Category Archives: Post Human

A Durban community organisation set up a 20-bed treatment area on the grounds of an overwhelmed private hospital in eight hours after the facility appealed for help.

Muslims for Humanity reacted to a distress call from the Ahmed Al-Kadi Hospital which needed to urgently set up a Covid-19 reception and receiving facility after critically ill patients were forced to wait in their cars as the demand for beds increased.

Muslims for Humanity roped in community- based organisation Natal Memon Jamaat (NMJ) to assist with the project.

This project was completed within eight hours from conception and has been operational from January 1, said NMJ project co-ordinator Imraan Jooma.

This first-of-a-kind facility will allow Covid-19 patients to be assessed and made comfortable before admission.

Critically ill patients were waiting outside the hospital in cars without medical assistance, awaiting spare beds at this state-of-the-art facility.

This facility, besides being manned by professional medical interns, is equipped with oxygenators and oximeters among other medical equipment, some of which was supplied by the Caring Sisters Network.

Hospital chairperson Dr Ayoob Bux praised the speedy effort.

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Durban community body sets up 20-bed facility for overwhelmed hospital within hours - TimesLIVE

Of all the newsworthy events in the world that happened over the last few weeks, none was more ignored and underreported on than that fly that landed on Vice President Mike Pences forehead. Did anyone notice that?

In 2016, the internet went wild over Ken Bone at the presidential debate, a man in a red sweater who asked about the candidates energy policies. A plethora of memes, Halloween costumes and parody accounts came from the ether surrounding this man.

When it was discovered that Bone has a strange past on Reddit, he was promptly somewhat justifiably ridiculed, and later swallowed up by whatever internet abscess consumes the memes we outgrow.

This year, its a fly. And given the whole idea that history repeats itself, once we grow tired of memes and tweets on this bug, will we find out the fly is an incel? Is that the last gift 2020 has to offer?

I think its easy to be exhausted by our culture, or more specifically, the lack of it. Memes are supposed to be small units of meaning albeit, easily consumable and repetitive. They are supposed to tell us something funny, painful or true. So why do these fly memes feel so empty?

I dont mean to rain on everybody having fun over the fly. Ill admit it was thrilling for a bug to, at least for a moment, degrade a man who is too powerful and untouchable to be degraded by any of us.

But what is funny, meaningful or true about multiple celebrities tweeting that the fly was Pences only Black friend? What is meaningful about comparing Black people to a fly? What about that joke is funny or telling about our culture at large?

Memes are supposed to be processed and cooked. They should go through some sort of oven for cultural artifacts. What I fear about these memetic explosions from Ken Bone to the fly is that they lead us to not really process the events at hand.

No real thought was taken when Stephen Colbert implied an insect was Pences Black friend. No real thought was taken when George Takei tweeted, In the end, Pence will only say that black flies matter.

What is the function of culture, if not to process history? What is the point of any of this?

Colbert and Takeis remarks were racist and dumb. But they got a lot of retweets. And if you ask anyone on the streets, particularly those who are Gen Z, what the most iconic thing to come out of the vice presidential debate was, their answer would be the fly.

Dont get me wrong, I love our generations ability to find humor in most, if not all, things in our everyday lives. I mean, why wouldnt we? Everyday were told we are going to be the generation to fix all the worlds problems. Were going to be the ones who will have to fix climate change and widespread disparity.

Being alive at this moment in time is gray. Theres not a day that goes by when were not reminded of how messed up our world is. Its no wonder we turn to irony and humor to cheer ourselves up a little.

But our memes and jokes do not have to be meaningless and empty. They can generate meaning as much as they can destroy it.

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Canceled: What the fly reveals about our culture as a whole - Daily Free Press

Every period has its great men, and if these are lacking, it invents them. Those are the words of philosopher Claude Adrien Helvtius. Or, well, they probably are. The phrase comes from Leon Trotsky, who quoted Helvtius in his memoirs as a way to dis Stalin. Rude! But also true. Inventing one's very own cult of greatness has helped political figures climb to power for as long as there have been politicians. In recent years, as celebrity culture has slowly devoured the political sphere, it has become the defining precondition. People dont just vote for politicians, they stan them. Idolatry accelerated when politicians began to appear on television. Now, the internet allows for participatory, communal, real-time adulation. Both Barack Obama and Donald Trumps presidential victories were accredited, at least partly, to their skill at cultivating avid fandomsin particular, to their skill at ginning up support on the internet and using social media to connect with voters.

During the 2020 primaries, most of the popular Democratic candidates had loud, proud grassroots fan blocs online. Andrew Yang had his #YangGang. Senator Bernie Sanders had his bros, many of whom were women. Senator Kamala Harris had her K-Hive cheering her on. The outlier of these major contenders? Former vice president Joe Biden. Biden has nothing materially consistent with that, says Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher for the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvards Shorenstein Center. Instead, Biden has had what New York Times critic Amanda Hess describes as negative online energy. Id call it NCIS energyas in the popular, long-running CBS procedural. For most of his candidacy, Biden has, like Mark Harmons open-collared shirts, managed to succeed despite generating only minimal organic online buzz and attention from social media tastemakers.

