StemCell Therapy

An international team of scientists, spearheaded by a 20 million ($25.9 million) award from Cancer Research UK, has developed the most detailed maps of breast cancer available, which map breast tumor samples to a resolution smaller than a single cell.

The maps, published in Nature Cancer this week, detail the intricacies and complexity of the cancer landscapecomprising cancer cells, immune cells, and connective tissueand how it varies both between, and within, tumors depending on their unique genetic makeup.

At the moment, doctors only look for a few key markers to understand what type of breast cancer someone has, said Dr. Raza Ali, junior group leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, and the studys lead author. But as we enter an era of personalized medicine, the more information we have about a patients tumor, the more targeted and effective we can make their treatment.

In the future, the hope is that such a map could provide clinicians with a wealth of information specific to each patients tumor at the time of diagnosis, thus providing an opportunity to match patients with the most appropriate therapy. The information would also be used to analyze tumor during a patients treatment to more clearly see how a patient is responding to their therapy and to adjust the treatment regimen based this.

In the study, the international research teams from Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge; the University of Zrich, Switzerland; and the British Columbia Cancer Research Centre, Canada, studied 483 different tumor samples collected during the Cancer Research UK funded METABRIC study, a project that has already significantly improved the understanding of the disease by revealing that there are at least 11 different subtypes of breast cancer.

The team looked within the samples for the presence of 37 key proteins, indicative of the characteristics and behavior of cancer cells. Using a technique called imaging mass cytometry, they produced detailed images, which revealed precisely how each of the 37 proteins were distributed across the tumour.

The researchers then combined this information with genetic data from each patients sample to further enhance the image resolution. This is the first time imaging mass cytometry has been paired with genomic data.

These tumor blueprints expose the distribution of different types of cells, their individual characteristics and the interactions between them.By matching these pictures of tumors to clinical information from each patient, the team also found the technique could be used to predict how someones cancer might progress and respond to different treatments.

Professor Carlos Caldas, from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and co-author of the study said: Weve shown that the effects of mutations in cancer are far more wide-ranging than first thought.They affect how cancer cells interact with their neighbours and other types of cell, influencing the entire structure of the tumour.

The research was funded by Cancer Research UKs Grand Challenge initiative. By providing international, multidisciplinary teams with 20 million grants, this initiative aims to solve the biggest challenges in cancer.

This team is making incredible advances, helping us to peer into a future when breast cancer treatments are truly personalized, said Dr. David Scott, director of Grand Challenge at Cancer Research UK. Theres still a long way to go before this technology reaches patients, but with further research and clinical trials, we hope to unlock its powerful potential.

Originally posted here:
Detailed Map of Breast Cancer Reveals the Effects of Mutations on the Tumor Landscape - Clinical OMICs News

Global Precision Medicine Marketto grow with a substantial CAGR in the forecast period of 2019-2026. Growing prevalence of cancer worldwide and accelerating demand of novel therapies to prevent of cancer related disorders are the key factors for lucrative growth of market

Key Market Players:

Few of the major competitors currently working in the global precision medicine market are Neon Therapeutics, Moderna, Inc, Merck & Co., Inc, Bayer AG, PERSONALIS INC, GENOCEA BIOSCIENCES, INC., F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, CureVac AG, CELLDEX THERAPEUTICS, BIONTECH SE, Advaxis, Inc, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Bioven International Sdn Bhd, Agenus Inc., Immatics Biotechnologies GmbH, Immunovative Therapies, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Gritstone Oncology, NantKwest, Inc among others.

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Global Precision Medicine MarketBy Application (Diagnostics, Therapeutics and Others), Technologies (Pharmacogenomics, Point-of-Care Testing, Stem Cell Therapy, Pharmacoproteomics and Others), Indication (Oncology, Central Nervous System (CNS) Disorders, Immunology Disorders, Respiratory Disorders, Others), Drugs (Alectinib, Osimertinib, Mepolizumab,Aripiprazole lauroxil and Others), Route of Administration (Oral,Injectable), End- Users (Hospitals, Homecare, Specialty Clinics, Others), Geography (North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2026

Competitive Analysis:

The precision medicine market is highly fragmented and is based on new product launches and clinical results of products. Hence the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, clinical trials, market initiatives, high expense on research and development, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of mass spectrometry market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America.

Market Drivers

Market Restraints

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Market Definition:

Precision medicines is also known as personalized medicines is an innovative approach to the patient care for disease treatment, diagnosis and prevention base on the persons individual genes. It allows doctors or physicians to select treatment option based on the patients genetic understanding of their disease.

According to the data published in PerMedCoalition, it was estimated that the USFDA has approved 25 novels personalized medicines in the year of 2018. These growing approvals annually by the regulatory authorities and rise in oncology and CNS disorders worldwide are the key factors for market growth.

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Key Developments in the Market:

Competitive Analysis:

Global precision medicine market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of global precision medicine market for Global, Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, South America and Middle East & Africa.

Market Segmentation:

By technology:-big data analytics, bioinformatics, gene sequencing, drug discovery, companion diagnostics, and others.

By application:- oncology, hematology, infectious diseases, cardiology, neurology, endocrinology, pulmonary diseases, ophthalmology, metabolic diseases, pharmagenomics, and others.

On the basis of end-users:- pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, diagnostic companies, laboratories, and healthcare it specialist.

On the basis of geography:- North America & South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Brazil among others.

In 2017, North America is expected to dominate the market.

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PRECISION MEDICINE MARKET 2020: INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND DETAILED PROFILES OF TOP INDUSTRY PLAYERS ARE NEON THERAPEUTICS, MODERNA, INC, MERCK & CO.,...

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With more and more digital technology (and screen-based work) being introduced across all areas of business, and increased use of smartphones and digital devices overall, Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS), or screen fatigue, is on the rise.

Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is caused by looking at a computer or other display device for prolonged, uninterrupted periods of time. Because screen pixels constantly refresh eyes are always having to refocus which results in eye muscles becoming fatigued.

It is also proven that people blink less frequently when staring at a screen for long periods, which causes eyes to dry out and in some cases can result in blurred vision. Glasses wearers that have incorrect or an out of date lens prescription can also be more susceptible to CVS.

Symptoms of CVS include eyestrain, headaches, blurred vision, dry eyes and neck and shoulder pain.

These effects can impact on productivity in the workplace and encouraging positive habits among employees is now an essential part of any wellbeing in the workplace schemes.

As a world-leading innovator in spectacle lens technology, Essilor is advising screen users to:

follow the 20:20:20 rule. Every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.Or take part in eye yoga. Look to the left, hold the position, repeat looking right. Look up, hold the position, repeat looking down. Repeat four times, closing your eyes and relaxing in between.

take regular breaks from screens and to go outside. Looking at objects in different distances and in natural light can be beneficial for your eyes and sight.

have regular eye tests. Eyes should be examined every two years as routine; many eye problems will be detected this way the earlier problems are identified, the easier they will be to rectify.

use specialist computer lenses, like Eyezen lenses with DualOptim technology, designed to prevent or reduce eye strain or visual fatigue. Different waves lengths of light, such as Ultraviolet and Blue-Violet light, can also cause premature eye ageing. Eye Protect systems embedded into lenses can also filter out Blue-Violet light.

Dr. Andy Hepworth from Essilor comments: While computer vision syndrome and digital eyestrain is on the rise, its not a permanent vision problem, but something that can be controlled with some simple changes in behaviours.

We know high levels of digital usage is not going away in fact a recent screen time survey showed most Brits do not intend to reduce the amount of time spent staring at screens; therefore it makes sense to be aware of the need to utilise new products better suited as lifestyles change.

While our scheme encourages people to look up and give their eyes a rest, which in turn will also help with their concentration and day to day mental health, were also offering a solution with innovative lenses. Our latest innovative solutions can rectify specific problems caused by heavy usage of digital technology.

We recognise every person is an individual and the lifestyle choices they make day to day will affect their eyesight. By encouraging people to following the 20:20:20 rule and refreshing eyes during the day, we hope to promote better eye health within UK businesses.

