Category Archives: Human Longevity

Multicohort Research Protocol Velocitizes Longevity Research
Description Velocitizing longevity research Create a group of 40 cohorts (groups) of 11 mice each Where each cohort is a different month of age Then the mont...

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Multicohort Research Protocol Velocitizes Longevity Research - Video

16 hours ago by Xerxes D. Arsiwalla

The human brain generates massive amounts of data resulting from its intricate and complex spatiotemporal dynamics. Biophysical mechanisms underlying these processes are key to our understanding of brain function and disease. To address this challenge, researchers at the SPECS lab lead by Prof. Paul Verschure, have recently developed BrainX3, a platform for visualization, simulation, analysis and interaction of large data, that combines computational power with human intuition in representing and interacting with large complex networks. BrainX3 serves as a hypotheses generator of big data. As is often the case with complex data, one might not always have a specific hypothesis to start with. Instead, discovering meaningful patterns and associations in big data might be a necessary incubation step for formulating well-defined hypotheses.

On this platform, the researchers have reconstructed a large-scale simulation of human brain activity in a 3D virtual reality environment. Using the brain's known connectivity along with detailed biophysics, the researchers reconstruct neuronal activity of the entire cortex in the resting-state. Users can interact with BrainX3 in real-time by perturbing brain regions with transient stimulations to observe reverberating network activity, simulate lesion dynamics or implement network analysis functions from a library of graph theoretic measures. Within the immersive mixed/virtual reality space of BrainX3, users can explore and analyze dynamic activity patterns of brain networks, both at rest or during tasks, or for discovering of signaling pathways associated with brain function and/or dysfunction or as a tool for virtual neurosurgery.

In addition to the dynamics of the resting state, the researchers have also simulated neural activity from lesioned brains and activity resulting from TMS perturbations. These simulations shed insight on the spatial distribution of activity in the attractor state, how the brain maintains a level of resilience to damage, and effects of noise and physiological perturbations. Knowledge of brain activity in these varied states is clinically relevant for assessing levels of consciousness in patients with severe brain injury.

Explore further: How we know where we are

More information: "Network Dynamics with BrainX[sup]3[/sup]: A Large-Scale Simulation of the Human Brain Network with Real-Time Interaction." Xerxes D. Arsiwalla, Riccardo Zucca, Alberto Betella, Enrique Martinez, David Dalmazzo, Pedro Omedas, Gustavo Deco and Paul F.M.J. Verschure. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. journal.frontiersin.org/articl .2015.00002/abstract

Provided by Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Knowing where we are and remembering routes that we've walked are crucial skills for our everyday life. In order to identify neural mechanisms of spatial navigation, RUB researchers headed by Prof Dr Nikolai ...

(Medical Xpress)Scientists have created a virtual model of the brain that daydreams like humans do.

Everyone makes mistakesso a University of Nebraska-Lincoln psychologist set out to determine how the human brain responds to the errors of its ways.

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Addressing the human brain's big data challenge with BrainX3

US President Barack Obama is proposing to spend $215 million on a precision medicine initiative, whose centrepiece will be a national study drawing on the health records and DNA of one million volunteers.

The term precision medicine refers to treatments tailored to a persons genetic profile, an idea which is already transforming the way doctors fight cancer and some rare diseases. When treating cancer, for example, doctors can nowadays assess any molecular abnormalities in the cancerous cells so that they can apply the appropriate treatment. Some types of abnormalities may be found in different types of cancer, and patients with these conditions will be given the same treatment. Studying a set of molecular abnormalities in a patient in order to prescribe a unique, personalised treatment for his/her condition appears to be the future of medicine and this means that going forward treatment will be based on peoples individual genetic maps

Barack Obama has recently put forward a funding initiative to support precision medicine with a view to developing technology that has to date been under-exploited. The aim is to change the old one-size-fits-all approach, as Jo Handelsman, associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, puts it, and to move towards personalised medicine using information from the human genome. Under the Federal funding proposal, $130 million will go to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for development of a voluntary national research cohort of a million or more volunteers to propel our understanding of health and disease and set the foundation for a new way of doing research through engaged participants and open, responsible data sharing, says the White House factsheet. This will be the largest genome study ever carried out at country level, and should open up amazing opportunities for the advance of science.

In the 1970s, the noted French biologistJacques Monod, regarded as one of the fathers of modern molecular biology, opined that the scale of DNA was too vast for scientists ever to be able to modify the human genome. Just six years later, the first genetic manipulations were being carried out. As recently as 1990, there was general consensus among genetic scientists that human DNA would never be sequenced, yet this feat had been achieved by 2003. Enormous progress has also been made in reducing the cost of human genome sequencing, which has fallen from $3 billion to just $1000 per person! In fact so mainstream has DNA sequencing become that the company ranked by MIT in 2014 as the smartest in the world was Illumina, a San Diego, California-based firm that develops, manufactures and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function. Today the main focus of investment in digital health is onBig Data and analytics.