Minimal, though, doesnt mean zero. As the election approaches, many liberal and left-leaning digital organizations and influencers have rallied behind Biden, creating a late-breaking wave of online support. Rafael Rivero, the cofounder of Occupy Democrats, created Ridin With Biden, the most visible pro-Biden meme page on Facebook, which has had some posts reach millions. Actor and writer Michael Imperioli, beloved for playing Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, recently started using Instagram to post pro-Biden fanfiction about Tony Soprano and the fictional DiMeo crime familys admiration for the Democratic candidate. (Tony got woke in recent years, Imperioli wrote in the comments of one of his posts.) Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is working with an influencer marketing agency to set up digital interviews with celebrities like Keke Palmer, and it is deputizing the Biden grandchildren as surrogates on platforms like Instagram. In one of their more popular appearances, they talked with Kaia Gerber about the Supreme Court.

And Biden does have some organic fan hubs onlinethey even include Gen Z members. I talked to one 16-year-old in Long Island who hangs out in the r/JoeBiden subreddit simply because he ardently supports the former vice presidents candidacy. (Although he did briefly switch allegiances when Pete Buttigieg was in the race.)

Still, even with this push, the memetic activity that Ive seen around Biden is largely negative, Friedberg says. Its easier to pull up an anti-Biden meme page on Facebook, for example, than it is to locate a genuine fan hub. Meanwhile, 4chan is crawling with plots to meme the Democratic candidate into defeat. One involves doctoring images to look like Biden is using the Pedobear as a mascot, an attempt to link Biden to the conspiracy theories about elite Democrats and pedophilia. Its grim.

Part of this is a function of Bidens personal relationship to the internet. He simply isnt as online as his predecessors and competitors, nor is he as internet fluent as the new class of rising political stars like US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is exceptionally gifted at Twitter retorts. He bills himself as a transitional candidate, but with his distant, milquetoast internet presenceits extremely clear that staff control his social mediaBiden is a throwback, less instantaneously accessible and less interested in the internet as a site of connection. The former veep, and his lack of ardent online fandom, are also a direct result of his politics. Bidens stanceshis support of fracking, for instancehave been calibrated to appeal to as wide a berth of voters as possible. Thats a good political strategy, but it has also alienated the robust progressive movement, which trends young and online.

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Joe Biden Is Very Offlineand Thats OK - WIRED

Jordan Ogihara October 15th, 2020 - 11:29 AM

On October 14th, Showtime announced that Showtimes Miami-set crime dramaDexter will continue by way of a ten-part limited series scheduled to air in 2021, according to a network press release.The shows official Twitter account confirmed the announcement with a brief video and a caption referencing a memetic catchphrase spoken by Sergeant James Doakes, played by Erik King (Oz, National Treasure).

Surprise Motherfucker.Hes back. #Dexter pic.twitter.com/EDXov06rot

Dexter on Showtime (@SHO_Dexter) October 14, 2020

Dexters season eight finale aired back in 2013. The original broadcast was allegedly watched by 2.8 million viewers, a record total for an individual episode of a Showtime original series at the time, as reported by New York Daily News.

The revival has already secured the participation of the showrunner from Dextersfirst four seasons, Clyde Phillips (Feed the Beast, Nurse Jackie), and Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under, Netflixs Safe), who portrayed the eponymous forensic analyst-cum-serial killer and currently sings in the indie pop trio Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, as reported by Deadline. Both Phillips and Hall will occupy executive producer roles, per Showtimes official press release.

Dexter is based on a crime novel series by Jeff Lindsay, formerly playwright Jeffry P. Freundlich (The Cave, Just Watch Me). Lindsays eighth and final novel in the series, Dexter is Dead, was published in 2015, two years after the Season 8 finale. Lindsay explained why he had to move on from the character in an interview with Crime Reads: It was a very durable, very comfortable relationship and that was part of the problem. Comfort is the enemy of quality. He told Crime Reads that he felt like he finished Dexters story before he got tired of it: I always promised my readers I would quit if I just started to phone it in. So I quit before that happened.

Showtime has pulled off revivals of shows even less likely to return than Dexter in the past. The L Word: Generation Q, a sequel series to The L Word, one of the networks most groundbreaking programs from the 2000s, was renewed for a second season in January, as reported by Deadline. Furthermore, in 2017, the eighteen-part limited series Twin Peaks: The Return improbably brought viewers back to the uncanny world of the postmodern primetime soap Twin Peaks, which had originally aired on ABC in the early 1990s.

The first eight seasons of Dexter are available to stream through Netflix. They are also accessible via Showtimes own streaming service, available through select television providers and priced at $10.99 a month.

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Dexter Returns With Limited Series Announced at Showtime - mxdwn.com

This spring, the fashion house Balenciaga launched its latest line with a fictional news broadcast from dystopia. Repurposing the uncanny valley as virtual runway, the video features prosthetically altered models with blackened mouths speaking in electronic blurts over a grim techno soundtrack, pantomiming headlines from a world of disappearing water, robot control, and planets realigningall while wearing austerely futuristic new couture apparently designed to aesthetically summon this grim tomorrow into being, as the conceptual chyron crawl scrolls enigmatic koans like In space humans cannot cry, Mushrooms have thousands of genders, and (perhaps grimmest of all) Its always Fashion Week somewhere. While it may not make you want to buy the clothes, it provides another remarkable example of people explaining what it feels like to be alive right now through reference to our darkest science fictions.

You dont need to trawl avant-fashion shows to find itjust check your news feed.