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Why keeping an eye on the effects of CVS can promote wellness in the workplace - Bdaily

A young dad is in a race against time to see his daughter born before he loses his eyesight forever.

Charlie Macaulay, 21, from east Hull, has said he just wants to see his daughter and watch his partner walk down the aisle before he loses his eyesight completely due to his diabetic condition.

The dad-of-one has been diabetic for 18 years, following his diagnosis one week after his third birthday.

Complications with his condition led to the development ofdiabetic retinopathy in December, which has caused a rapid deterioration in his eyesight.

Now blind in his right eye and with poor vision in his left, Charlie said he just wants to see the arrival of his daughter in July and his pregnant bride-to-be Billie Smith in her wedding dress in May before he becomes permanently blind.

"I'd marry her tomorrow if I could," Charlie told Hull Live.

"I just want to see her in her dress and I want to see my wedding and my little girl before my eyes go."

Charlie's health complications did not take effect until he joined secondary school, when he started getting bullied for having an insulin pump attached to his stomach to regulate his blood sugar levels.

"That's when I used to mistreat it and try to pretend it wasn't there," he said. "That was a tough time."

After experiencing problems with his vision at the end of last year, Charlie went to the hospitalin December and was told about the imminent deterioration of his eyesight.

Six operations in the space of just a few weeks later and Charlie has only partial vision in just one of his eyes.

"Now I'm struggling to see and it's really tough," he said.

"I can't see my phone screen or cars when I'm crossing the road. I've fallen over a few times because I can't see kerbs.

"I can't really go out on my own now, I've got to have someone with me."

But Charlie has been supported by Hull charity Sight Support and is in the process of enrolling for white cane training.

A liaison support worker has also put him in touch with a local blind football team.

"I just don't want to lose my independence, it's had a massive effect over the past couple of months," he said.

"I struggle with my mental healthanyway and it's hard to take in. Sometimes I wonder how I keep it together without having some sort of breakdown."

Now Charlie said he is hoping to raise awareness not just of diabetes in younger people and the potential complications it can cause, but the potential effects onmental healthtoo.

"I struggle to speak to people at the best of times but I want to start taking to spread awareness," he said.

"A lot of people think, 'Oh you can't have sugar,' but it isn't that.

"I've had a few people when I tell them I'mdiabeticsay, 'But you're not overweight.'

"I don't think we get taught enough about it, especially younger people.

"It can affect everybody, every age group, but in younger people it needs to be put out there how serious it can be and the effects it can have.

"And I have to wear sunglasses now too because I'm really sensitive to light, but people just see a young lad wearing sunglasses in the middle of February and think, who does he think he is?

"I want to spread awareness of the mental health side of it as well to let people know the seriousness of it, but also that it's alright to talk."

He said the biggest source of comfort has been his family, including his long-term partner Billie and their two-year-old son Freddie-James.

And he said planning his wedding is helping to keep his mind off his condition.

"My family are brilliant, they're always there for me if I need to talk," Charlie said.

"Billie's struggling but she doesn't show it, she hasn't left my side the whole way through. She's there 100 per cent."

Charlie's mum Sarah, 41, is even running the London Marathon in April to help raise awareness and money for Diabetes UK.

She has set up JustGiving pageto help support her cause.

"I'm really proud, I can't believe she's actually doing it," Charlie said.

"It's one of the biggest charity events in the country, if not the world, so I'm massively proud of her and just want to help her in any way possible."

Mum Sarah said: "It was awful at first coming to terms with it, but then he did great.

"But once he got to secondary school he just wanted to pretend he didn't have it and that's had a knock-on effect. He just wanted to be the same as everybody else.

"People don't know how serious can be or how important to get the right support. It's very serious and the complications that come with it are huge.

"But now he's got all his family pulling together around him.

"They've got the wedding booked for May 9 and we're all rallying round for him, but they want to bring it forward.

"That's his dream - to see Billie in her wedding dress and their baby who's on the way in July.

"They've been together for such a long time and she's been amazing. He wouldn't have been able to do this without her or their little boy.

"A lot of people don't know about it, they know he's struggling but they didn't know how serious the condition has got with his eyesight.

"So coming out like this is a big step for him."

Anybody who wants to support Sarah and Charlie's cause can donate to the JustGiving page here.

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Dad in race against time to see his baby born before he goes completely blind - Mirror Online

The report titled on Retinal Prosthesis Market report offers in-intensity analysis of the worldwide market size (Production, Value and Consumption), splits the breakdown (data status 2014-2019 and 6 Forces forecast 2020 to 2026), by manufacturers, region, type and application. Retinal Prosthesis market competitive landscape provides details by topmost manufactures like (Philips Healthcare, Retina Implant, Second Sight Medical Products, Bionic Eye Technologies, Bionic Vision Australia, VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies, Abbott Vascular), including Company Overview, Company Total Revenue (Financials), Market Potential, Presence, Retinal Prosthesis Sales and Revenue Generated, Market Share, Price, Production Sites And Facilities, SWOT Analysis, Product Launch. In the end, there are 4 key segments covered in this Retinal Prosthesis market report: Competitor Segment, Product Type Segment, End Use/Application Segment and Retinal Prosthesis industry geography segment.

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Retinal Prosthesis Market Report Offers Comprehensive Assessment of:

1) Executive Summary, 2) Retinal Prosthesis Market Overview, 3) Key Market Trends, 4) Key Success Factors, 5) Market Demand/Consumption (Value or Size in US$ Mn) Analysis, 6) Retinal Prosthesis Market Background, 7) Retinal Prosthesis industry Analysis & Forecast 20202026 by Type, Application and Region, 8) Retinal Prosthesis Market Structure Analysis, 9) Competition Landscape, 10) Company Share and Company Profiles, 11) Assumptions and Acronyms and, 12) Research Methodology etc.

Scope of Retinal Prosthesis Market:Retinal Prosthesis is being used for improving eyesight of people with partial or complete blindness. The technology is still in its nascent stage hence a mixed speculation continues to hover around it.

Visual devices such as bionic eye and visual prosthesis are expected to have bigger impact in years to come, which in turn will pave the way for retinal implant market.

The global Retinal Prosthesis market is valued at xx million US$ in 2018 and will reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of xx% during 2019-2025. The objectives of this study are to define, segment, and project the size of the Retinal Prosthesis market based on company, product type, end user and key regions.

On the basis of product type, this report displays the shipments, revenue (Million USD), price, and market share and growth rate of each type.

Argus II Implantable Miniature Telescope

On the basis on the end users/applications,this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, shipments, revenue (Million USD), price, and market share and growth rate foreach application.

People with Partial Blindness People with Complete Blindness Retina Implant Alpha AMS

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The report offers in-depth assessment of the growth and other aspects of the Retinal Prosthesis Market in Important Countries (Regions), including:

Important Key Questions Answered In Retinal Prosthesis Market Report:

What will the Market Growth Rate, Overview, and Analysis by Type of Retinal Prosthesis in 2026?

What are the key factors affecting market dynamics? What are the Drivers, Challenges, and Business Risks in Retinal Prosthesis market?

What is Dynamics, This Overview Includes Analysis of Scope and price analysis of top Manufacturers Profiles?

Who Are Opportunities, Risk and Driving Force of Retinal Prosthesis market? Knows Upstream Raw Materials Sourcing and Downstream Buyers.

Who are the key manufacturers in space? Business Overview by Type, Applications, Gross Margin, and Retinal Prosthesis Market Share

What are the Opportunities and Threats Faced by Manufacturers in the global Retinal Prosthesis market?

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Retinal Prosthesis Market Trade Outlook And Information Collected 2020-2026 - Instant Tech News

Image Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Dubai: Myra, J, a belly dancer working at a Dubai hotel, was unhappy that saddle bags on her thighs were making her performance less graceful and she feared she would be replaced in her job. So on a weekend, she checked into a leading aesthetic clinic and the surgeon trimmed the pockets of fat around her thighs, sculpting her body back into perfect shape. It took her a week to recover and get back to work, but she is delighted with her shapely thighs and feels happier than ever before.

