Building a Digital Immune System
Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Tomas Helikar.
The power of computer code has been a longtime fascination for Tomas Helikar, Ph.D., a professor of biochemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). In college, when he learned he could use that power to help researchers better understand biology and improve human health, Dr. Helikar knew he’d found his ideal career. Since then, he’s built a successful team of scientists studying the ways we can use mathematical models in biomedical research, such as creating a digital replica of the immune system that could predict how a patient will react to infectious microorganisms ...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - June 28, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Chrissa Chverchko Tags: Being a Scientist Cells Tools and Techniques Bioinformatics Computational Biology Cool Tools/Techniques Modeling Profiles Source Type: blogs
Prompt Engineering For Healthcare: 11 Tips To Craft Great ChatGPT Prompts
In conclusion, as AI continues to grow and evolve, the importance of being adept at prompt engineering cannot be overstated. The ability to elicit useful and meaningful responses from AI can empower us to make the most of this cutting-edge technology. Remember, practice is key, and each question we ask is a step towards becoming more fluent in the language of AI.
In general, use it to expand your knowledge and ideas instead of solving things on behalf of you.
The post Prompt Engineering For Healthcare: 11 Tips To Craft Great ChatGPT Prompts appeared first on The Medical Futurist. (Source: The Medical Futurist)
Source: The Medical Futurist - June 22, 2023 Category: Information Technology Authors: Andrea Koncz Tags: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine AI in healthcare AI in medicine AI text generator ChatGPT ChatGPT in healthcare prompt engineering Healthcare AI Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, June 19th 2023
In conclusion, among Swedish middle-aged subjects, nearly two-thirds showed complete fatty degeneration of thymus on CT.
Age-Related Dysfunction of Water Homeostasis
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2023/06/age-related-dysfunction-of-water-homeostasis/
Dehydration can be an issue in older people. As in every complex system in the body, the mechanisms by which hydration is regulated become dysfunctional with advancing age. Researchers here look at the brain region responsible for regulating some of the response to dehydration, cataloging altered gene expression in search of the more important mechan...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 18, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Notes from the 2023 Age-Related Disease Therapeutics Summit
The former Longevity Therapeutics conference series was renamed to the Age-Related Disease Therapeutics Summit and held its fifth event recently in San Francisco. It was a smaller meeting than in past years, perhaps a result of the recent downturn in the global financial and investment environment. Few investors were present. Nonetheless, one can usually learn something interesting from the presenting biotech founders and executives. I took a few notes while I was there to present on progress at Repair Biotechnologies, and they follow in the order of the conference program.
Birget Schilling from the Buck Institute f...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 16, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Longevity Industry Source Type: blogs
Targeting Pro-Inflammatory Cytokine IL-17 to Slow Skin Aging
Researchers here report that a few cell types in aged skin begin to generate large amounts of IL-17, an inflammatory signal molecule. While the obvious suspect here is cellular senescence, as we know that senescent cells accumulate with age and energetically secrete pro-inflammatory signal molecules, this data suggests that this may not be the case, at least for this particular signal molecule in this particular tissue. The researchers show that blocking IL-17 slows the manifestations of skin aging. The challenge in this sort of approach is that inflammatory signal molecules are needed for the normal immune response to fun...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 16, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, June 5th 2023
In conclusion, higher BMR might reduce lifespan. The underlying pathways linking to major causes of death and relevant interventions warrant further investigation.
Betting Against Progress Turns Out Poorly, But Can Work in the Short Term in a Slow Field
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2023/06/betting-against-progress-turns-out-poorly-but-can-work-in-the-short-term-in-a-slow-field/
Setting oneself up as a spokesperson for "we will not achieve this goal", as the fellow noted here is choosing to do, is a bet against technological progress. A glance at any few decade period in the past two hundred yea...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 4, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Long Term Hypoxia Slows Aging in an Accelerated Aging Mouse Model
Researchers here show that a mouse model of accelerated aging lives considerably longer when in a low-oxygen atmosphere for most of its life span. This is quite interesting, even given that large effect sizes in accelerated aging models should be taken with a grain of salt. It is most likely that any effect on normal mice would be smaller, and also likely that any form of life extension achieved through manipulation of stress responses, such as the response to hypoxia, will produce much smaller effects in long-lived mammals than in short-lived mammals.
