Future Technology Trends

The strategies for engineered negligible senescence program is searching for novel methods to overcome the aging process. While medical technology has progressed an astounding amount over the last 100 years, lifespans have not increased as much as many previously had hoped. One apparent target for longevity medicine is to get rid of extracellular junk that may cause various biological breakdowns as someone gets older. AmyloSENS is the name of this undertaking. The goal is to remove amyloid plaques that begin to accumulate within the body. The heart receives damage due to these products over the course of decades. This can lead to coronary issues later in life. The proteins that may aggregate in the region include senile systemic amyloidosis (SSA), isolated atrial amyloidosis (IAA) and “cardiac amyloidoses”. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, is also associated with too much of a specific substance. Destruction of neurons in key areas involved with memory possibly happens because of these things. Stopping this process early could potentially help maintain a person’s normal cognition.  Read More »

A European project is developing computer simulations of the human heart. The four-year undertaking will end in 2012. The digital models can allow doctors to ascertain the progression of various diseases. The disorders that they are emulating include coronary artery disease and heart failure. In the European Union, more than 1.9 million deaths each year are due to cardiovascular conditions. There are enormous costs associated with these afflictions. Any way of lessening those dollar figures would be beneficial. The EU facilitates collaborations between many countries. Scientists are collecting information about biology at a tremendous pace. Unfortunately, not a lot of this work has translated into payoffs at the clinic. The euHeart venture seeks to rectify a few of these shortcomings and give patients better personalized medicine. Eventually, integrating these results into a hospital setting will help to guide a physicians treatment plan. The level of software detail ranges from sub-cellular components up to the entire structure of the heart. Read More »

Biological cellular-based nanorobotics may be able to piggyback on what evolution has already accomplished. Instead of miniature machines, these would be genetically engineered “intelligent” artificial cells. They may have a greater range of abilities than their evolved counterpart as they would be designed to fulfill specific niches. There has been recent work on genetic logic gates for robust digital-like synthetic biology. This is dissimilar to how an electronic circuit runs. The operation happens by way of signal transduction, instead of the flow of current. It might be easier to function in a messy environment. Another mechanism for computation is microbial nanowires derived from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens. The filaments conduct electricity. They are 3 to 5 nanometers in size and can be several micrometers in length. Perhaps these could be utilized in a cell to provide information-processing capabilities. A protein memristor might even enable a nano-neural network for a tiny brain.  Read More »

The Allen brain atlas project is devoted to publishing an enormous amount of data. The underlying operations of the mind are gradually being uncovered. Scientists are performing an analysis on neurons. Depending on the environmental circumstances, an individual cell expresses different proteins at varying rates. The quantity of information to sift through makes this a challenging venture. Taking samples over the course of neurological development helps academics to discover how the brain grows. They are investigating other aspects such as the axonal branches of the neural networks. Recently the scientists have launched the Allen mouse brain connectivity atlas. A main feature of this work includes higher-resolution axonal projection maps. The axons are the tendrils that link one brain cell to another. The action potential signal propagates down these pathways to reach a target destination. A rAAV virus tracer labels the structures. Then they utilize 2-photon tomography to visualize 27 brain regions. The researchers can compare that data to the conventional tracers.  Read More »

There has been a lot of hope that scientists will eventually discover novel technologies to enable a radical extension of lifespan. Unfortunately, this promise has failed to materialize thus far and the outcome appears to be nowhere on the immediate horizon. Biology is just too complex. It is a herculean feat to try to fix all of the damage, as a person gets older. German researchers are studying the role of oxidative stress as it relates to the aging process. There is a new project named OXISYS. This work is occurring under the umbrella of the GerontoSys II initiative. The academics are examining signaling pathways that lead to reactive oxygen species (ROS). The ROS have an unpaired electron and they aggravate degenerative disorders by causing the breakdown of proteins, DNA or lipids. This analysis will allow for the identification of aberrant molecules that arise due to those oxidative processes. This could help doctors to diagnose patient’s ailments by finding biomarkers that delineate these products. A few organizations are beginning to carry out experiments on animal models and human liver cell cultures. This technology could stop the negative outcomes associated with ROS.  Read More »