Nina M., (52), always loved how beautiful her eyes were and how youthful her cheeks looked. However last year, as she got busy with her sons marriage preparations, she started to experience bouts of anxiety at the sight of slowly encroaching bags under her eyes and a slight droop in her cheeks. I wanted to look and feel my best and thought a filler and a round of botox were harmless indulgences. It took me just an hour at the clinic and the results were amazing. I am glad I was able to stop the onslaught of aging in time. Its beautiful to age gracefully, but we all do use creams and gels to delay the process. I think of these minor injectibles as tools in our make-up bag. I have used fillers and Botox twice since last year, combined with my beauty regimen. I feel it has given me not just confidence but also psychological boost. I would recommend it to everyone.

Anna M was a physical trainer but vexed with her body shape as she had a masculine build. This was affecting her work as most women were intimidated by her personality and she was losing self-confidence. Four years ago, she went in for breast implants and her life changed. People talk about getting addicted to cosmetic surgery. But that is not so. Most people approach a cosmetic surgeon only when they cannot deal with a physical issue themselves and just like one needs medicine when one is ill, cosmetic surgery acts as a solution to boost confidence and self-esteem. Look at how people have reclaimed their health with gastric bypass!

- Dr Sanjay Parashar, chairman, Scientific of the Emirates Plastic Surgery Society

Changing the world one person at a time and providing them with an incredible burst of confidence, aesthetic and cosmetic surgeons in the UAE have built a practice of reliability that can take as little as one hour to a day to transform your personality. Welcome to the multi-million dirham cosmetic surgery industry in the UAE that is the toast of medical tourism in the region, With a high footfall of Gulf and Asian medical tourists as well as resident expatriates, the industry has accelerated at a speed that is making Dubai be hailed as the new Beverly Hills of the Middle East.

Cosmetic or Plastic Surgery?

These are two different concepts. Cosmetic surgery refers to aesthetic surgery and revolves around enhancement of physical features of an individual and is elective. This includes procedures such as rhinoplasty, face and cheek enhancement, brow lifts, neck and eyelid lift, face peels, laser resurfacing, botox fillers, peels, laser hair removal, breast augmentation, tummy tucks, liposuction, hair implants and dental veneers.

Plastic surgery, on the other hand, is a surgical speciality dealing with life-saving procedures of re-construction of the face and body owing to congenital defects, disfigurement due to accident, trauma, burns, tumour removal due to diseases such as cancer. In most cases, plastic surgery is not elective.

Dh12b Medical tourism sales in 2018

Since the time pop stars began to inundate Instagram with images of their perfect bodies, dazzling smiles, flawless skin and enviable hair volume, elective procedures have become commonplace with teenagers as young as 13 who are going in for instant fixes. While some procedures require a couple of days of hospital stay and being out of circulation for a while, many quick fixes are carried out during lunch breaks in one-hour durations.

Highest Per Capita cosmetic surgeons in UAE

Dr Sanjay Parashar, chairman, Scientific of the Emirates Plastic Surgery Society, told Gulf News: Cosmetic surgery tops the list in medical tourism in Dubai and according to a 2015 report of Dubai Health Authority (DHA), Dubai has the highest number of cosmetic surgeons per capita in the region - about 50 specialists for a million people.

- Dr Zuhair Al Fardan, President of the Emirates Plastic Surgery

Dr Parashar added: The field has grown beyond expectations and much of the credit goes to the development of a world-class infrastructure in this field and the corresponding health regulations. Today, in Dubai, most Day Care Surgery centres where most of the plastic surgery procedures are carried out have the best international accreditations.

Dr Zuhair Al Fardan, President of the Emirates Plastic Surgery, said,Much of the advancement in plastic and cosmetic surgery is work in progress as surgeons are constantly upgrading themselves with techniques, technologies. The UAE is keeping abreast of the best that is taking place in the world. In the last five years or so, there have been tremendous advancements in cosmetic and plastic surgery in the UAE. We have the top plastic surgeons of the world come here to do surgeries and the UAE hosts two major international plastic surgery conferences each year.

Soaring revenues

With greater acceptance and broadening of scope for the discipline, it is evident that plastic surgery is a major revenue earner and places UAE as one of the leading medical tourism destinations in the region. From a price range of Dh150-250 for a filler to Dh40,000 for a detailed body sculpting procedure, these procedures are money-spinners.

Together, the plastic and cosmetic surgery is a multimillion dirham business in the UAE. While there are no exact figures available, safe estimates can be made, say surgeons. Lets take the emirate of Dubai. There are 30 hospitals in Dubai, of which 70 per cent are internationally accredited. The emirate aims to build 22 hospitals by 2020 - 18 private and 4 public hospitals. At least 50 per cent of these offer cosmetic and plastic surgery options. Besides that there are about 150 Day Care Surgery centres and 400 aesthetic clinics in Dubai. All of them offer a bouquet of cosmetic surgery procedures and their average annual revenue is between Dh4-6 million a year. If one were to compute that with the numbers of facilities including hospitals, the annual revenue from cosmetic surgery would run into many millions of dirhams annually.

High on medical tourism

Currently, Dubai aims to attract 500,000 medical tourists a year by end 2020. In a short priod of time, Dubai has managed to be ranked 17 among the top 25 global destinations for medical tourism and cosmetic surgery, along with fertility, orthopaedic, dental and wellness disciplines in the list of most-billed medical procedures.

As per statistics, about 46 per cent of the current medical tourists in Dubai come from Asian countries, 25 per cent from GCC and Arab countries and 13 per cent from African countries, and the remaining 16 per cent from other countries, mainly the UK and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. In fact, 40 per cent of tourists who come to Dubai come only for medical tourism.

- Dr Francis Conroy, consultant plastic, cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon at the American Hospital, Dubai

Medical tourism sales topped Dh12 billion in 2018, with a 5.5 per cent overall increase in medical tourists. Dubai attracted a total of 640,542 international and domestic medical tourists in 2018 (51 per cent were international patients). European tourists consisting mostly of UK, French and Italian citizens, share 16 per cent of health and wellness tourists. A substantial medical tourism revenue, it is evident, is earned through plastic and cosmetic surgery.

Dr Francis Conroy, consultant plastic, cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon at the American Hospital, Dubai, remarked: American Hospital Dubai, is one of the few facilities offering both comprehensive reconstructive and cosmetic surgery services. Our plastic surgeons are fully trained in both reconstructive and cosmetic surgery so we see a wide-ranging case mix, from severe trauma cases to cancer cases and of course, those opting for cosmetic surgery.

The most popular cosmetic surgery is body contouring namely abdominoplasty and liposuction, sometimes combined with a breast lift the mommy make-over. Typically, these patients would be female, who done with having children and raising them, now wish to address the changes in their body. I also see a large number of male patients who want to correct problems associated with their chest with the help of liposuction, said Dr Conroy.

Non-surgical treatments (neuro-modulators, fillers, etc) are still very popular and I have seen a trend in that patients are starting with such treatments at an earlier age.

Given the prestigious reputation of the hospital and the Dubai governments plan to promote medical tourism, I have noticed a huge influx of patients from Africa, Nigeria and Ghana in particular. These patients come mainly for cosmetic surgery, knowing that they are in the hands of a highly qualified surgeon, in a safe, luxurious facility, with standards second to none, said Dr Conroy.

Top six cosmetic surgery procedures in town

The procedures can be divided into categories:

Does health insurance cover plastic surgery?

Dr Parashar said: Lumps, bumps, nerve and tendon transfer, skin transplant, etc, are all covered. Few people know that plastic surgery has a regenerative and reconstructive role to play in case of congenital and disease deformities. Reconstructive surgery such as correction of birth deformities such as a tuberous breast, cleft lip, hand deformities, skin transplant following burns, road trauma and breast augmentation and reconstruction following a mastectomy and rebuilding after a tumour resection is all covered under all leading health insurances. There is also new kinds of stem cell therapy being used to regenerate tissues and nerves especially in diabetic patients.

