It is known that the mitochondria is called the powerhouse of the cell, without which there will be no energy production in the cell, thereby the body too! Along with this mitochondria has its role in other important functions, one crucial role being in aging.

Research has shown that age-related diseases are linked to mitochondrial functioning. Further, it is known that "mild inhibition of mitochondrial respiration" promotes longevity in many species, which means to mildly slow down mitochondria's energy-making process. Thus, the life-span extension compensates for the reduced mitochondrial respiration.

An enzyme called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) that promotes mitochondrial health is also known as anti-aging protein. The same enzyme plays a crucial role in life-span extension by reducing mitochondrial respiration.

Research on roundworms has shown that an enzyme called VRK-1 can extend their lifespan. VRK-1 does this by increasing the level of AMPK resulting in an increase in its activity, promoting longevity through phosphorylation.

This VRK-1 is also a gene that gives instructions in making a protein called VRK (vaccinia-related kinase), which is active in cells throughout the body. It plays a critical role in cell growth and division. It also influences proteins that control gene activity attaching itself to the DNA.

This is an important finding in the research of extending human lifespan too.

Korean scientists published a paper this Wednesday in Science Advances, that showed how the lifespan of worms was extended by varying VRK-1 levels.

Roundworms normally have a lifespan of about two to three weeks. But the genetically engineered worms in the experiment, having elevated levels of VRK-1 lived about 23.7 days on average - they lived longer. When they inhibited the function of VRK-1 in other worms, they found that their lives were shortened.

Lab-controlled worms that lived 20.3 days on average, lived only 12.7 days as VRK-1 was inhibited. That is, the worms died sooner.

A senior author of the paper, Seung-Jae Lee, professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology told Inverse that the key to activating longevity was in the anti-aging protein, AMPK, while the key to activating AMPK is VRK-1. The VRK-1 enzyme is found in worms and has its cousin in human cells, that's very similar to it.

"Therefore, it is possible that this mechanism can be applied to promoting human longevity in the future," he added.

Similar patterns were shown in cultured human cells in the experiment, Lee said, showing that the process holds even in complex organisms.

Replicating the study in animals, like mice will show it's likeliness in humans. However, scientists still don't know how exactly the process occurs.

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One More Key to Human Longevity Found After Worm Research - International Business Times, Singapore Edition

The Obama administration pursued a plan to reform it. An entire news organization, The Marshall Project, was launched in late 2014 to cover it. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Sentencing Project are dedicated to unmaking a system that unjustly targets people of color.

But how did we get this system in the first place? Our ongoing historical research project investigates the relationship between the press and convict labor. While that story is still unfolding, we have learned what few Americans, especially white Americans, know: the dark history that produced our current criminal justice system.

If anything is to change if we are ever to end this racial nightmare, and achieve our country, as James Baldwin put it we must confront this system and the blighted history that created it.

During Reconstruction, the 12 years following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, former slaves made meaningful political, social and economic gains. Black men voted and even held public office across the South. Biracial experiments in governance flowered. Black literacy surged, surpassing those of whites in some cities. Black schools, churches and social institutions thrived.

As the prominent historian Eric Foner writes in his masterwork on Reconstruction, Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.

But this moment was short-lived. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.

History is made by human actors and the choices they make.

According to Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name, the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the countrys accommodation, explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.

Designed to reverse black advances, Redemption was an organized effort by white merchants, planters, businessmen and politicians that followed Reconstruction. Redeemers employed vicious racial violence and state legislation as tools to prevent black citizenship and equality promised under the 14th and 15th amendments.

By the early 1900s, nearly every southern state had barred black citizens not only from voting but also from serving in public office, on juries and in the administration of the justice system.

The Souths new racial caste system was not merely political and social. It was thoroughly economic. Slavery had made the Souths agriculture-based economy the most powerful force in the global cotton market, but the Civil War devastated this economy. How to build a new one?

Ironically, white leaders found a solution in the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States in 1865. By exploiting the provision allowing slavery and involuntary servitude to continue as a punishment for crime, they took advantage of a penal system predating the Civil War and used even during Reconstruction.

A new form of control

With the help of profiteering industrialists they found yet a new way to build wealth on the bound labor of black Americans: the convict lease system. Heres how it worked. Black men and sometimes women and children were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners plantations and farms. The most sinister crime was vagrancy the crime of being unemployed which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay.

Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the regions untapped natural resources. As many as 200,000 black Americans were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture.