As I write this, a search of The Washington Post reveals three headlines from the past week describing the days events as dystopian. From Tucker Carlsons histrionic fear-mongering about the anarchic mobs of his American Dystopia to the laments of The Guardians post-pandemic cricket writers covering matches without spectators, the d-word is routinely used by journalists across the political gamutusually as grim foreboding, sometimes as gallows humor. NBC News reporter Ben Collins even proclaims that he is working the dystopia beat. When they say it, you know just what they mean. Even as you cant help but wonder whether, in their invocation of Orwellian analogies, our pundits and reporters are doing exactly what Orwell warned againstobfuscating the real truth with imprecise language, and thereby helping to usher the real dystopia into being.

The blurring of the boundary between dystopian fiction and the evening news is not so new. It goes back to at least 2017, when White House talk of alternative facts put Orwells 1984 back atop the bestseller listsdriving sales of that 70-year-old masterpiece up 10,000 percent in the week following the inauguration. Hulus adaptation of Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale and Amazons take on Philip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle delivered authoritarian alt-Americas whose underground resistance movements seemed equally aimed at the real-life regime. Publishing began a wave of new novels that imagined a Second Civil War, including Omar El Akkads American War and my Tropic of Kansas (followed in 2018 by books like Lilith Saintcrows Afterwar and Claire ODells A Study in Honor, and in 2019 by Craig DiLouies Our War and my Rule of Capture)just as our partisan divisions began to make it seem like such a conflict was about to erupt in real life. The gun lobby launched a series of ads that looked like trailers for those books, narrating fiery news clips with a dark vision of the self-proclaimed Resistance as revolutionary saboteurs seeking to drive their daggers through the heart of our futureso they can build their utopia from the ashes of what they burned down. A vision so extreme it seemed like parody, until a few weeks later when similar scenes erupted on the streets of Charlottesvillecomplete with brownshirts in white polosand real people died in the conflict.

Flash forward to 2020, and the scenes on the news look more dystopian than the darkest new Hollywood futures streaming to our living rooms. The fear factor gets dialed up every day, fueled by genuine concerns about everything from contagion to climate crisis to the coming political reckoning, but amplified by an overclocked media environment that profits from its ability to stoke our anxieties. And those of us who craft even darker futures in our fictions are forced to wonder whether we might be contributing to the problem, cranking out the memetic fuel that lets a clickbait-driven culture turn up the algorithmic volume in a way that summons its own most hysterical fears into being.

I blame science fiction dystopias, jokes cyberpunk progenitor Bruce Sterling in a popular running gag on his Twitter feed. Its funny because it uses the platforms own exclamatory tendencies to riff on the way such narratives distract from the very real problems driving the state of the world. But its also funny because it tells the truth, especially about the way our most dismal narratives can excuse or encourage our failure to take agency over our own futures.

As a writer, its an uncomfortable feeling when the parallels between the evening news and your deliberately provocative worldbuilding make you feel like someone is taking your books and using them as manuals. The similarities are there. Science fiction has a knack for drawing out the immanent now, using a fun-house mirror to show what it really feels like to be alive in the current momentan oblique realism that often passes for prescience when it mostly just magnifies emergent aspects of the observed world. The dystopian lens is a useful tool to shatter exceptionalist myths and amplify whats wrong with the real world, all while telling compelling stories. But when its dramatic devices are imported into the days headlines, it distorts the truth, achieving an effect like those chumbox ads that stroke our darkest fears and creepiest curiosities. In fiction and in real life, overreliance on dystopian framing reflects a failure to imagine futures we would actually want to live in.

One reason the real world feels yoked to our dystopian imagination may be the failure of other science fictional futures to deliver the goods. The techno-utopian Tomorrowland 20th century science fiction promised us this century would bring turned out to be something much darker. Real life never lives up to the movie version our popular culture and politics teach us to expect. The End of History and the birth of the World Wide Web promised us a cyber-utopia of peace, progress and prosperity just around the corner, but the first two decades of the 21st century delivered a very different story, from 9/11 and its dark aftermath to the financial crisis and the resurgence of ethno-nationalism. Now our response to the pandemic has the world looking at the U.S. as a declining nation with some of the characteristics of a failed state. You cant blame science fiction dystopias for all that, any more than you can blame the mirror for how you look in the morning.

Dystopia is the kind of science fiction you can expect when the whole world seems unable to get a handle on what tomorrow will bring, let alone the future. It is a powerful form, with the capacity to draw on the worst of human history to highlight the injustices of the present. At its best, it is a fiction of resistance. Tiny acts of courageous dissidence by horrifically oppressed characters are what enable us to endure stories as grim as The Handmaids Tale and 1984, providing flickers of hope. Writing Tropic of Kansas, I learned I had to dial up the worst injustices of contemporary American life in order to plausibly conjure the positive revolutionary change that was my real goal. Dystopian storytelling has the greatest power when it births a vision of utopian possibility that gives real meaning to the struggle. Fighting the Empire is great, but what comes after the Ewok party?

Science fiction has produced many plausible but compromised utopias, usually by putting them in tension with equally plausible dystopias. Consider masterworks like Ursula K. Le Guins The Dispossessed, Kim Stanley Robinsons Pacific Edge and Green Mars, Joanna Russs The Female Man, and Octavia Butlers Earthseed books. But there are far fewer such books than there are popular dystopias, especially in recent years. Part of that has to do with the narrative challenges of writing stories set in places where conflict is minimal, or where the novelistic preoccupation with self has been replaced by a focus on community as protagonist. But science fiction has unique tools to tackle such challenges, and has already done an amazing job lately of showing its capacity for imagining more inclusive futures. As pandemic compounds political uncertainty and climate angst to further confound our ability to get a bead on the present, SF has an opportunity to provide fresh visions of what could lie on the other side, and help us stop doomscrolling our way through this dystopian Groundhog Day. We might even make the future feel like the Future again.