Know the regulations:

The DHA has made it mandatory for all Day Care Surgery Centres, most of who carry out aesthetic procedures, to have one leading international accreditation from Canada, US, UK or Australia. These accreditations were earlier mandatory for hospitals only, but from 2020, all Day Care Surgery centres compulsorily must have an international accreditation. This ensures that an independent, international medical body enforces global health standards to grant them certification and in case of a sentinel event, conducts its independent inquiry and downgrades these places in case of a serious lapse. DHA on its own has issued a 25-page manual on quality and regulations that is to be followed at all centres.

A close examination of the Day Care Surgery centres indicates several layers of quality control.

Pre surgery quality: This involves free consultation, especially in case of a second opinion or a first time patient seeking to enquire about a procedure based on his/her requirement. When a patient uploads a request on the website of a centre from anywhere in the world, the centre has to provide a detailed consultation free of charge.

Services available to a patient: Once the patient is convinced and comes in person to consult the doctor, quality is upheld in the pre-diagnostic tests that the patient has to undergo.

Infrastructure quality: DHA has graded Day Care Centres into A, B and C categories based on the level of medical facilities that can be accessed by a patient. Anaesthesia methods such as oral, epidural and general also help classify centres. For instance, hair transplant procedures can only be carried out in B and above grade clinics. Day Care Centres that conduct surgeries under general anaesthesia much be equipped with the Advance Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) with their surgeons and registered nurses being certified as trained in administering ACLS to a patient.

Patient safety protocol: There are very specific guidelines for patient safety and the doctor/surgeon must explain the procedure in detail to the patient and his/her family and obtain a written consent to go ahead after ascertaining that all risks and side-effects have been clearly explained to the patient.

Post-operative regulation: There are specific protocols for discharge of patients undergoing cosmetic surgery. Although ambulatory care means the patient has to be discharged within the same day, there is a specification about asking the patient to desist from long-distance travel, specific rehabilitative work to be carried out from the next day for which the patient has to be within Dubai and also specific instructions when an overseas patient is declared fit to fly out of the country. When a patient flies out, he or she is provided with a proper review and notes, with instructions for overseas rehabilitation protocol with reference notes for the rehabilitation instructor and instructions for medication and periodic reviews.

Accountability

The law is clear, said Dr Al Fardan, The DHA regulations constitutes an accountability committee and holds an enquiry to fix the liability. If the centre is found guilty, its licence can be suspended or cancelled depending on the extent of guilt. If the surgeon, anaesthesiologists, nurse and technicians are found guilty, their license to practice is suspended or cancelled. If the crime is lighter, then both the centre and the team are let off with serious warnings. In case of disability following a surgery, the team examines the extent of disability and calculates the financial compensation to the patient. In case of fatality following a surgery, the is provision to pay blood money.

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All you need to know about cosmetic surgery in UAE - Gulf News

The coronavirus that originated in China has spread fear and anxiety around the world. But while the novel virus has largely spared one vulnerable group children it appears to pose a particular threat to middle-aged and older adults, particularly men.

This week, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published the largest analysis of coronavirus cases to date. Although men and women have been infected in roughly equal numbers, researchers found, the death rate among men was 2.8 percent, compared with 1.7 percent among women.

Men also were disproportionately affected during the SARS and MERS outbreaks, which were caused by coronaviruses. More women than men were infected by SARS in Hong Kong in 2003, but the death rate among men was 50 percent higher, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Some 32 percent of men infected with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome died, compared with 25.8 percent of women. Young adult men also died at higher rates than female peers during the influenza epidemic of 1918.

A number of factors may be working against men in the current epidemic, scientists say, including some that are biological, and some that are rooted in lifestyle.

When it comes to mounting an immune response against infections, men are the weaker sex.

This is a pattern weve seen with many viral infections of the respiratory tract men can have worse outcomes, said Sabra Klein, a scientist who studies sex differences in viral infections and vaccination responses at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Weve seen this with other viruses. Women fight them off better, she added.

Women also produce stronger immune responses after vaccinations, and have enhanced memory immune responses, which protect adults from pathogens they were exposed to as children.

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

Theres something about the immune system in females that is more exuberant, said Dr. Janine Clayton, director of the Office of Research on Womens Health at the National Institutes of Health.

But theres a high price, she added: Women are far more susceptible to autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, in which the immune system shifts into overdrive and attacks the bodys own organs and tissues.

Nearly 80 percent of those with autoimmune diseases are women, Dr. Clayton noted.

The reasons women have stronger immune responses arent entirely clear, and the research is still at an early stage, experts caution.

One hypothesis is that womens stronger immune systems confer a survival advantage to their offspring, who imbibe antibodies from mothers breast milk that help ward off disease while the infants immune systems are still developing.

A stew of biological factors may be responsible, including the female sex hormone estrogen, which appears to play a role in immunity, and the fact that women carry two X chromosomes, which contain immune-related genes. Men, of course, carry only one.

Experiments in which mice were exposed to the SARS coronavirus found that the males were more susceptible to infection than the females, a disparity that increased with age.

The male mice developed SARS at lower viral exposures, had a lower immune response and were slower to clear the virus from their bodies. They suffered more lung damage, and died at higher rates, said Dr. Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology at the University of Iowa who was the senior author of the study.

When researchers blocked estrogen in the infected females or removed their ovaries, they were more likely to die, but blocking testosterone in male mice made no difference, indicating that estrogen may play a protective role.

Its an exaggerated model of what happens in humans, Dr. Perlman said. The differences between men and women are subtle in mice, its not so subtle.

Health behaviors that differ by sex in some societies may also play a role in disparate responses to infections.

China has the largest population of smokers in the world 316 million people accounting for nearly one-third of the worlds smokers and 40 percent of tobacco consumption worldwide. But just over 2 percent of Chinese women smoke, compared with more than half of all men.

Chinese men also have higher rates of Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure than women, both of which increase the risk of complications following infection with the coronavirus. Rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are almost twice as high among Chinese men as among women.

In the United States, women are more proactive about seeking health care than men, and some small studies have found the generalization applies to Chinese students at universities in the United States, as well.

In unpublished studies, Chinese researchers have emphasized that patients whose diagnoses were delayed, or who had severe pneumonia when they were first diagnosed, were at greatest risk of dying.

One study of 4,021 patients with the coronavirus emphasized the importance of early detection, particularly in older men. And men have been turning up in hospitals with more advanced disease.

But in areas of China outside Hubei Province, the disease's epicenter and where the majority of those affected are concentrated, the patterns are different: The disease appears to have dramatically lower mortality rates, and men are being infected at much higher rates than women, according to the Chinese C.D.C. analysis.

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Men may have a false sense of security when it comes to the coronavirus, said Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunology at Yale University who studies why some viruses affect women more severely.

Gathering and analyzing data about the new virus by sex is important both for the scientists studying it and for the general public, experts said.

Since the start of the outbreak, for example, public health officials have emphasized the importance of washing hands well and often, to prevent infection. But several studies have found that men even health care workers are less likely to wash their hands or to use soap than women, Dr. Klein said.

We make these broad sweeping assumptions that men and women are the same behaviorally, in terms of comorbidities, biology and our immune system, and we just are not, Dr. Klein said.

Read more:
Why the Coronavirus Seems to Hit Men Harder Than Women - The New York Times

Summary

Current immunotherapies dont work for most people with cancer. Researchers have identified an overlooked immune cell type that may react to targeted therapies to rally a more powerful immune response in more cancer patients.

Immunotherapy is showing great promise for treating cancer. But so far, this approach has been effective in only about 20% of all cancers. To advance those results, researchers are looking for new ways to mobilize the immune system to destroy tumors.

Most immunotherapy drugs act on one type of immune cells called T cells. Drugs called checkpoint inhibitorsrelease the brakes on these cells, spurring them to mount an attack against a tumor. Researchers have learned that checkpoint inhibitors seem to work best in people whose tumors have been invaded by T cells sensing some kind of threat from the cancer before the treatment is started.