A novel technique can further automate the process of making cell cultures. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute have built a new robotic device that performs all the necessary steps, without the need for human intervention. These sorts of techniques can help introduce an exponential pace to more biotechnology trends. Trying to unravel all of the intricate details of gene expression is a daunting undertaking. The apparatus makes it easier than ever to accomplish this. High-throughput science will happen in a more effective manner. Supercomputers can analyze the information.  Read More »

The war on cancer has been a long and arduous road. There are a vast number of possible methods to ameliorate these pathologies, but clinical progress has still been relatively slow. Finding ideal anti-cancer compounds is time consuming. A team from the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Japan is employing a swifter way to discover the mode of action for certain experimental medications. They utilize a specialized proteomic profiling technique to assess potential candidates. BNS-22 is a remedy that they found with this biotechnology. Read More »

Extreme longevity is something of a futurist’s pipe dream. No matter how much state of the art medical equipment is developed, drastically longer lifespans seem to remain a distant fantasy. The biology of the aging processes is extremely complex. Fortunately, new tools allow a rapid analysis of pathologies. There is a surfeit of data on biochemical functions. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Buck Institute have discovered a novel method to revert adult stem cells back to a previous state. Experimental techniques combined with computational approaches helped them understand a few of the genomic changes associated with age. Adult stem cells are located in numerous tissues and they help them regenerate. Microscopic cellular constituents of the body are constantly dying off and replaced by new ones. The stem cell hypothesis of aging is relatively recent addition to the field of biogerontology. The theory’s main point is that a decline in their ability to renew is one reason that health gets worse as a person becomes older.   Read More »

Over the last several decades, new tools have allowed researchers to uncover a massive amount of data on biological processes.  In some arenas, such as genomics or connectomics, researchers are gathering data at an exponential rate.  Scientists have found numerous protein targets.  There has been a large gap, however, between these R&D discoveries and the selection at the pharmacy.  Obtaining approval for medicines is a challenging process that requires millions of dollars to complete.  Often medications can make it all the way to phase three clinical trials, but they still may not pan out in the end.  There have been many disastrous outcomes even with approved drugs.  The FDA has inadvertently introduced meds with toxic side effects onto the market.  New methods of screening molecules are necessary to cut the costs associated with the process.  Perhaps this can salvage some of the failures of the genomics revolution and make a few of the more speculative visions of future human longevity a reality.  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in conjunction with the NIH and FDA will develop a new chip that can more efficiently screen for molecules.  This sort of work may be crucial to create vaccines fast enough to defend against bioweapons.  The progress in biotechnology could make it easier to produce deadly designer viruses.  There is somewhat of an arms race to be able to respond swiftly to these threats. Read More »

A new machine built by EPFL researchers can enable doctors to look at real time blood flow underneath the skin. This device is an improvement over past scanners. It will help hospitals to better determine the severity of a patient’s burns or ameliorate other disorders. It is an easy way of visualizing sub-cutaneous microcirculation at a high resolution. Examining the images can help doctors to understand the dynamics of person’s heartbeat and vasomotion. The contraption is based on a relatively new technique called laser doppler imaging (LDI for short). This novel machine is considerably less complicated and bulky than related technology. A laser beam shines on a patient’s skin and various tissues or red blood cells then reflect this light. A doppler equivalent frequency shift occurs to achieve this. The laser light is scattered when it hits blood cells and some of that light reflects back to the source. The movement of particles causes the wavelength shift (Doppler Effect) when electromagnetic radiation bounces off it. The camera is from a biomedical optics laboratory and can take 20,000 images per second by analyzing incoming photons. To capture these signals requires a fast complementary metal oxide semiconductor sensor. A special software program deciphers the perfusion data and puts it on a color monitor to allow doctors to make sense of the information. Read More »