Chinese Scientists To Perform Gene-Editing Trial On Humans
CRISPR-Cas9 is not exactly a household name. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Cas9 stands for CRISPR associated protein 9, an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme associated with CRISPR. If you read what they really stand for, it might make your head hurt. It is really complex. CRISPR was discovered in 2007 when a yogurt company found a bacteria which could eliminate viruses. The technology has evolved dramatically […]
Cancer Moonshot 2020
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiung is an amazing human being. A simple list of his accomplishments would fill this blog. Among many other things, he is leading an five-star group of companies, institutions, and scientists in an initiative called Cancer Moonshot 2020, announced in January 2016 in a White House Memorandum. The Cancer MoonShot 2020 Program is a comprehensive cancer […]
Accelerating Cancer Treatment
I remember being at a technology conference in 1999 when teenagers Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning demonstrated a digital music service called Napster. It was the beginning of a revolution, and it made a lot of sense to me. The rock group Metallica sued Napster in 2000 and the momentum of music sharing slowed — […]
Swallowable Video Pill
Wearables and a variety of mHealth devices are at the forefront of a consumer led revolution in healthcare. A third category of innovation is the swallowable. A team of researchers at the University of Glasgow has developed a swallowable video pill which can detect cancers in the throat and gut. The video pill is not new […]
Do We Need a Total-Body PET Scanner?
A research team at the University of California – Davis has received a $15.5 million grant to build the world’s first total-body positron emission tomography (PET) scanner. One could argue such scans will always find something and lead to unnecessary tests and procedures which drive up the cost of healthcare. The other side of the coin […]