The problem is that most tumors dont have many T cells in them. In order to design an immunotherapy that works on more people, researchers have been looking for additional immune cell types to rally against cancer.

Now, an MSK research team reports finding a promising candidate: a group of immune cells called innate lymphoid cells (ILCs). These cells are present in many different tissues and appear to have mild antitumor effects in their normal resting state. The researchers showed that activating ILCs with drugs mobilizes T cells to shrink pancreatic cancer tumors. This could be an important step, as pancreatic cancers have not responded to checkpoint inhibitor drugs.

We think this is an important finding both for pancreatic cancer research and cancer immunotherapy overall, says Vinod Balachandran, a surgeon-scientist affiliated with theDavid M. Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Researchand a member of theParker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. We are learning there are multiple ways to use the immune system to fight cancer. We think this is a sign that new immunotherapies are on the horizon.

Dr. Balachandran made the discovery in collaboration with cancer immunologistsTaha Merghouband Jedd Wolchokof the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program. The finding is reported today in Nature.

This is a novel treatment that works together with one of the most successful immunotherapies we have today.

ILCs are part of the bodys innate immune system where immune cells are programmed to put up an initial defense against infections and other threats, and further amplify the immune response by activating T cells. But ILCs were discovered only 10 years ago, so they have not been the focus of immunotherapy efforts. Now, innate immune cells are beginning to draw more interest from the cancer-research community. Dr. Balachandran and colleagues investigated if and how these cells played a role in the bodys response to cancer.

For the Nature study, the team looked in human pancreatic tumors to see if ILCs were present. They saw that a subtype of these cells called ILC2s were present in larger numbers in tumors compared with normal organs, suggesting they were responding to the tumors. The researchers also found that pancreatic cancer patients with more ILC2s in their tumors lived longer, suggesting ILC2s possibly had an anticancer function.

The team then tested if ILC2s could help control tumors in mice. Removing ILC2s caused pancreatic tumors to grow faster.

We thought, if these cells have protective tendencies against cancer, maybe we can figure out ways to activate them, Dr. Balachandran says.

ILC2s have receptors on their surface that control whether they multiply. The researchers found that dosing the ILC2s with a protein called interleukin 33 (IL-33) activated them, and caused both them and T cells to expand, which in turn caused tumors to shrink. IL-33 did not shrink tumors in mice that didnt have ILC2s, proving the ILC2s were the key cells mediating the effects.

The research team then looked for ways to further amp up ILC2 antitumor activity. Checkpoint proteins on the surface ofT cells act as brakes to prevent them from attacking the bodys own tissues. But this also limits the T cells antitumor activity. As ILC2s are related to T cells, Dr. Balachandrans team wondered whether checkpoint proteins also acted as brakes on ILC2s.

Immunotherapy at MSK

Cancer is smart, but your immune system is smarter. Discover how Memorial Sloan Kettering is deploying immunotherapy to fight cancer.

They discovered that when activated by IL-33, ILC2sexpress an important checkpoint protein on their surface called PD-1. This has interesting immunotherapy implications: PD-1 is one of the most important brakes on T cells, yet PD-1-blocking checkpoint inhibitors have not worked well against pancreatic tumors. This suggested treating mice with IL-33 may make pancreatic tumors sensitive to PD-1-blocking checkpoint inhibitors.

When the researchers gave IL-33 plus a PD-1 inhibitor to the mice, the tumors shrank even more. Activating ILC2s by adding IL-33 appeared to be the key for PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors to work well against the mouse pancreatic tumors.

Dr. Balachandran and his team are currently working on developing a drug that can activate ILC2s in humans as the next step.

This is a novel treatment that works together with one of the most successful immunotherapies we have today, Dr. Balachandran says. This could be a way to sensitize cancers that typically would not respond to PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors.

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Recently Discovered Immune Cell Type May Be Key to Improving Pancreatic Cancer Immunotherapy - On Cancer - Memorial Sloan Kettering

Dr. Steven Katz

(Photo by Aaron Kes Photography)

Dr. Steven Katz

Coronavirus is on the verge of being the next worldwide pandemic.

Thousands of people, mostly in China, have contracted the virus. However, at least two Arizonans are suspected of having the virus.

With no known cure for this virus, researchers are working furiously to find a way to treat those with this potentially deadly infection.

And while the world is focused on a cure, not enough of the conversation is focused on the things people can do to avoid contracting the disease.

Naturopathic doctors, however, are opting to address just that.

As with most of these epidemics, the people who generally die are the people with weak immune systems. Naturopathic physicians are combating this issue by using natural and safe approaches rather than through chemicals created in the lab that just suppress our immune systems.

Naturopathic physicians take a holistic approach to treating patients and eschew from prescribing pharmaceuticals unless deemed necessary. Just like conventional medical doctors, naturopathic physicians undergo a four year medical school doctoral program. The difference is that naturopathic physicians look to natural solutions to cure any of the bodys ailments.

And our solutions to avoiding diseases and viruses such as the coronavirus are particularly prescient today as the world confronts this pandemic. I have a practice in Scottsdale where I stress to my patients that the best way to fight off something like the coronavirus is living a healthy lifestyle where a strong body and immune system can create a barrier to many different infections.

To promote a strong immune system, we must maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle. An exercise regimen that combines cardio and strengthening as well as a healthy diet is an integral part to promoting a strong immune system.

A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and healthy fats while avoiding processed non-nutritious foods creates an immune system ready for whatever the world throws at us and allows our bodies to be protected from these aggressive viruses.

A treatment to consider that you may not have heard of is intravenous dosages of immune system boosting vitamins. Supplements such as vitamin C, echinacea, elderberry, and garlic are all beneficial nutrients to help fight off an infection. However, many of them are limited due to dosing restrictions and absorption ability.

When you do an IV of vitamin C, zinc and selenium, these nutrients get absorbed right into the blood stream and provide maximum immune system benefits and protection both treating and preventing many infections.

So as the world grows more concerned about the coronavirus, the best defense against this new disease is to adhere to a healthy lifestyle and build up our immune systems to fight off any attempt by the virus to attack the body.

Seeing a naturopathic physician is a great way to start protecting your health!

To find a naturopathic doctor near you, please go to http://www.aznma.org.

Editors Note: Dr. Steven Katz, NMD is a Scottsdale-based naturopathic doctor, and president of AZNMA.

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Dr. Katz: A healthy lifestyle will be best defense against coronavirus threat - Your Valley

Among the many health tips for expectant moms: Pregnant women shouldn't clean up the litter box. But why not? A common parasite called Toxoplasma gondii is to blame. Although the parasite, which can be found in cat feces, is relatively harmless to people with healthy immune systems, those who are immunocompromised including developing fetuses can suffer serious consequences from an infection by Toxoplasma gondii.

On National Love Your Pet Day, Oscar Mendez, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of Arizona and self-proclaimed cat lover, discusses the "cat litter parasite" and what his research might help us better understand about it. Mendez studies how the parasite affects neurons in the mammalian brain in the Koshy Lab, a laboratory in the university's BIO5 Institute led by neurologist and immunobiologist Anita Koshy.

Q: What is Toxoplasma gondii?

A: Toxoplasma gondii is a common parasite that lives in a host cell to survive. Toxoplasma naturally infects a wide range of warm-blooded animals including birds, rodents and even humans. Infection usually arises from consuming contaminated food or water. The previously listed hosts are known as intermediate hosts, hosts in which Toxoplasma can only reproduce asexually. Felines, including domestic cats, are the definitive hosts of Toxoplasma. In the gut of cats, Toxoplasma can undergo sexual reproduction. The first time a cat is infected, it can poop out millions of infectious forms of Toxoplasma. One unique characteristic of Toxoplasma is that in some hosts, including humans and rodents, the parasite establishes a chronic infection of neurons in the central nervous system, or CNS. Unlike other CNS pathogens, this lifelong CNS infection does not seem to be detrimental to the life of the host as long as they have a normal immune system.