Christopher Brown is the Campbell and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Tropic of Kansas and Rule of Capture. His latest novel, Failed State, is now available from Harper Voyager.

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Dystopia as Clickbait: Science Fiction, Doomscrolling, and Reviving the Idea of the Future - tor.com

SIOUX FALLS, S.D., Sept. 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Sanford Health, the largest provider of rural healthcare in the country, today announced it has initiated a Phase 1b trial of SAB-185, a first-of-its-kindhuman polyclonal antibodytherapeutic candidate developed by SAB Biotherapeutics (SAB), that would be used to treat patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 at an early stage of the disease. The trial will enroll a total of 21 adult patients across several clinical sites. Sanford Health is the first site in the country to open the study to patients.

"Today's milestone underscores our relentless commitment to advancing the science of medicine to ensure our patients benefit from new discoveries as quickly as possible," said David A. Pearce, PhD, president of innovation and research at Sanford Health. "Working with SAB Biotherapeutics on this clinical trial gives us an opportunity to deliver on our promise to patients."

"We are eager to participate in this clinical trial to investigate the safety of SAB-185, a human polyclonal antibody therapeutic candidate for COVID-19," said Dr. Susan Hoover, principal investigator and an infectious disease physician at Sanford Health. "Our goal is to advance the science around COVID-19 so physicians can be better prepared to treat this novel coronavirus in the future, especially for our populations most at-risk."

SAB's novel platform, which leverages genetically engineered cattle to produce fully human antibodies, enables scalable and reliable production of specifically targeted, high potency neutralizing antibody products. This approach has expedited the rapid development of this novel immunotherapy for COVID-19, deploying the same natural immune response to fight the disease as recovered patients, but with a much higher concentration of antibodies.

"SAB is pleased to advance SAB-185, one of the leading novel therapeutics for COVID-19, into human trials and leverage the rapid response capabilities of our first-of-its-kind technology during this pandemic, when its needed most," said Eddie Sullivan, founder, president and CEO of SAB Biotherapeutics.

SAB is a Sioux Falls-based biopharmaceutical company advancing a new class of immunotherapies leveraging fully human polyclonal antibodies.Sanford Health is committed to taking research from the bench and bringing promising new treatments to our patients' bedside.New medical discoveries come out of hard work, innovation and research. SAB and Sanford Health are committed to developing and delivering novel solutions to overcome this global pandemic and improve people's lives.

About Sanford HealthSanford Health, one of the largest health systems inthe United States, is dedicated to the integrated delivery of health care, genomic medicine, senior care and services, global clinics, research and affordable insurance. Headquartered inSioux Falls, South Dakota, the organization includes 46 hospitals, 1,400 physicians and more than 200 Good Samaritan Society senior care locations in 26 states and 10 countries. Learn more about Sanford Health's transformative work to improve the human condition atsanfordhealth.orgorSanford Health News.

About SAB BiotherapeuticsSAB Biotherapeutics, Inc. (SAB) is a clinical-stage, biopharmaceutical company advancing a new class of immunotherapies leveraging fully human polyclonal antibodies. Utilizing some of the most complex genetic engineering and antibody science in the world, SAB has developed the only platform that can rapidly produce natural, highly-targeted, high-potency, human polyclonal immunotherapies at commercial scale. The company is advancing programs in autoimmunity, infectious diseases, inflammation and oncology. SAB is rapidly progressing on a new therapeutic for COVID-19, SAB-185, fully human polyclonal antibodies targeted to SARS-CoV-2 without using human donors. For more information visitsabbiotherapeutics.comor follow @SABBantibody on Twitter.

Media Contacts:

Angela Dejene[emailprotected](218) 280-0148

Melissa Ullerich[emailprotected](605) 695-8350

SOURCE Sanford Health

http://www.sanfordhealth.org

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Sanford Health is first in nation to dose patient with promising novel therapeutic candidate for COVID-19, SAB-185 - PRNewswire

When I asked Facebook about concerns around the ethics of big tech entering the brain-computer interface space, Mr. Chevillet, of Facebook Reality Labs, highlighted the transparency of its brain-reading project. This is why weve talked openly about our B.C.I. research so it can be discussed throughout the neuroethics community as we collectively explore what responsible innovation looks like in this field, he said in an email.

Ed Cutrell, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft, which also has a B.C.I. program, emphasized the importance of treating user data carefully. There needs to be clear sense of where that information goes, he told me. As we are sensing more and more about people, to what extent is that information Im collecting about you yours?

Some find all this talk of ethics and rights, if not irrelevant, then at least premature.

Medical scientists working to help paralyzed patients, for example, are already governed by HIPAA laws, which protect patient privacy. Any new medical technology has to go through the Food and Drug Administration approval process, which includes ethical considerations.

(Ethical quandaries still arise, though, notes Dr. Kirsch. Lets say you want to implant a sensor array in a patient suffering from locked-in syndrome. How do you get consent to conduct surgery that might change the persons life for the better from someone who cant communicate?)

Leigh Hochberg, a professor of engineering at Brown University and part of the BrainGate initiative, sees the companies now piling into the brain-machine space as a boon. The field needs these companies dynamism and their deep pockets, he told me. Discussions about ethics are important, but those discussions should not at any point derail the imperative to provide restorative neurotechnologies to people who could benefit from them, he added.