For both the state and private corporations, the opportunities for profit were enormous. For the state, convict lease generated revenue and provided a powerful tool to subjugate African-Americans and intimidate them into behaving in accordance with the new social order. It also greatly reduced state expenses in housing and caring for convicts. For the corporations, convict lease provided droves of cheap, disposable laborers who could be worked to the extremes of human cruelty.

Every southern state leased convicts, and at least nine-tenths of all leased convicts were black. In reports of the period, the terms convicts and negroes are used interchangeably.

Of those black Americans caught in the convict lease system, a few were men like Henry Nisbet, who murdered nine other black men in Georgia. But the vast majority were like Green Cottenham, the central figure in Blackmons book, who was snatched into the system after being charged with vagrancy.

A principal difference between antebellum slavery and convict leasing was that, in the latter, the laborers were only the temporary property of their masters. On one hand, this meant that after their fines had been paid off, they would potentially be let free. On the other, it meant the companies leasing convicts often absolved themselves of concerns about workers longevity. Such convicts were viewed as disposable and frequently worked beyond human endurance.

The living conditions of leased convicts are documented in dozens of detailed, firsthand reports spanning decades and covering many states. In 1883, Blackmon writes, Alabama prison inspector Reginald Dawson described leased convicts in one mine being held on trivial charges, in desperate, miserable conditions, poorly fed, clothed, and unnecessarily chained and shackled. He described the appalling number of deaths and appalling numbers of maimed and disabled men held by various forced-labor entrepreneurs spanning the entire state.

Dawsons reports had no perceptible impact on Alabamas convict leasing system. The exploitation of black convict labor by the penal system and industrialists was central to southern politics and economics of the era. It was a carefully crafted answer to black progress during Reconstruction highly visible and widely known. The system benefited the national economy, too. The federal government passed up one opportunity after another to intervene.

Convict lease ended at different times across the early 20th century, only to be replaced in many states by another racialized and brutal method of convict labor: the chain gang. Convict labor, debt peonage, lynching and the white supremacist ideologies of Jim Crow that supported them all produced a bleak social landscape across the South for African-Americans.

Black Americans developed multiple resistance strategies and gained major victories through the civil rights movement, including Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Jim Crow fell, and America moved closer than ever to fulfilling its democratic promise of equality and opportunity for all.

But in the decades that followed, a tough on crime politics with racist undertones produced, among other things, harsh drug and mandatory minimum sentencing laws that were applied in racially disparate ways. The mass incarceration system exploded, with the rate of imprisonment quadrupling between the 1970s and today. Michelle Alexander famously calls it The New Jim Crow in her book of the same name.

Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with 2.2 million behind bars, even though crime has decreased significantly since the early 1990s. And while black Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 37 percent of the incarcerated population. Forty percent of police killings of unarmed people are black men, who make up merely 6 percent of the population. It doesnt have to be this way. We can choose otherwise.

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Peonage Explained: The system of convict labor was Slavery by another name - Milwaukee Independent

According to a new report published by Allied Market Research, titled, Precision Medicine Software Marketby Delivery Mode (On-premise and Cloud-based), Application (Oncology, Pharmacogenomics, Rare Diseases, and Others), and End User (Healthcare Providers, Research Centers & Government Institutes, and Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology Companies): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2019-2026

Precision medicine is an emerging medical approach undertaken by medical practitioners for the treatment of a patient, followed with medical decisions, treatments, practices, or products being tailored to the individual patient. Appropriate or optimal therapies may be employed based on variability in the patients genetic profile, environment, and lifestyle for each person. The diagnostic testing can be based on the context of an individuals genetic profile or other molecular or cellular analysis. The emergence of precision medicine has addressed the dire need for better diagnostic and analytical tools. Precision medicine software combines the clinical and molecular data to provide with valuable insights to determine the ideal therapeutic course of treatment.

Download Report Sample @https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/5675

Moreover, it provides with a wide range of applications in both the diagnostics and clinical areas for better understanding of diseases such as cancer, searching for new biomarkers, researching new therapies, repurposing existing drugs, and stratifying patients for clinical trials.

The global market size of Precision Medicine Software Market is $XX million in 2018 with XX CAGR, and it is expected to reach $XX million by the end of 2026 with a CAGR of XX% from 2019 to 2026.