Q: What is already known about how it affects humans, and what are you trying to add to that knowledge?

A: Toxoplasma is estimated to chronically infect the CNS of up to one third of humans across the globe. For the most part, if someone has a working immune system, this persistent brain infection does not cause problems. Problems can arise in those with limited immune responses, such as AIDS patients or developing fetuses. We know a lot about the parts of the immune system that are needed to keep Toxoplasma in check, and we even know a little bit about how different cells in the CNS help keep Toxoplasma controlled. But even though we think neurons are the major CNS cell that get infected with Toxoplasma, we still know very little about the Toxoplasma-neuron interaction. My work is focused on understanding how Toxoplasma alters neurons themselves.

Q: Why is it important to understand how Toxoplasma gondii affects neurons specifically?

A: Neurons are the signaling cells of the brain, and if something goes wrong with the neurons, it can affect the brain's ability to function properly. For example, some patients with symptomatic CNS toxoplasmosis have seizures. These seizures have to be coming from abnormal neuron signaling and, from what we know, most would think this abnormal firing is caused by the massive CNS immune response to uncontrolled Toxoplasma. Yet my work suggests that part of the abnormal signaling could come directly from Toxoplasma's effect on single neurons, which no one has studied until now. In other words, the effect of the immune response may be much more localized than we know.

Q: Do cat owners generally have anything to worry about?

A: I always joke that if you are eating the cat litter, you might have to worry. In reality, for the most part, if you are washing your hands after cleaning the litter, you should be fine. Pregnant women and those who have compromised immune systems should be extra careful and consider not being the one to change the litter. I have a cat at home and do not worry about becoming infected with Toxoplasma. Even in a laboratory setting, the chances of infection are quite low.

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Four Questions: The Parasite in Your Cat Box - UANews

A crucial component of our immune system, antibodies are now the most rapidly growing class of approved biopharmaceutical drugs. We explore the past, present and future of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.In the 1970s, the Nobel-prize winning work of Kolher and Milstein enabled researchers to produce individual or monoclonal antibodies infinitely in culture using hybridoma technology. This key innovation paved the way for the development of therapeutic antibodies.When we have an immune response, we normally generate lots of different antibodies to different parts of a pathogen, says Mark Cragg of the Cancer Research UK Southampton Centre. Monoclonal antibody technology enabled us to just take just a single antibody to a specific antigen and produce it infinitely in culture.In 1986, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first therapeutic monoclonal antibody for the prevention of transplant rejection. By the end of 2019, a total of 79 antibody-based drugs were approved to treat a range of autoimmune conditions, infectious diseases and cancers. Many more potentially exciting therapies are also in the pipeline including against HIV or Ebola.With recent advances in antibody engineering technologies helping to further accelerate progress, therapeutic antibodies are set to remain a feature of the drug development landscape for many years to come.

These Y-shaped proteins have a variable binding domain at one end, which recognizes and binds with a specific protein (or antigen) on a pathogen. At the other end, they have a constant region that interacts with other molecules on immune cells to trigger a response. Collectively, our bodys army of antibody-generating cells B cells have the potential to recognize countless antigens.

You can generate an antibody against a specific target molecule and then use it to block or manipulate how that target works, says Cragg.

Traditional hybridoma technologies involved injecting mice with an antigen and then isolating and immortalizing a single B-cell clone to produce a specific antibody.

But when you put this type of antibody into a person, their immune system will invoke an anti-mouse response which can limit their effectiveness and potentially cause serious side effects, explains Cragg.The next generation were chimeric human antibodies, where the mouse antigen-binding region is placed within a human framework.We still use chimeric antibodies as drugs today one of the most successful is rituximab, which is used to treated lymphoma and autoimmune diseases, says Cragg.

Replacing more and more of the mouse antibody regions has led to "humanized" antibodies where the only remaining amino acids of mouse origin are those that make direct contact with the antigen.

But the latest generation of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies are fully human. These are generated either by using mice that have been genetically engineered to carry human antibody genes, or through recombinant display screening technologies that involve inserting a library of human antibody gene sequences into bacteriophage or yeast.

You basically express your antigen and pan across your display library to find one that binds to it, explains Cragg.

A major advantage of this approach for generating a monoclonal antibody is its speed compared to traditional hybridoma technologies: You can go from three to six months to generate an antibody down to only one to two weeks, says Cragg.

Functional evaluation of bsAbs during pharmaceutical development is critical to their success, but this is not without challenges. Existing evaluative methods such as ELISA and SPR are commonly used but are often time consuming. Therefore, there is high demand for a rapid, simple method for the functional assessment of two or more interactions of bispecific therapeutics. In this app note, discover an assay that caters to this demand with a method that is versatile, high-throughput, and low-cost.

But there is a problem with achieving native pairing of the heavy and light chain molecules that make up each antibody. In nature, these genes sit on different chromosomes and the polypeptide chains are only paired after translation. The traditional approach to creating a display library involves collecting the heavy chain genes in one group and the light chain series in another and then randomly combining these together.

Previously, display screens have involved panning random combinations of libraries containing largely non-native pairs in order to find binders, explains DeKosky.These non-native gene pairings can lead to antibodies that arent good enough quality to become effective therapeutics. But newer display platforms maintain the native pairing of human antibodies by physically linking the heavy and light chain genes together.We can use these display libraries to screen millions of natively-paired antibodies to find natural human antibodies that can bind to the antigen in a much faster and more powerful way than hybridoma technology can do, says DeKosky.

Instead of it taking maybe four months to look at 50 or 100 genes, were looking at more like two weeks to look at 50 to 100,000, says DeKosky. So its really changed the way we can understand and mine patient immune responses.

Another game-changer is rapid DNA synthesis, which removes the need to physically identify and recover a gene using PCR.

If you can sequence it, you can synthesize it, clone it and make it, describes DeKosky.

After identifying an antibody, researchers also have the option to carry out genetic engineering to further improve its binding affinity a process known as affinity maturation.

You effectively make random changes to the antibody binding site, put these sequences into a display library and carry out another screen to find the ones that bind more tightly, explains Cragg.6 Steps for Optimizing Recombinant Antibody Expression

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have pioneered discovery and development in biological science and medicine, playing an increasingly important role in research and drug discovery. To meet this rising demand, researchers have developed alternative methods to accelerate antibody production the generation of recombinant antibodies (rAbs), often in mammalian cell lines. In this white paper, discover the steps to optimizing rAb expression.

The next frontier is more of an intellectual or design problem knowing about what you want the drug to achieve in the body and how youre going to do it, says Cragg.For example, cancer researchers are trying to understand more about one of the most important determinants of antibody activity, the efficient interaction with Fc receptors on the surface of immune cells.Were seeing early signs of that with therapeutics that potentiate T cell responses, says DeKosky. And within the coming decades, I think were going to be using antibodies to recruit more and more cells in one way or another into the game.We are also likely to see the development of more bispecific antibodies, which can simultaneously target two different antigens.Theyre more sophisticated as theyre able to bring in more mechanisms all at the same time, comments Cragg.

Within the next 10 years, well have a larger armory of different monoclonal antibodies and a better understanding of which patients to treat with which antibodies and in what combinations, predicts Cragg. In the longer term, we may remove the need to produce antibodies outside the body at all and instead introducing DNA constructs into the patients to make them on-site making it much, much cheaper.

Researchers are increasingly excited about what the future holds for therapeutic antibodies.

I think in some ways were just getting started exploring what these molecules can really do, concludes DeKosky.

Read more from the original source:
The Therapeutic Antibody Revolution - Technology Networks

No matter how many times a day we wash our hands, clean our house or wash our dishes, were still surrounded by bacteria and viruses which can cause illness and disease. So we rely on our immune system to fight off these potential threats constantly. In most people, the immune system operates as an effective - even if not perfect defensive mechanism.