Some companies are now even specialising in combating ageing, including California startupHuman Longevity Inc., a genomics and cell therapy-based diagnostic and therapeutic company whose stated goal is to tackle the diseases associated with age-related human biological decline. The web giants are also muscling into this field. Google is out in front via its R&D biotech firm California Life Company (Calico) on an amazingly ambitious mission to vanquish death, as CEO Larry Page put it. Clearly the White House is aware of the huge opportunities in this sector, hence the Presidents intention to channel Federal dollars into the search for DNA-based treatments.

Jo Handelsman predicts that significant scientific progress will result from studying the genome in a large number of people and merging this information with data from other ongoing studies. In fact she believes it will be a major step forward in how we see medicine. Some $130 million of the budget proposed by Barack Obama will be allocated to the NIH to fund the huge volunteer genome study. Another outcome of the initiative is that patients will be able to obtain lots of genetic information about themselves. We arent just talking about research but also about patients access to their own data, so they can participate fully in decisions about their health that affect them, underlined the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren. The proposal also earmarks $70 million for DNA-driven research on cancer and another $10 million for related certification work by the US Food and Drug Administration.

NIH director Francis Collins underlined that the United States is not looking to create a single bio-bank. Instead, the project will seek to combine data from among over 200 large ongoing American health studies, which jointly together involve at least two million people. The challenge of this initiative is to link those together. Its more a distributed approach than centralised, he explained. Meanwhile, in the search for data, NIH officials have met in recent weeks with administrators from the Veterans Health Administration, whose ongoingMillion Veteran Program has already collected DNA samples from 343,000 former soldiers. Obama also wants to allocate grants to private sector technology firms, and Illumina is likely to be an early beneficiary. As the famous work La mort de la mort (The Demise of Death) by French surgeon DrLaurent Alexandre points out, progress in the field of medicine in the 21st century is in the process of delivering a scientific revolution on an unprecedented scale.

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Genome Studies: Personalised Medicine around the Corner?

Even seemingly intractable problems such as the antibiotic crisis and the obesity epidemic could be resolved by treating human health and society as an integral part of an ecosystem.

Renowned health and nutrition expert Professor Mark Wahlqvist of Monash University said the living world was by nature a collaborative enterprise rather than a competitive one.

"It is unhelpful to look at ourselves as discrete species as the interconnectedness of all things, animate and inanimate, becomes more apparent," he said.

In research published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Professor Wahlqvist says awareness is growing of the ecosystem-dependent nature of human health.

"The problem now faced is that ecosystems have been plundered in such an anthropocentric fashion that their sustainability is precarious and our health with it," he said.

Calling for a re-evaluation of many ecosystems, from the home, school and work-place to health care, communication, transport and recreation, Professor Wahlqvist said we had become accustomed to blaming disease and dysfunction on one factor, or a small set of factors.

Such views had contributed to the rise of medications such as antibiotics, as well as their probable imminent demise.

"We confront multiple-resistant microorganisms in farm animals and ourselves that no currently available antibiotic can eradicate, not least because of their misuse as growth promotants in livestock for human consumption," he said.

"Better ecosystem management is likely to be one of the few solutions available to this crisis."

Professor Wahlqvist also said more integrative approaches to health-care practice were required.

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Team approach boosts human and environmental wellbeing, researcher says

Even seemingly intractable problems such as the antibiotic crisis and the obesity epidemic could be resolved by treating human health and society as an integral part of an ecosystem.

Renowned health and nutrition expert Professor Mark Wahlqvist of Monash University said the living world was by nature a collaborative enterprise rather than a competitive one.

"It is unhelpful to look at ourselves as discrete species as the interconnectedness of all things, animate and inanimate, becomes more apparent," he said.

In research published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Professor Wahlqvist says awareness is growing of the ecosystem-dependent nature of human health.

"The problem now faced is that ecosystems have been plundered in such an anthropocentric fashion that their sustainability is precarious and our health with it," he said.

Calling for a re-evaluation of many ecosystems, from the home, school and work-place to health care, communication, transport and recreation, Professor Wahlqvist said we had become accustomed to blaming disease and dysfunction on one factor, or a small set of factors.

Such views had contributed to the rise of medications such as antibiotics, as well as their probable imminent demise.

"We confront multiple-resistant microorganisms in farm animals and ourselves that no currently available antibiotic can eradicate, not least because of their misuse as growth promotants in livestock for human consumption," he said.

"Better ecosystem management is likely to be one of the few solutions available to this crisis."

Professor Wahlqvist also said more integrative approaches to health-care practice were required.

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Team approach boosts human and environmental wellbeing

DUBLIN, Feb. 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ --Research and Markets

(http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/6j59z5/human) has announced the addition of the "Human Augmentation Market by Product, Application, & Geography - Global Forecast to 2020" report to their offering.