Ethicists, Dr. Jepsen told me, must also see this: The alternative would be deciding we arent interested in a deeper understanding of how our minds work, curing mental disease, really understanding depression, peering inside people in comas or with Alzheimers, and enhancing our abilities in finding new ways to communicate.

Theres even arguably a national security imperative to plow forward. China has its own version of BrainGate. If American companies dont pioneer this technology, some think, Chinese companies will. People have described this as a brain arms race, Dr. Yuste said.

Not even Dr. Gallant, who first succeeded in translating neural activity into a moving image of what another person was seeing and who was both elated and horrified by the exercise thinks the Luddite approach is an option. The only way out of the technology-driven hole were in is more technology and science, he told me. Thats just a cool fact of life.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff, the author of An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases, is a contributing opinion writer.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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The Brain Implants That Could Change Humanity - The New York Times

Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have added to evidence that a gene responsible for turning off a cells natural suicide signals may also be the culprit in making breast cancer and melanoma cells resistant to therapies that use the immune system to fight cancer. A summary of the research, conducted with mice and human cells, appeared in Cell Reports.When the gene, called BIRC2, is sent into overdrive, it makes too much, or an overexpression, of protein levels. This occurs in about 40% of breast cancers, particularly the more lethal type called triple negative, and it is not known how often the gene is overexpressed in melanomas.

If further studies affirm and refine the new findings, the researchers say, BIRC2 overexpression could be a key marker for immunotherapy resistance, further advancing precision medicine efforts in this area of cancer treatment. A marker of this kind could alert clinicians to the potential need for using drugs that block the genes activity in combination with immunotherapy drugs to form a potent cocktail to kill cancer in some treatment-resistant patients. Cancer cells use many pathways to evade the immune system, so our goal is to find additional drugs in our toolbox to complement the immunotherapy drugs currently in use, says Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., the C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Genetic Medicine, Pediatrics, Oncology, Medicine, Radiation Oncology and Biological Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and director of the Vascular Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering.

Semenza shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the gene that guides how cells adapt to low oxygen levels, a condition called hypoxia.

In 2018, Semenzas team showed that hypoxia essentially molds cancer cells into survival machines. Hypoxia prompts cancer cells to turn on three genes to help them evade the immune system by inactivating either the identification system or the eat me signal on immune cells. A cell surface protein called CD47 is the only dont eat me signal that blocks killing of cancer cells by immune cells called macrophages. Other cell surface proteins, PDL1 and CD73, block killing of cancer cells by immune cells called T lymphocytes.

These super-survivor cancer cells could explain, in part, Semenza says, why only 20% to 30% of cancer patients respond to drugs that boost the immune systems ability to target cancer cells.

For the current study, building on his basic science discoveries, Semenza and his team sorted through 325 human genes identified by researchers at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston whose protein products were overexpressed in melanoma cells and linked to processes that help cancer cells evade the immune system.

Semenzas team found that 38 of the genes are influenced by the transcription factor HIF-1, which regulates how cells adapt to hypoxia; among the 38 was BIRC2 (baculoviral IAP repeat-containing 2), already known to prevent cell suicide, or apoptosis, in essence a form of programmed cell death that is a brake on the kind of unchecked cell growth characteristic of cancer.

BIRC2 also blocks cells from secreting proteins that attract immune cells, such as T-cells and natural killer cells.

First, by studying the BIRC2 genome in human breast cancer cells, Semenzas team found that hypoxia proteins HIF1 and HIF2 bind directly to a portion of the BIRC2 gene under low oxygen conditions, identifying a direct mechanism for boosting the BIRC2 genes protein production.

Then, the research team examined how tumors developed in mice when they were injected with human breast cancer or melanoma cells genetically engineered to contain little or no BIRC2 gene expression. In mice injected with cancer cells lacking BIRC2 expression, tumors took longer to form, about three to four weeks, compared with the typical two weeks it takes to form tumors in mice.

The tumors formed by BIRC2-free cancer cells also had up to five times the level of a protein called CXCL9, the substance that attracts immune system T-cells and natural killer cells to the tumor location. The longer the tumor took to form, the more T-cells and natural killer cells were found inside the tumor.

Semenza notes that finding a plentiful number of immune cells within a tumor is a key indicator of immunotherapy success.

Next, to determine whether the immune system was critical to the stalled tumor growth they saw, Semenzas team injected the BIRC2-free melanoma and breast cancer cells into mice bred to have no functioning immune system. They found that tumors grew at the same rate, in about two weeks, as typical tumors. This suggests that the decreased tumor growth rate associated with loss of BIRC2 is dependent on recruiting T-cells and natural killer cells into the tumor, says Semenza.

Finally, Semenza and his team analyzed mice implanted with human breast cancer or melanoma tumors that either produced BIRC2 or were engineered to lack BIRC2. They gave the mice with melanoma tumors two types of immunotherapy FDA-approved for human use, and treated mice with breast tumors with one of the immunotherapy drugs. In both tumor types, the immunotherapy drugs were effective only against the tumors that lacked BIRC2.

Experimental drugs called SMAC mimetics that inactivate BIRC2 and other anti-cell suicide proteins are currently in clinical trials for certain types of cancers, but Semenza says that the drugs have not been very effective when used on their own.