But in some people the immune system may go awry, causing it to perceive parts of the body itself as a threat and attack the bodys own tissues and cells. This is what happens in type 1 diabetes, where the immune system targets cells in the pancreas that make insulin. It also happens in rheumatoid arthritis, when the immune system attacks the lining of the joints. Both of these are examples of autoimmune diseases.

There are more than 80 different autoimmune conditions that affect more than 4 million people in the UK alone. While treatments that reduce autoimmune attacks have been developed, there is still no cure for these diseases. Existing drugs might also not be effective in all patients, and can cause severe side effects. In order to develop better treatments, we need to have a better understanding of how these diseases develop.

Over the past decade, many studies investigating the genetics of autoimmunity have found a common feature: a particular gene, called TYK2. This gene has been associated with at least 20 autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and psoriasis.

Since the discovery of this gene, a drug that targets TYK2 has been developed and is showing promise for the treatment of psoriasis, a disease that causes raised, red, scaly patches on the skin. Based on the results, this clinical trial gives hope not only for treating psoriasis, but for the treatment of other autoimmune conditions as well.

TYK2 plays an integral role in regulating how active the immune system is. But key to the effect of TYK2 on autoimmunity is what scientists call gene variants. Every person will have one of several possible variants of the TYK2 gene. These variants are essentially slightly different versions of the gene, which might make the immune system more or less active depending on what variant a person has.

Certain variants that increase activity in the immune system have been found to increase the likelihood that a person will develop an autoimmune disease, while other variants can actually protect against more than 20 different autoimmune diseases. While genetics is only one of many factors which influence whether a person develops autoimmunity, this discovery may be a major help in improving treatments of many autoimmune diseases.

Since a higher level of TYK2 activity results in autoimmunity, a team of researchers tested the use of a drug, called BMS-986165, which inhibits TYK2 function in treating autoimmune conditions. The drug works by reducing the genes activity in the immune system. Promising results were reported when testing the drug both in pre-clinical and clinical settings.

The team first studied the effects of the drug in human blood cells. After having observed the effect of the drug on the cells, they then moved on to animal models to test the effect it had on a whole organism. The drug was shown to protect mice from several different autoimmune diseases, including lupus, which causes long-term inflammation to the skin, joints, and organs. Treatment with the drug reduced the number of attacking immune cells by 50% in some cases.

These promising results follow on from a 2018 study, which successfully trialled the drug for the treatment of psoriasis. The study found 75% of patients showed a reduction in the size of skin lesions and severity by 75%. Of these patients, 25% had complete clearance of lesions.

These studies, in conjunction with the evidence of the role of TYK2 in another 20 autoimmune diseases, suggest a potential for the use of this drug in the treatment of the other conditions as well. Currently, BMS-986165 is under evaluation in clinical trials in patients with Crohns disease, lupus and further trials for psoriasis.

This article is part of a series tied to Medicine made for you, a series by The Anthill podcast on the future of healthcare and how it could soon get a lot more personal. Read more here.

View original post here:
Discovery of gene associated with 20 autoimmune diseases leads to promising drug trials - The Conversation UK

Theres still a lot we dont know about the novel coronavirus thats already sickened more than 75,000 people worldwide, with more than 2,000 deaths reported.

But one thing thats clear is that in serious cases, the virus can have a devastating effect on the body and not just on the lungs.

Heres what we know so far about how the new coronavirus now dubbed COVID-19 affects the different systems in the body.

As with other coronavirus illnesses including SARS, MERS, and the common cold COVID-19 is a respiratory disease, so the lungs are usually affected first.

Early symptoms include fever, cough, and shortness of breath. These appear as soon as 2 days, or as long as 14 days, after exposure to the virus.

The severity of COVID-19 varies from mild or no symptoms to severe or sometimes fatal illness. Data on more than 17,000 reported cases in China found that almost 81 percent of cases were mild. The rest were severe or critical.

Older people and those with chronic medical conditions appear to have a higher risk for developing severe illness.

This variability also shows up in how COVID-19 affects the lungs.

Some people may only have minor respiratory symptoms, while others develop non-life-threatening pneumonia. But theres a subset of people who develop severe lung damage.

What were frequently seeing in patients who are severely ill with [COVID-19] is a condition that we call acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, said Dr. Laura E. Evans, a member of the Society of Critical Care Medicine Leadership Council and an associate professor of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle.

ARDS doesnt happen just with COVID-19. A number of events can trigger it, including infection, trauma, and sepsis.

These cause damage to the lungs, which leads to fluid leaking from small blood vessels in the lungs. The fluid collects in the lungs air sacs, or alveoli. This makes it difficult for the lungs to transfer oxygen from the air to the blood.

While theres a shortage of information on the type of damage that occurs in the lungs during COVID-19, a recent report suggests its similar to the damage caused by SARS and MERS.

One recent study of 138 people hospitalized for COVID-19 found that on average, people started having difficulty breathing 5 days after showing symptoms. ARDS developed on average 8 days after symptoms.

Treatment for ARDS involves supplemental oxygen and mechanical ventilation, with the goal of getting more oxygen into the blood.

There isnt a specific treatment for ARDS, Evans said. We just support the person through this process as best we can, allowing their bodies to heal and their immune system to address the underlying events.

The lungs are the main organs affected by COVID-19. But in serious cases, the rest of the body can also be affected.

In patients who become severely ill, a good proportion of those patients also develop dysfunction in other organ systems, Evans said.

However, she says this can happen with any severe infection.

This damage to the organs isnt always directly caused by the infection, but can result from the bodys response to infection.

Some people with COVID-19 have reported gastrointestinal symptoms, such as nausea or diarrhea, although these symptoms are much less common than problems with the lungs.

While coronaviruses seem to have an easier time entering the body through the lungs, the intestines arent out of reach for these viruses.

Earlier reports identified the viruses that cause SARS and MERS in intestinal tissue biopsies and stool samples.

Two recent studies one in the New England Journal of Medicine and a preprint on medRxiv report that stool samples of some people with COVID-19 tested positive for the virus.

However, researchers dont know yet whether fecal transmission of this virus can occur.

Evans says COVID-19 can also affect the heart and blood vessels. This may show up as irregular heart rhythms, not enough blood getting to the tissues, or blood pressure low enough that it requires medications.

So far, though, theres no indication that the virus directly damages the heart.

When liver cells are inflamed or damaged, they can leak higher than normal amounts of enzymes into the bloodstream.

Elevated liver enzymes arent always a sign of a serious problem, but this laboratory finding was seen in people with SARS or MERS.

One recent report found signs of liver damage in a person with COVID-19. Doctors says its not clear, though, if the virus or the drugs being used to treat the person caused the damage.

Some people hospitalized with COVID-19 have also had acute kidney damage, sometimes requiring a kidney transplant. This also occurred with SARS and MERS.

During the SARS outbreak, scientists even found the virus that causes this illness in the tubules of the kidneys.

Theres little evidence, though, to show that the virus directly caused the kidney injury, according to a World Health Organization report.

Dr. James Cherry, a research professor of pediatrics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, says the kidney damage may be due to other changes that happen during coronavirus infection.

When you have pneumonia, you have less oxygen circulating, he said, and that can damage the kidneys.

With any infection, the bodys immune system responds by attacking the foreign virus or bacteria. While this immune response can rid the body of the infection, it can also sometimes cause collateral damage in the body.

This can come in the form of an intense inflammatory response, sometimes called a cytokine storm. The immune cells produce cytokines to fight infection, but if too many are released, it can cause problems in the body.

A lot of [the damage in the body during COVID-19] is due to what we would call a sepsis syndrome, which is due to complex immune reactions, Evans said. The infection itself can generate an intense inflammatory response in the body that can affect the function of multiple organ systems.

Another thing about the immune system is that, so far, there are almost no cases of COVID-19 in children under 9 years old. Scientists arent sure whether young children arent getting infected or their symptoms are so mild that no one notices it.

Cherry says children also have a less severe illness than adults during other kinds of infections, including measles and pneumococcal infections.

He says this may be because children have a straightforward immune response, whereas older people can sometimes have an over-response. Its this excess immune response that causes some of the damage during infections.