The global human augmentation market is expected to reach up to $1135 million by 2020, at a CAGR of 43.5% between 2014 and 2020.

The lucrative growth rate of the augmentation market in the future is the major driving factor for the human augmentation market. Human augmentation has not only made human beings' life easier but has also resulted in its longevity. In the product category of human augmentation, the wearable augmentation is expected to have a higher market size as compared to the in-built augmentation. The major reason behind its large market size is the growing demand for sophisticated gadgets.

The eye-wear holds the highest market share in the North American human augmentation market, due to the presence of a large number of market players, which are launching new products in this region. The North American market is estimated to grow at the highest growth rate between 2014 and 2020.

The global human augmentation market has been segmented into three categories that include: products segment, application, and geography. The product segment includes the in-built augmentation and wearable augmentation types. The application segment includes the medical, defense, industrial, and others segments. The human augmentation market has also been segmented on the basis of geography. The market by geography has been classified into various economic regions such as North America, Europe, APAC, and ROW.

The major players that offer various products in the human augmentation market are B-Temia Inc. (U.S.), BrainGate Company (U.S.), Ekso Bionics Holdings, Inc. (U.S.), Google Inc. (U.S.), Raytheon Company (U.S.), Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd (South Korea), and Vuzix Corporation (U.S.).

Key Topics Covered:

1 Introduction

2 Research Methodology

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Global Human Augmentation Market 2015-2020: B-Temia, BrainGate, Ekso Bionics, Google, Raytheon, Samsung & Vuzix Leads ...

Innovations In Multiple Myeloma: The Role of Patients in Big Data Collection
Moderated by patient advocate, Bob Tufts and featuring Robert Goldberg, PhD (Center for Medicine in the Public Interest), Robert Hariri, MD, PhD (Human Longe...

By: Vital Options International

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Innovations In Multiple Myeloma: The Role of Patients in Big Data Collection - Video

The prize will be awarded to the first team to unlock what many believe to be the secret to ageing: homeostatic capacity, or the ability of the body's systems to stabilise in response to stressors.

As the body ages, being able to recover from diseases, injuries and lifestyle stresses becomes more difficult. In youth, blood pressure and elevated blood sugar levels can return easily to normal levels.

As homeostatic capacity erodes as we get older, the body is no longer able to regulate these changes as effectively, resulting in diseases such as diabetes or hypertension.

Dr Yun, who worked for several years as a radiologist at Stanford Hospital before joining a hedge fund investing in health care, uses the analogy of a "weeble wobble" toy to explain that no matter how far it is pushed, it is able to centre itself again.

A person only becomes aware of their body's homeostasis when they start losing it in middle age: often characterised by the loss of ability to tolerate cold or hot weather, or feeling nauseous after a roller-coaster ride where you once felt exhilarated.

"Up until about 45 years old, most people die from external stressors such as trauma or infection, but as we get older we die of what looks like a loss of intrinsic capacities," he tells The Sunday Telegraph.

Increased homeostatic capacity could allow people to live beyond 120 years the theoretical maximum human lifespan.

Scientists could effectively slow down the body's clock and enable us to remain middle aged for 50 years or more, meaning we can feel 50 when we are really 80. The future could see us not just living longer, but staying healthier for longer.

"This isn't like plastic surgery where you're papering over the cracks, this is actually making a person younger from the inside out," Dr Yun says.

The first half of the prize will be awarded next year to the team that can restore the homeostatic capacity of an ageing adult mammal to that of a young one, thereby reversing the effects of ageing.

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How Silicon Valley is trying to cure ageing

Creating a Culture of Innovation and Breakthroughs - Peter Diamandis
Rejuvenation Biotechnology 2014 Keynote Presentation (August 23, 2014, 9:00am) "Creating a Culture of Innovation and Breakthroughs" Presenter: Peter Diamandi...

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Creating a Culture of Innovation and Breakthroughs - Peter Diamandis - Video

Who the hell are you people? quipped Norman Lear to the fashionable crowd packed into his book party at the Richard Feigen Gallery off Madison Avenue on Wednesday night.

The liberal TV legend may not have known many besides Vogue editor Hamish Bowles, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Pat Kiernan of NY1, Tribeca Film Fests Craig Hatkoff and fashionistas Rory Tahari and Fern Mallis but they certainly knew Lear.

The People for the American Way founder took questions from the group about his pioneering shows like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons and Maude, and movies like This Is Spinal Tap.

When his cellphone rang, he answered it. Hello, Paul? said Lear, as 200 listened in. You wouldnt believe this fking moment.

Lears memoir Even This I Get To Experience details how he went from being a 9-year-old whose father was sent to jail to a World War II B-17 gunner to a gazillionaire who paid $8 million for a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

When asked if he felt comedy has contributed to his longevity, the 92-year-old said, I attribute it to humor as much as anything. I adore foolishness, because thats the human condition.

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92-year-old Norman Lear attributes longevity to humor