These drugs might be very useful to improve the response to immunotherapy drugs in people with tumors that have high BIRC2 levels, says Semenza.Reference: Samanta D, Huang TYT, Shah R, Yang Y, Pan F, Semenza GL. BIRC2 Expression Impairs Anti-Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy Efficacy. Cell Rep. 2020;32(8). doi:10.1016/j.celrep.2020.108073

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Cell Suicide Gene Further Linked to Immunotherapy Response - Technology Networks

Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have added to evidence that a gene responsible for turning off a cell's natural "suicide" signals may also be the culprit in making breast cancer and melanoma cells resistant to therapies that use the immune system to fight cancer. A summary of the research, conducted with mice and human cells, appeared Aug. 25 in Cell Reports.

When the gene, called BIRC2, is sent into overdrive, it makes too much, or an "overexpression," of protein levels. This occurs in about 40% of breast cancers, particularly the more lethal type called triple negative, and it is not known how often the gene is overexpressed in melanomas.

If further studies affirm and refine the new findings, the researchers say, BIRC2 overexpression could be a key marker for immunotherapy resistance, further advancing precision medicine efforts in this area of cancer treatment. A marker of this kind could alert clinicians to the potential need for using drugs that block the gene's activity in combination with immunotherapy drugs to form a potent cocktail to kill cancer in some treatment-resistant patients."Cancer cells use many pathways to evade the immune system, so our goal is to find additional drugs in our toolbox to complement the immunotherapy drugs currently in use," says Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., the C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Genetic Medicine, Pediatrics, Oncology, Medicine, Radiation Oncology and Biological Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and director of the Vascular Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering.

Semenza shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the gene that guides how cells adapt to low oxygen levels, a condition called hypoxia.

In 2018, Semenza's team showed that hypoxia essentially molds cancer cells into survival machines. Hypoxia prompts cancer cells to turn on three genes to help them evade the immune system by inactivating either the identification system or the "eat me" signal on immune cells. A cell surface protein called CD47 is the only "don't eat me" signal that blocks killing of cancer cells by immune cells called macrophages. Other cell surface proteins, PDL1 and CD73, block killing of cancer cells by immune cells called T lymphocytes.

These super-survivor cancer cells could explain, in part, Semenza says, why only 20% to 30% of cancer patients respond to drugs that boost the immune system's ability to target cancer cells.

For the current study, building on his basic science discoveries, Semenza and his team sorted through 325 human genes identified by researchers at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston whose protein products were overexpressed in melanoma cells and linked to processes that help cancer cells evade the immune system.

Semenza's team found that 38 of the genes are influenced by the transcription factor HIF-1, which regulates how cells adapt to hypoxia; among the 38 was BIRC2 (baculoviral IAP repeat-containing 2), already known to prevent cell "suicide," or apoptosis, in essence a form of programmed cell death that is a brake on the kind of unchecked cell growth characteristic of cancer.

BIRC2 also blocks cells from secreting proteins that attract immune cells, such as T-cells and natural killer cells.

First, by studying the BIRC2 genome in human breast cancer cells, Semenza's team found that hypoxia proteins HIF1 and HIF2 bind directly to a portion of the BIRC2 gene under low oxygen conditions, identifying a direct mechanism for boosting the BIRC2 gene's protein production.

Then, the research team examined how tumors developed in mice when they were injected with human breast cancer or melanoma cells genetically engineered to contain little or no BIRC2 gene expression. In mice injected with cancer cells lacking BIRC2 expression, tumors took longer to form, about three to four weeks, compared with the typical two weeks it takes to form tumors in mice.

The tumors formed by BIRC2-free cancer cells also had up to five times the level of a protein called CXCL9, the substance that attracts immune system T-cells and natural killer cells to the tumor location. The longer the tumor took to form, the more T-cells and natural killer cells were found inside the tumor.

Semenza notes that finding a plentiful number of immune cells within a tumor is a key indicator of immunotherapy success.

Next, to determine whether the immune system was critical to the stalled tumor growth they saw, Semenza's team injected the BIRC2-free melanoma and breast cancer cells into mice bred to have no functioning immune system. They found that tumors grew at the same rate, in about two weeks, as typical tumors. "This suggests that the decreased tumor growth rate associated with loss of BIRC2 is dependent on recruiting T-cells and natural killer cells into the tumor," says Semenza.

Finally, Semenza and his team analyzed mice implanted with human breast cancer or melanoma tumors that either produced BIRC2 or were engineered to lack BIRC2. They gave the mice with melanoma tumors two types of immunotherapy FDA-approved for human use, and treated mice with breast tumors with one of the immunotherapy drugs. In both tumor types, the immunotherapy drugs were effective only against the tumors that lacked BIRC2.

Experimental drugs called SMAC mimetics that inactivate BIRC2 and other anti-cell suicide proteins are currently in clinical trials for certain types of cancers, but Semenza says that the drugs have not been very effective when used on their own.

"These drugs might be very useful to improve the response to immunotherapy drugs in people with tumors that have high BIRC2 levels," says Semenza.

Read more:
Effective cancer immunotherapy further linked to regulating a cell 'suicide' gene - Science Codex

It goes by many names: cultured, in vitro, cell-based, cultivated, lab-grown meat, etc. As the names imply, it is a meat alternative made in a lab via animal cells and a cultured medium, like fetal bovine serum or a proprietary mix of sugars and salts. Several companies around the world are promoting this new technique as a way to cultivate a meat alternative that is supposedly cleaner and safer than traditional meat.