The Major Key Players Are:

Synapse, Inc., Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc. (2bPrecise LLC), Roche Holdings, Inc. (Foundation Medicine, Inc.), Fabric Genomics, Inc., Sophia Genetics SA, PierianDx, Inc., Qiagen N.V. (N-of-One, Inc.), Human Longevity, Inc., Roper Technologies, Inc. (Sunquest Information Systems, Inc.), Gene42, Inc. Other players in the value chain include Translational Software, Inc., LifeOmic Health, LLC, NantHealth, Inc., Tempus Labs, Inc., Flatiron Health, Inc., IBM Watson Group, and Koninklijke Philips N.V.

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Precision Medicine Software Market Size Prognosticated to Perceive a Thriving Growth by 2026 | Synapse, Inc., PierianDx, Inc. - Morning Tick

U.S. capitalism survived because it found a solution to the basic problem of its instability, its business cycles. Since capitalism never could end cyclical downturns and their awful effects, its survival required making those effects somehow socially tolerable. Systemic racism survived in the post-Civil War United States partly because it helped to achieve that tolerability. Capitalism provided conditions for the reproduction of systemic racism, and vice versa.

Every four to seven years, on average, capitalism produces a downturn (recession, depression, bust, crashmany words for a problem so regularly repeated). Political leaders, economists, and others have long searched for a cure for capitalisms instability. None was ever found. Capitalism has thus already recorded three crashes in this new century (spring of 2000, autumn of 2008, and now in 2020).

Defenders of capitalism prefer to call its inescapable instability the business cycle. That sounds less awful. Yet its cycles hard reality has always frightened capitalisms defenders. They recognize that when large numbers of people suddenly lose their jobs, many businesses die, production shrinks, and governments lose tax revenues, the results can and often do threaten the entire economic system. Capitalisms cyclical crises could potentially turn their victims against it and make them receptive to the systems critics.

This would more likely happen if everyone in the society were roughly equally vulnerable to cyclical downturns. Most employees would then rightly worry that their jobs would be lost in the next crash. They would periodically face income losses, interrupted educations, lost homes, and so on. Whatever relief employees felt if neighbors, rather than themselves, got fired, they would know that it might well be their turn in the next cycle. The losses, insecurities, and anxieties produced by such a capitalism would long ago have turned employees against it and provoked transition to a different system.

U.S. capitalism solved its instability problem by making cyclical downturns afflict chiefly a minority subpart of the whole working class. It positioned that minority to bear the brunt of each cycle and suffer its damages disproportionally. That minority was repeatedly drawn into and then thrown out of jobs as the cycle dictated. Any savings it might accumulate when working would be lost when unemployed. Repeated firings precluded such a minority from enjoying the benefits of job longevity (seniority, promotion, household stability, etc.). Poverty, disrupted households and families, unaffordable housing, education, and medical care would haunt such a minority. It would become capitalisms business cycle shock-absorberthe last hired, first firedacross the four-to-seven year average duration of its cycles.

For capitalism, making such a minority absorb most of the costs of capitalisms instability allowed the majority of the working class to be relatively exempted, relieved, freed from them. The majority could be less subject to cycles because the minority was made relatively much more subject. Capitalism promised the majority relatively secure jobs and incomes because it took those away from the minority. The majority could thus worry less about the next cycle, whereas the minority had to worry more and adjust their lives more. Racists could then attribute the resulting differences between minority and majority subparts of a population to inherent qualities of different races instead.

Other advanced capitalist countries found parallel solutions. Some condemned immigrants to play the role assigned to African Americans in the United States. Racism aimed at immigrants often followed. In cyclical upswings, immigrants would be brought in: North Africans into France, southern Italians into Switzerland, Turks into Germany, and so on. Then, cyclical downswings would return those immigrants to their home countries. Capitalisms would thus save on costs of unemployment insurance, welfare payments, etc., for the workers who had returned. While some capitalisms relied on domestic minorities to be shock-absorbers and others relied on immigrants, some countries relied on both. The United States used Central American immigrants alongside domestic African Americans, and it still does. Germany allowed some immigrants to settle and acquire German citizenship alongside Turkish and other immigrant guest workers.

In the United States, married white women also played the role of business cycle shock-absorber. During cyclical upswings, they would enter the paid labor force in part-time or full-time positions. Like African Americans, they earned less than white men. Womens jobs, too, were likely to be temporary, undone by cyclical downturns.

Whatever communities were forced into the shock-absorber role, poverty, depression, broken families, slums, and inadequate education and health facilities became more widespread among them than they were among the majority of the working class. Insecure jobs, incomes, homes, and lives often bred bitterness, envy, desperation, crime, and violence. These collateral damages had to be managed by the capitalisms whose survival depended on producing and reproducing those communities. Police and prisons were and are assigned that management task.

