., M.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and medical director of the Johns Hopkins Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Center of Excellence. When the heart beats, she explains, it pushes cells injected into the heart wall out into the lungs before they get a chance to attach to the wall.

Cambridge, Mass. September 25th, 2015 — A team including the scientist who first harnessed the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 system for mammalian genome editing has now identified a different CRISPR system with the potential for even simpler and more precise genome engineering. In a study published today in Cell, Feng Zhang and his colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, with co-authors Eugene Koonin at the National Institutes of Health, Aviv Regev of the Broad Institute and the MIT Department of Biology, and John van der Oost at Wageningen University, describe the unexpected biological features of this new system and demonstrate that it can be engineered to edit the genomes of human cells.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new analysis supports the hypothesis that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells, researchers report. The study offers the first reliable method for tracing viral evolution back to a time when neither viruses nor cells existed in the forms recognized today, the researchers say.

In August the TSU Laboratory of Intelligent Diagnostic Radiation and Laser-Optical Systems and Technologies conducted experiments that confirmed that the strontium vapor laser invented by scientists of Tomsk State University can be used for the cutting and drilling of a living bone. - We had used samples of dry bones to rebuild our strontium vapor laser installation to work on the bone tissue - said Professor Anatoly Soldatov, head of the laboratory. - And when the laser was created and experiments with dry bone were successful, we replaced it with a living bone. The results wholly confirm that the effect on the living bone at certain parameters of the laser radiation does not lead to charring.

The Moscow Seed Fund and the RVC Biofund, an investment arm of RVC, Russia’s fund of funds for innovation, have anted up $180,000 in Central Factory of Prepared Solutions (CFPS), a Russian company, the RVC website announced. CFPS is Russia’s pioneering company to set up innovation production of ready-to-use microbiological nutrient solutions for medical diagnostics and research labs, which is said to meet international standards and is expected to help supplant imports from the Russian market. The CFPS solutions are used in identifying a disease, monitoring production space cleanliness at pharmaceutical and cosmetic factories, etc.

People with a certain type of gene are more deeply affected by their life experiences, a new study has revealed. The findings challenge traditional thinking about depression, showing what might be considered a risk gene for depression in one context, may actually be beneficial in another. Researchers at the University of Melbourne were interested in why some, but not all adults who have experienced sexual or physical abuse as children go on to develop long-term depression.

Tremendous controversy erupted in early 2014 when two papers published in Nature described how a technique called “stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency,” or STAP, could quickly and efficiently turn ordinary cells into pluripotent stem cells, that is, stem cells capable of developing into all the tissues in the body. The simplicity of the approach—subjecting the cells to particular stresses like mild acid exposure—seemed too good to be true. And it was.