Genes – Page 3 – Impact Lab

Biotech, DNA, Genes, Genetics, Science & Technology News

Should athletes be allowed to enhance their genes?

May 5, 2019

So-called gene doping is banned in sports, but some philosophers argue that it’s the way of the future

Scientists first developed gene therapy techniques in the 1990s, exploring ways to treat disease by modifying malfunctioning cells. In 1997, a team at John Hopkins University edited genes to create what the media called “Schwarzenegger mice,” which had twice the normal amount of muscle.

The researchers’ goal was to develop treatments for muscle-wasting conditions, including old age, but the same technique could theoretically be used to add muscle bulk to athletes, a concept called gene doping. Doctors could, theoretically, inject cells with enhanced genes into the relevant body part or use a benign virus to deliver modified cells. These superhumans could be the elite athletes of the future — athletes who perform faster, higher, and stronger than any “natural” human ever could.

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Alzheimer's Disease, cutting edge, Genes, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

A novel dementia treatment will flood people’s brains with a low-risk version of a key gene.

March 7, 2019

No one knows for certain what causes Alzheimer’s disease. But one fact about the condition has gained nearly irrefutable status. Depending on what versions of a gene called APOE you inherit, your risk of the brain disorder can be half the average—or more than 12 times as high.

Sometimes called “the forgetting gene,” APOE comes in three common versions, called 2, 3, and 4. Type 2 lowers a person’s risk, 3 is average, and 4 increases the chance dramatically. The risk is so great that doctors avoid testing people for APOE because a bad result can be upsetting, and there’s nothing to do about it. There’s no cure, and you can’t change your genes, either.

Well, today you can’t. But doctors in New York City say that beginning in May, they will start testing a novel gene therapy in which people with the unluckiest APOE genes will be given a huge dose to their brain of the low-risk version.

Continue reading… “A novel dementia treatment will flood people’s brains with a low-risk version of a key gene.”

Agriculture, Biotech, Farming, Food, Genes, Science & Technology News

Next generation of biotech food heading for grocery stores

November 23, 2018

WASHINGTON (AP) — The next generation of biotech food is headed for the grocery aisles, and first up may be salad dressings or granola bars made with soybean oil genetically tweaked to be good for your heart.

By early next year, the first foods from plants or animals that had their DNA “edited” are expected to begin selling. It’s a different technology than today’s controversial “genetically modified” foods, more like faster breeding that promises to boost nutrition, spur crop growth, and make farm animals hardier and fruits and vegetables last longer.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has declared gene editing one of the breakthroughs needed to improve food production so the world can feed billions more people amid a changing climate. Yet governments are wrestling with how to regulate this powerful new tool. And after years of confusion and rancor, will shoppers accept gene-edited foods or view them as GMOs in disguise?

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Analysis, DNA, Genes

Height, bone density, and more can be predicted using new DNA analysis algorithm

October 13, 2018

A new computer model could accurately predict a person’s height to within one inch just by analyzing their DNA

AI-driven diagnostic tools are undeniably on the precipice of revolutionizing how doctors treat and manage patients. The ability for machine-learning algorithms to crunch immense volumes of patient data and find patterns not visible to the eyes of human clinicians is revealing new ways to predict everything from breast cancer risk to a person’s chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Now, a team of scientists from Michigan State University claims to have built a computer algorithm that can analyze a person’s complete genome and accurately predict how tall they are with only around a one-inch (2.5-cm) margin of error. The machine-learning system was trained on a dataset of nearly 500,000 adults.

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Biotech, DNA, Genes, Medical Breakthrough

Scientists just made human egg cells from human blood for the first time

September 29, 2018

It’s the first step toward being able to mass produce human eggs using other people’s body tissues or blood.

Scientists in Japan have used human blood to successfully create immature human egg cells in a lab for the first time, according to new research published Thursday in Science. The work is a major breakthrough in stem cell research and may lead the way to babies that can be created in a lab using the body tissues or blood of their relatives.

Mitinori Saitou, a biologist at Kyoto University who contributed to this pioneering research, managed to produce mouse eggs and sperm from stem cells back in 2012 and used them to breed healthy baby mice. It was the first time that eggs were created from embryonic stem cells.

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Bill Gates, Biotech, Genes, Genetics, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

Gene editing for good

May 1, 2018

How CRISPR could transform global development.

Today, more people are living healthy, productive lives than ever before. This good news may come as a surprise, but there is plenty of evidence for it. Since the early 1990s, global child mortality has been cut in half. There have been massive reductions in cases of tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. The incidence of polio has decreased by 99 percent, bringing the world to the verge of eradicating a major infectious disease, a feat humanity has accomplished only once before, with smallpox. The proportion of the world’s population in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1.90 per day, has fallen from 35 percent to about 11 percent.

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Analysis, Biotech, Genes, Medical Breakthrough

End of ageing and cancer? Scientists unveil structure of the ‘immortality’ enzyme telomerase

April 29, 2018

Making a drug is like trying to pick a lock at the molecular level. There are two ways in which you can proceed. You can try thousands of different keys at random, hopefully finding one that fits. The pharmaceutical industry does this all the time – sometimes screening hundreds of thousands of compounds to see if they interact with a certain enzyme or protein. But unfortunately it’s not always efficient – there are more drug molecule shapes than seconds have passed since the beginning of the universe.

Alternatively, like a safe cracker, you can x-ray the lock you want to open and work out the probable shape of the key from the pictures you get. This is much more effective for discovering drugs, as you can use computer models to identify promising compounds before researchers go into the lab to find the best one. Now a study, published in Nature, presents detailed images of a crucial anti-ageing enzyme known as telomerase – raising hopes that we can soon slow ageing and cure cancer.

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Genes, Medical Breakthrough, Medicine

In surprise result, gene therapy reverses blinding eye disease

March 15, 2018

Biotech, Cancer, China, Genes, Medical Breakthrough

Doctors in China lead race to treat cancer by editing genes

February 26, 2018

Shaorong Deng gets an experimental treatment for cancer of the esophagus that uses his own immune system cells. They have been genetically modified with the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR.

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Biotech, China, Genes, Genetics

China has already gene-edited 86 people with CRISPR

January 23, 2018

In the U.S., the first planned clinical trials of CRISPR gene editing in people are about to kick off. China, meanwhile, has been racing ahead, having already used the gene-altering tool to change the DNA of dozens of people in several clinical trials.

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Analysis, Culture, Genes, Genetics

The immigrant maps of America: Genome study of over 770,000 people reveals the ancestral origins of each part of the country

October 26, 2017

Scientists from AncestryDNA analysed genome-wide genotype data from 774,516 Americans

This allowed researchers to identify the genetic ‘clusters’ within, or the genetic communities

The study reveals ancestral origins and migration patterns for specific groups across the country

Continue reading… “The immigrant maps of America: Genome study of over 770,000 people reveals the ancestral origins of each part of the country”

Genes, Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough

FDA approves second gene-altering treatment for cancer

October 24, 2017

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the second in a radically new class of treatments that genetically reboot a patient’s own immune cells to kill cancer.

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