/ News
HOW WE'VE SUCCEEDED IN BREACHING THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER AT LAST
Last week, a team of Canadian doctors tried an experimental new procedure on a patient in dire straits. Bonny Hall has a brain tumor that she had been managing for years with medication, but it was growing. Her doctors decided to try a new technique in which powerful anti-cancer drugs could burst through the blood-brain barrier and attack the tumor—the first time such a procedure has been done in a human, though researchers have been trying to do it for years. Just how big a deal is this, and why hasn’t it happened before?
The blood-brain barrier is made of a thin layer of cells tightly fitted together around blood vessels in the brain. The cells separate the blood in the rest of your body from the blood in your brain. While the rest of your body has frequent fluctuations of chemicals like hormones or potassium, the delicate cells in your brain might be thrown out of whack by these drastic variations. This barrier also ensures that pathogens that might be in your blood don’t make it to the brain. The brain needs special microenvironments to function properly and stably, so the blood-brain barrier in healthy adults is nearly impenetrable, though a number of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s or stroke have been connected to disruptions in it.
While this barrier’s impenetrable quality is good for regular function, it’s a real pain when doctors are trying to treat diseases. About 95 percent of drugs administered through typical means (pill, injections, enemas, patches) don’t have any function in the brain. So doctors have been looking for ways to penetrate it so that medications can treat the brain without permanently damaging the barrier, which would leave the brain vulnerable to infection or chemical imbalance. The researchers have had a couple of leads—they found that certain tiny molecules, such as alcohol and nicotine, can penetrate the barrier, so they thought maybe they can just make drug molecules small enough. Others found that different drug delivery mechanism—enzymes, or ultrasound, or nanoparticles—might make the barrier passable.
So far, scientists have been limited to testing these methods on animal models. And though lots of progress has been made in the past five years,some researchers suggestion that the research hasn’t progressed further due to a lack of interest from pharmaceutical companies, as well as an aversion to trying risky procedures on humans.
Now, the researchers from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto have tried it on a human being. To do the procedure, the researchers administered chemotherapy drugs intravenously, along with tiny air bubbles. Using targeted ultrasound, the researchers were able to compress and expand some of the bubbles once they flowed into blood vessels in the brain. The vibrations were just enough to loosen the junctures between the cells lining the blood vessels, enabling the drug to penetrate through the barrier and into the brain tumor.
Based on initial brain scans, it seems that the procedure was successful in reversibly opening the blood brain barrier, though the researchers don’t yet know how much of the chemotherapy drug reached its intended target. The researchers are paying close attention to Hall’s status and side effects; as part of this initial trial, they intend to test the procedure on several more patients like her. Much more research needs to be done, they admit. But the ability to safely send drugs directly to certain parts of the brain could lead to more effective treatments for conditions such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, and beyond.
Source: http://www.popsci.com/bubbles-burst-blood-brain-barrier-beneficial-or-bad
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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