As is always the case, recall that when we say "accelerated agin...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 2, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, May 29th 2023
In this study, we used a Drosophila model to understand the role of the dec2P384R mutation on animal health and elucidate the mechanisms driving these physiological changes. We found that the expression of the mammalian dec2P384R transgene in fly sleep neurons was sufficient to mimic the short sleep phenotype observed in mammals. Remarkably, dec2P384Rmutants lived significantly longer with improved health despite sleeping less. In particular, dec2P384R mutants were more stress resistant and displayed improved mitochondrial fitness in flight muscles. Differential gene expression analyses went on to reveal several altered tr...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 28, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Reviewing the Complexity of Immunosenescence
The immune system becomes more inflammatory and less competent with advancing age, undergoing sweeping changes in immune cell characteristics and relative population sizes. The cells, structures, and processes that produce immune cells similarly undergo significant changes. Taken together, this is called immunosenescence, though many researchers choose to break out the inflammatory component of dysfunction into its own category, calling it inflammaging. One of the most important goals for the research community is to find ways to improve immune function in older people.
Evidently, the decline of the immune system is...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 22, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Teaching Wound Care at the American College of Physicians Annual Meeting
I recently had the honor of teaching a section entitled “Wound Care for the Internist.” at the annual meeting of the American College of Physicians (ACP) in San Diego. ACP is the largest medical specialty organization in the United States with members that include internal medicine physicians, subspecialists, and medical students. My session was well attended by caregivers from across the healthcare continuum including hospitalists, doctors in outpatient practices, and long-term care providers.
In my introductory remarks I asked the question, “How many of you have had a lecture on wound care in medical school....
Source: Jeffrey M. Levine MD | Geriatric Specialist | Wound Care | Pressure Ulcers - April 29, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Authors: Jeffrey M Levine Tags: Featured Medical Articles Geriatric Medicine Pressure Injuries & Wound Care arterial ulcer bedsores burns chronic wounds decubitus ulcer end-of-life care Jeff Levine MD medical education pressure sores pressure ulcers venous ulce Source Type: blogs
How Your Brain Is Connected to Your Gut: 7 Facts About Gut Health
We've all had a "gut feeling," or someone has told us to "follow our gut." It's that feeling that we may know something just by knowing—our intuition telling us something. It turns out that this feeling is more than just a feeling. The human body is an intricate series of systems, each individually playing a vital role in our overall health and well-being, and at the same time, they are all connected to make our whole body work.
One of these systems is the gut, also known as the gastrointestinal tract, which is responsible for digesting food and absorbing nutrients. When we combine its superpowers with the brain...
Source: PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement - April 28, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Irene Rondom Tags: health and fitness self-improvement brain health gut health Source Type: blogs
Approaching a Half-Century of Life With Type 1 Diabetes (T1D)
On July 24, 2023, I will mark 47 years of having lived with autoimmune Type 1 diabetes (T1D). I was diagnosed as a seven year old, so not quite fifty years ago, but much closer than I ever really anticipated. When I was diagnosed in 1976, no one told me that I should expect horrific complications or that I ' d die young because threats weren ' t part of the conversation; some may have been due to my age. But there was also no such thing as a certified diabetes educator
in 1976; instead, pediatric nurses instructed patients on how to give
themselves an injection. In fact, scientists had only
proven that Type 1 diabetes h...
Source: Scott's Web Log - April 26, 2023 Category: Endocrinology Tags: 2023 50 years half century half-century joslin medal Source Type: blogs
I Have No Mouth, Yet Still I Scream
BY KIM BELLARD
In light of the recent open letter from AI leaders for a moratorium on AI development, I’m declaring a temporary moratorium on writing about it too, although I doubt either one will last long (and this week’s title is, if you hadn’t noticed, an homage to Harlan Ellison’s classic dystopian AI short story). Instead, this week I want to write about plants. Specifically, the new research that suggests that plants can, in their own way, scream.
Bear with me.
To be fair, the researchers don’t use the word “scream;” they talk about “ultrasonic airborne sounds,” but just about every ac...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 4, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Non-Health Kim Bellard Microbiome Plants Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, April 3rd 2023
Fight Aging! publishes news and commentary relevant to the goal of ending all age-related disease, to be achieved by bringing the mechanisms of aging under the control of modern medicine. This weekly newsletter is sent to thousands of interested subscribers. To subscribe or unsubscribe from the newsletter,
please visit:
https://www.fightaging.org/newsletter/
Longevity Industry Consulting Services
Reason, the founder of Fight Aging! and Repair Biotechnologies, offers strategic consulting services to investors, entrepreneurs, and others interested in the longevity industry and its complexities. To find out m...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 2, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Towards Thymus Organoids Made From Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells
The adaptive immune system depends upon the thymus. Thymocyte cells are generated in the bone marrow and then migrate to the thymus, where they mature into T cells through a complex process of training and selection. The thymus is largest during development, up until the end of childhood. At that point it shrinks dramatically, and then the remainder undergoes a slow atrophy over the rest of a lifespan. In older people, the much reduced volume of active thymic tissue diminishes the supply of new T cells, leading to an adaptive immune system increasingly made up of broken, misconfigured, exhausted, and senescent cells.
...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 30, 2023 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