Police and prisons were to keep the lid on, tame, patrol and control the restive portions of the shock-absorber communities sequestered in slums or ghettos. Interactions with police coupled with cycling and recycling through prisons were the chosen means to manage capitalisms collateral damage. Those means generated collateral damage of their own: the long, tragic record of police violence, use of excessive force, the harshness and violence of incarceration, and the killing especially of African Americans.

Why were African Americans chosen to be key (but not the only) cyclical shock-absorbers in the United States? One factor concerned the racist legacies of U.S. slavery. They included beliefs that slaves were either not fully human or inferior humans. Even the U.S. Constitution had counted a slave as merely three-fifths of a full (i.e., white) person for census purposes. Accommodation to slavery before the U.S. Civil War had already shaped a racialized consciousness in both masters and slaves. And because U.S. slavery entailed different skin colors for masters and slaves (unlike many slaveries in world history), a readily identifiable minority had already been defined in racial terms in the slave portions of the United States. Moreover, that definition had spread to other parts of the United States as well. U.S. capitalism used, absorbed, and built on slaverys legacy by inserting large portions of the African American community into the shock-absorber role that the system required. The racism developed by U.S. slavery thereby both facilitated U.S. capitalism and was reinforced by it.

A significant portion of the white working class in all capitalisms has always also been forced into the shock-absorber role. White trash in U.S. capitalism was never far from the African Americans similarly situated. There thus arose possibilities of class solidarity between these Black and white working-class communities. U.S. history displays moments when those possibilities were realized, as C. Vann Woodward documented so well. It also displays moments of intense racist violence used to block the realization of those possibilities. Employers played on racialized differences to keep employees from unifying against them. In bitter competitions between Black and white shock-absorbers for cyclically scarce jobs, whites could and often did use racism to gain advantages in access to those jobs. In multiple ways, then, capitalism fostered and benefited from racism; it thus settled deeply into the system.

Fundamental injustice characterized the relationship between police and prisons, on the one hand, and the African American and other communities (Indigenous, people of color) condemned to play capitalisms shock-absorber role, on the other. The solution was and is not better training or more funding; both have been tried repeatedly and both have likewise failed repeatedly. A real solution would provide a decently paid job to everyone who wants one as a matter of right. Unemployment would then be outlawed much like slavery, child abuse, etc. Taxes levied on capitalist enterprises would provide the funds needed to find jobs, private or public, for those laid off by an employer (much as such taxes help fund unemployment insurance now). Those funds would include wages or salaries paid for each workers time between being laid off and rehired. Minimum wages, applied universally, would cover reasonable housing, transport, health care and other living costs.

If such a solution were deemed to be incompatible with capitalism as a system, capitalism would have to give way to a system that made adequately paid employment a basic right for all. Enterprise profit would then finally be ejected from its throne as capitalisms number one social priority.

Such a solution would finally free African Americans, Indigenous, and Brown people from long-standing abuses in and by police and prisons. It would thus reduce the racism that those institutions have exemplified and reinforced. It would also reduce pressures on police and prison personnel to behave in ways that self-destructively rob them of their humanity as well as oppress others. Police and prisons in the United States today serve an inherently unstable capitalism by means of systemic racism. The logic of alliance between anti-racism and anti-capitalism could not be clearer.

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How Capitalism solved its instability problem by using racism as an essential tool for maintaining order - Milwaukee Independent

DetailsCategory: DNA RNA and CellsPublished on Friday, 03 July 2020 10:25Hits: 378

NATICK, MA, USA I July2, 2020 I AffyImmune Therapeutics, Inc. disclosed novel advancements in their proprietary affinity-tuned CAR T-cell programs and technology in three presentations at the recent Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). One presentation reported on a new CAR T design for localized and inducible cytokine release. The other two described their affinity-tuned CAR T cell design approach that maintains robust tumor cell killing while reducing toxicity. The company currently has an open IND for the treatment of relapsed or refractory thyroid cancer using an affinity-tuned CAR T-cell targeting the ICAM-1 protein, which is overexpressed in advanced thyroid cancer.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy has shown robust anti-cancer responses in hematologic malignancies, but applying this therapeutic approach to solid tumors has been hindered by multiple challenges, including impaired T cell infiltration of the immune-suppressive tumor environment and on-target/off-tumor cytotoxicity to normal tissues. To improve infiltration and mitigate toxicity, AffyImmune developed CARs with selective targeting and fine-tuned affinity.