(We are only looking at those products that culture cells taken from animals into a new meat-like formulation. There are many other products that culture plant, fungi, or algal cells into a meat substitute, but we are not reviewing them here.)

29 companies are planning to bring lab-cultured meat to market in the form of chicken, beef, pork, seafood, pet food, and beyond. These companies include Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, Mosa Meat, Meatable, SuperMeat, and Finless Foods. These companies are backed by huge investments from meat industry corporations (Cargill and Tyson), venture capitalist firms (Blue Yard Capital, Union Square Ventures, S2G Ventures, and Emerald Technology Ventures), and billionaires (such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson).

While the hype is certainly there, is lab-cultured meat actually better? Its proponents tout it as an environmentally responsible, cruelty-free, and antibiotic-free alternative to current meat production. While the goal of producing sustainable meat without killing animals is admirable, lab-cultured meat is in its infancy and the science behind the production methods requires more scrutiny.

Of particular concern is the genetic engineering of cells and their potential cancer-promoting properties. To be able to better assess whether the products are being produced by methods that involve genetic engineering and use genetic constructs (called onco-genes, typically used to make stem cells keep growing; this is not a problem for lab experiments, but could be for food products) that might encourage cancer cells, we need more information on how the cells are engineered and kept growing. Many of the companies are claiming this information is confidential and a business secret. These companies are not yet patenting their production processes wherein this information would be more fully disclosed. Some suggest that the production will follow the FDA cell culture guidelines, but theFDAs cell culture guidelines do not apply to this because theyre not designed for food.

To produce lab-cultured meat, many producers extract animal cells from living animals. This is typically done via biopsy, a painful and uncomfortable procedure that uses large needles. If a company could scale up with this method, it would require a consistent supply of animals from which to acquire cells and innumerable painful extractions. To make the cell-based product more consistent, the producer may biopsy the same animal many times for the cells that growing meat requires.

Growing animal cells (typically muscle cells) also requires a growth medium. When lab-cultured meat production first began, companies depended on fetal bovine serum (FBS) as a growth medium. Producing FBS involves extracting blood from the fetus of a pregnant cow when the cow is slaughtered.

Given its high cost, it appears that FBS is usually only used during small-scale lab trials. Additionally, increasing production capacity using FBS comes with its own set of concerns. Even disregarding the high cost of FBS, non-genetically engineered animal muscle cells only proliferate or increase to a certain degree. In order to overcome this limitation, large companies such as Mosa Meats and Memphis Meats claim theyve found an FBS alternative that does not involve animals along with an effective way to expand production. For Memphis Meats, this process involves the utilization of abioreactor and the creation of immortal cell lines.

Curious about how we make our Memphis Meat? See below! #sogood pic.twitter.com/co5d7OY0bI

Memphis Meats (@MemphisMeats) May 8, 2018

These companies are using a bioreactor essentially a very large vessel for containing biological reactions and processes to implement a scaffold-based system to grow meat, which uses a specific structure for cells to grow on and around. The scaffolding helps the cells differentiate into a specific meat-like formation. Researchers cite using cornstarch fibers, plant skeletons, fungi, and gelatin as common scaffold materials. Instead of animal muscle cell precursors (otherwise known as myosatellites), researchers have been using cultured stem cells. This distinction is important because extracted muscle cells will only proliferate to a certain extent. Companies are trying cultured stem cells as an alternative type of cell(s) that could proliferate exponentially so that they could scale up production, and later differentiate the cells into the various cell types that make up animal meat (muscle, fat, and blood cells) in a bioreactor.

In this process, the stem cells still come from animals or animal embryos, but what differentiates the two methods is that in the scaffold-based system, the cells can be genetically engineered to proliferate indefinitely. These cells are otherwise known as pluripotent (which make many kinds of cells, like stem cells) or totipotent (which make every kind of cell, as do embryos). This would greatly expand a companys capacity to make lab-cultured meat, but the methods by which companies make these cells proliferate come with human health and food safety ramifications.

While the FDA has previously reviewed enzymes, oils, algal, fungal, and bacterial products grown in microorganisms, these new animal cell-cultured products are much more complicated in structure and require a more thorough review. The scale required for making lab-cultured meat feasible for mass consumption will be the largest form of tissue engineering to exist and could introduce new kinds of genetically engineered cells into our diets. Further research will also be needed to conrm or dispel uncertainties over various potential safety issues. Candidate topics for research include the safety of ingesting rapidly growing genetically-modied cell lines, as these lines exhibit the characteristics of a cancerous cell which include overgrowth of cells not attributed to the original characteristics of a population of cultured primary cells. If lab-cultured meat enters the market, there are several human health concerns associated with this new production method, specifically that these genetically-modified cell lines could exhibit the characteristics of a cancerous cell.

While these companies dont disclose much to the public about their processing methods, their public patents reveal the creation of oncogenic, or cancer-causing, cells.A Memphis Meats patent on the creation of modified pluripotent cell lines involves the activation or inactivation of various proteins responsible for tumor suppression. Another patent from JUST Inc. describes the utilization of growth factors as part of its growth medium. This process could promote the development of cancer-like cells in lab-cultured meat products. Additionally, it is possible certain growth factors can be absorbed in the bloodstream after digestion.