Highly localized, inducible interleukin-12 release augments ICAM-1 CAR T cell activity against solid tumors

One presentation (abstract #4359) demonstrated that IL-12 secretion induced the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines IFN- and TNF- both in vitro and in vivo, suggesting a mechanism by which local release of inducible IL-12 can help overcome hostile tumor microenvironments and augment anti-tumor immune responses. The inducible IL-12 CAR T cells exhibited much more robust elimination of subcutaneous and peritoneal tumors compared to CAR T cells lacking inducible IL-12 expression.

Mitigating on-target off-tumor cytotoxicity of EpCAM CAR-T by affinity tuning

Two additional presentations focused on the multi-cancer biomarker epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM). EpCam is frequently over-expressed in a wide variety of carcinomas, including colon, gastric, pancreas, and breast cancers. This makes EpCAM attractive for targeted therapeutics, but recent clinical trials of EpCAM-targeting therapeutics have shown significant dose-limiting toxicities resulting in limited clinical responses. To selectively target EpCAM high tumors, AffyImmune is developing affinity tuned EpCAM CAR T cells.

In one EpCAM presentation (abstract #4534), author Huan Yang of AffyImmune described the development of AffyImmune's EpCAM targeting technology, which involved a rational design approach incorporating lower-affinity single-chain antibody (scFv) variants. While high-affinity EpCAM-targeting CAR T-cells kill both normal human epithelial cells as well as EpCAM-high tumor cells, AffyImmune's lower affinity CAR T-cells were shown to spare normal human epithelial cells while still effectively killing tumor cells expressing high levels of EpCAM. Further, transcriptional profiling suggested that lower affinity CAR T variants were less prone to exhaustion.

Eradication of EpCAM expressing solid tumors by low-affinity CAR T cells

In the final, complimentary presentation (abstract #4534), it was shown that potent in vivo anti-tumor activity could be obtained using lower affinity CAR T cells in an intraperitoneal gastric cancer model, an orthotopic pancreatic tumor model, and in a PDX model using a gastric cancer patient-derived xenograft. The authors concluded that the technology enabled "eradication of various difficult-to-treat solid tumors, without triggering severe treatment-related toxicities," showing promise for the fine-tuning approach as a general strategy for identifying a therapeutic window for CAR-T cells in challenging, solid tumor types.

"Together, these presentations demonstrate the elegance and effectiveness of AffyImmune's strategy," said AffyImmune co-founder Moonsoo Jin. "We're focused on identifying the optimal affinity for targeting tumor-associated antigens using CAR T-cells. In this way, it is possible to both avoid non-tumor cells expressing basal levels of the target and to optimize CAR T-cell function, longevity, and tumor killing."

All presentations were presented at the AACR Virtual Annual Meeting II between June 22-24, 2020, and are available for on-demand viewing.

About AffyImmune Therapeutics, Inc.

AffyImmune is realizing the potential of cancer immunotherapy by extending the anti-cancer activity of CAR-T cell therapy to solid tumors, improving the safety and efficacy of CAR-T treatment. Based on Professor Moonsoo Jin's work at Weill Cornell Medicine, AffyImmune's proprietary technology allows fine-tuning of CAR-T cells affinity to selectively kill tumor cells, reducing toxicity. AffyImmune scientists have also developed a tracking system, that can be engineered into any CAR-T cell, to allow for real-time localization of cells after administration to patients.

AffyImmune's lead asset, AIC100, is an affinity-tuned, 3rd generation CAR-T cell therapy co-expressing SSTR2. Preclinical studies in various solid tumor models demonstrated AIC100's robust and enduring tumor eradication and superior safety profile compared to standard, high-affinity CAR T cell therapy. In 2019, AffyImmune received Orphan Drug Designation by the FDA for AIC100 and began recruitment for a Phase 1 trial to treat advanced thyroid cancer.

Founded in 2016, AffyImmune is headquartered in Natick, MA, and is incubated by ORI Capital.

About ORI Healthcare Fund L.P.

ORI Healthcare Fund is a $200 million venture capital fund focused on investing in innovative companies with disruptive technologies in the healthcare industry globally. The General Partner of the Fund was founded by Ms. Simone (Hong Fang) Song, the former head of China Healthcare Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs.

SOURCE: AffyImmune Therapeutics

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AffyImmune Therapeutics presents novel CAR T development programs at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research | DNA RNA and...