If they are using stem cells, cell-based meat companies need to pay attention to the risk of cancer cells emerging in their cultures. A research team from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI), Harvard Medical School (HMS), and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has found that as stem cell lines grow in a lab environment, they often acquire mutations in the TP53 (p53) gene, an important tumor suppressor responsible for controlling cell growth and division. Their research suggests that inexpensive genetic sequencing technologies should be used by cell-based meat companies to screen for mutated cells in stem cell cultures so that these cultures can be excluded.

Cancer-causing additives are prohibited in our food supply under the Delaney Clauses in the 1958 Food Additive Amendments and the 1960 Color Additive Amendments to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA). These new rapidly growing cell lines might be considered color additives if they are being used to produce the color in the meat. The federal statutes regulating meat also prohibit the selling of animals with symptoms of illness, such as cancerous cells in meat. Regardless, all of these new ways of making cells that continue to grow or differentiate should require a safety assessment to determine if they contain cancerous cells before they can be sold.

In describing the scaffolding and growth media being used, lab-cultured meat companies need to be fully transparent about what ingredients theyre using. During the above-mentioned industry nonprofits presentation, the presenter suggested the growth media could be composed of a variety of different ingredients like proteins, amino acids, vitamins, and inorganic salts classified under the GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) process that allows companies to do their own testing and not submit to a new FDA food additive review. Since companies are not required to fully disclose the composition of their scaffolding or growth media, potentially exposing consumers to novel proteins and allergens, the new mixture of ingredients should be reviewed under a full FDA supervised food additive review, not GRAS.

Another major issue associated with processing methods using cell lines and/or culture medium is contamination. Unlike animals, cells do not have a fully functioning immune system, so there is a high likelihood of bacterial or fungal growth, mycoplasma, and other human pathogens growing in vats of cells. While lab-cultured meat companies emphasize that this type of meat production would be more sterile than traditional animal agriculture, its unknown how that is true without the use of antibiotics or some other pharmaceutical means of pathogenic control.

Based on commentary from various companies, antibiotic usage across the industry is still very unclear. While the industrys promoters have outlined many uses for antibiotics in lab-grown meat production in preventing contamination, they have not disclosed the amount of antibiotics being used in the various processes. Instead, they suggest that because mass production of lab-grown meat will be done in an industrial rather than lab setting, with bioreactors and tanks, there will be higher safety oversight than in medical labs. It is suggested that the many preventative measures in the industry will maintain a sterile boundary and deter antibiotic use in production. It remains a question of how a food production plant would be more sterile than a medical lab.

Some companies, such as Memphis Meats claim they are genetically engineering cell lines to be antibiotic-resistant, which would suggest they plan on using antibiotics, but dont want their meat cells to be affected. Problems with bacterial and viral contamination plague medical cell culture, so they generally use antimicrobials. Still, any large-scale production that requires antibiotic use even if just for a short-term duration should require such lab-cultured meat undergo even stricter USDA drug residue testing, pathogen testing, and FDA tolerance requirements than conventionally-produced meat. Many other companies claim they dont plan to use antibiotics in expanded production which begs the question, in addition to supposed sterile bioreactors, are they using other undisclosed processes to prevent contamination? For example, Future Meat Technologies describes the use of a special resin to remove toxins.

The companies have also not disclosed plans for how they will dispose of the toxins from bioreactors, scaffolding, and culture media like growth factors/hormones, differentiation factors, often including fetal calf serum or horse serum, and antimicrobials (commonly added to cultured cells to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination, particularly in long-term cultures). In conventionally-produced meat, animals dispose of these toxins in their urine and feces. If companies cant find a way for this meat to dispose of these toxins, they could potentially build up within the meat itself. Given the lack of clarity of these companies and their processes, there must be continuous monitoring of the cell lines and growth media/bioreactor for contaminants and some sort of standardization established across the industry to ensure safety.

The industry is new and the exact production process and inputs needed for large-scale, lab-cultured meat production are unknown (or not being disclosed by the companies). It is the responsibility of both FDA and USDA to ensure that all inputs used in production and the final product are safe for human and animal consumption. These agencies must ensure that lab-cultured meat is labeled appropriately, including if any of the product ingredients are genetically modified or if the ingredients are produced using unmodified cells from animals. These agencies must also ensure that this product doesnt introduce new allergens into the food supply, that any hormones or antibiotics used are not found at unsafe levels in the final product, and that the product doesnt contain any compounds or oncogenic (cancer-causing) cells that have not been approved for use in food.

Lab-cultured meat should not be allowed to use the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) regulatory loophole wherein companies can hire their own experts to evaluate their products, often in secret without any notice to the public or FDA. GRAS is an inappropriate designation because the consensus among knowledgeable experts regarding the safety of lab-cultured meat does not yet exist. Instead, FDA should require that lab-cultured meat products be regulated more thoroughly as food additives. Meat companies should submit complete food additive petitions for each of the novel ingredients used to produce these meats as well as a final food approval petition for the entire product. The production facilities, like all meat processing plants, should then have USDA inspectors on-site monitoring the process and inspecting the meat. The USDA announced in August that it will start the process of developing regulations for these new kinds of meat. Adequate regulation will be necessary to address the concerns raised in this blog.

Overall, due to the novel nature of lab-cultured meat, the lack of transparency from the companies involved, and the myriad potential health risks to consumers, rigorous regulation of this product is vitally important. Join Center for Food Safetys mailing list to protect your right to safe food HERE >>

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Is Lab-Grown Meat Healthy and Safe to Consume? - One Green Planet