There was evidence of this happening during SARS, Cherry said, and I suspect it could also be playing out here [with COVID-19].

See the rest here:
Here's What Happens to the Body After Contracting the Coronavirus - Healthline

What's the estimated effectiveness of this season's flu vaccine so far? (Photo: Getty)

How is 45? Well, that depends on what you are talking about, of course. Eating 45 doughnuts in one sitting is probably not so good. Batting .450 in a Major League Baseball season? Thats good. All-time best good. A flu vaccine thats 45% effective? Thats certainly not the all-time best. But its still better than it was measured to be this time last year: 29%.

The 45% number came from a report released yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This report indicated that so far the flu vaccine has been an estimated 45% effective in preventing influenza-associated medically attended acute respiratory illness. Ummm, what the who attending a cute illness what? This may seem like a jumble of words if you dont speak medical-ese.

Lets break it down a bit. Influenza-associated means the result of the flu. Medically attended says that you sought medical care for the problem. Acute respiratory illness stands for a disease affecting your respiratory tract that is new and not something that has been going on for a while already.

Thus, the flu vaccine is estimated to have been 45% effective at preventing flu-associated respiratory illnesses that resulted in doctors visits. Not 45% effective in preventing the flu in general. Not flu in which you melt into your bed and dont go anywhere for several days. But flu that gets you to go to the doctors office. The number was even higher for those 6 months to 17 years of age. Kids and adolescents had 55% for this type of vaccine effectiveness.

So, back to the original question: how is 45? In general, when the influenza virus strains in the vaccine match the strains that are circulating the population, such effectiveness tends to be between 40% and 60%. Of course, in years that the strains dont match, vaccine effectiveness can be lower. So 45% is kind of like sushi in a food court. Not the best that it could be. But it does its job.

Where did the CDC get these vaccine effectiveness numbers? Well they came from the U.S. Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness Network, which conducted studies from October 23, 2019 to January 25, 2020. During that time period, five study locations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin enrolled 4,112 patients, all 6 months of age and older, who had visited clinics for acute respiratory illness accompanied by cough when the flu virus was known to already be circulating in the area.

The researchers asked each patient whether he or she had received the flu vaccine at least 14 days earlier this season and tested their noses or mouths for presence of the flu virus. Ultimately, 1,060 (26%) of the study participants ended up testing positive for the influenza virus. The percentage of participants in each site who had received the flu vaccine ranged from 38% to 61%.

From the results, they calculated an odds ratio. Not an odd ratio as in a weird ratio but an odds ratio calculated as such: the odds that a person who tested positive for the flu also had been vaccinated earlier in the season divided by the odds that a person who tested negative for the flu had been vaccinated. The following formula then calculated the estimated vaccine effectiveness: 100% x (1- odds ratio).

Counting the number of clinic visits underestimates the number of people who get the flu in a season ... [+] as many people suffer without seeking medical care. (Photo: Getty)

So this is a somewhat indirect method of evaluating the effectiveness of the flu vaccine. It is also from a specific sample of 4,112 patients. If you think political polls dont really represent what people think, you can imagine that numbers from a sample of people from particular locations may not really represent what is occurring throughout the country. Plus, numbers for particular parts of the flu season may not end up holding throughout the entire flu season. This flu season is far from over, and vaccine effectiveness can change over time as different strains become more or less prominent.

Oh, and remember this is vaccine effectiveness in preventing influenza-associated medically attended acute respiratory illness. Not the flu in general.

Moreover, dont go around saying, Im 45. Im 45. That may not be your specific number. The flu vaccine probably offers different levels of protection to different people. Remember, you are a snowflake and so is your immune system. This isnt a statement about your toughness. This is just a reminder that no two people and no two immune systems are identical. A vaccine basically presents inactivated or weakened versions of the viruses to your immune system and says, hey watch out for these. Its up to your immune system to respond. Therefore, the protection that you get depends on how your immune system reacts.

Regardless of your specific number, as they say with the flu, sword fighting, and sex (not that the three are related), some protection is better than no protection. Nothing else even comes close to the vaccine in protecting against the flu. Taking supplements is not going to do it. Neither is a special diet, getting chiropractic treatments, douching your nose, or drinking whiskey. The CDC has estimated that the flu has already caused 12 to 17 million medical visits, 250,000 to 440,000 hospitalizations, and 14,000 to 36,000 deaths this season as of February 8, 2020. Those are not inconsequential numbers, and they will continue to grow. They are still much, much, much higher than what the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) has caused in this country as I have explained previously for Forbes. If you havent yet gotten the flu vaccine, it is still worth getting.

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This Years Flu Vaccine: CDC Says How Effective It Is - Forbes

Have you ever heard of the term Blue Zones? This phrase refers to five different regions around the globe that researchers have identified as having the highest concentrations of centenarians in the world.

While in the U.S., the average life expectancy is 78 years, in the Blue Zones, living to be over 100 isnt uncommon. The regions that make up the Blue Zones include Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Icaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California.

Despite the geographical differences, people in these areas share nine key lifestyle habits, which have been coined the Power 9. Here is a glance at what the longest-living people in the world have in common, and what you can do to adopt their longevity practices, no matter where you live.

Move Naturally

Physical activity is part of daily life for the residents in the Blue Zones and is incorporated into the day through activities like gardening, walking and cooking. Research on men living in the Sardinian Blue Zone discovered that living longer was associated with activities like raising farm animals, living on steeper slopes in the mountains and walking longer distances to work. Building more physical activity into daily life can help meet the physical activity guidelines for Americans. These guidelines suggest at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity per week.

Sense of Purpose

In the Blue Zones communities, having a sense of purpose in life is associated with living longer.

In Okinawa, a life purpose is known as ikigai and in Nicoya, it is referred to as plan de vida.

Having a reason to get out of bed in the morning is closely intertwined with happiness, and without one, it can be difficult to maintain healthy behaviors and a lifestyle that contributes to a longer life. Research on psychological well-being has linked a sense of purpose and happiness with a reduced risk of death. The evidence is clear; having a positive outlook on life can influence how long you live.

Manage Your Stress

We know that too much stress is bad for us and often leads to inflammation that is associated with many age-related chronic diseases. In the Blue Zones, people still experience stress, however they have different routines that help manage their stress. For example, people in Okinawa take time every day to remember their ancestors, while Seventh Day Adventists in Loma Linda often pray, Ikarians take frequent naps, and Sardinians partake in happy hour. It is clearly important to find stress management techniques that work for you, whether that is getting the right amount of sleep, being physically active or socializing with friends and family.

Eat Until You Are 80% Full

Another practice that Blue Zone communities have in common is that they dont overeat. Okinawans follow the 80% rule, which is known as hara hachi bu. It simply means that they stop eating when they feel 80% full, rather than 100% full. Because of this, it is harder to consume too many calories, which leads to weight gain, obesity and other chronic diseases. Strategies like placing your fork down between bites and focusing on your sense of fullness can help make it easier to stop eating when you feel 80% full.

Plant Slant

It may sound strange to us in the United States, but the cornerstone of most Blue Zone diets is plants.

Although most are not vegetarians, they do tend to eat a 95% plant-based diet. Instead of being the main course, meat is served as a small side, and is often considered a celebratory food or a way to add flavor to plant-based dishes. Diets in the Blue Zones are rich in vegetables, legumes, nuts and whole grains.

Moderate Wine Consumption

Another factor common to many of the Blue Zones is moderate wine consumption. Some studies have shown that one to two drinks per day can significantly reduce mortality, specifically from heart disease. In the Icarian and Sardinian Blue Zones, red wine is the drink of choice, with many people consuming 1-2 glasses per day. Red wine contains an antioxidant called resveratrol, which may prevent blood vessel damage and may reduce LDL cholesterol. It is important to remember that these benefits are only seen for moderate wine consumption (up to one 5-ounce glass a day for women and up to two for men). Be sure to talk with your doctor before making any changes in alcohol consumption.

Find Community

Most of the Blue Zones are religious, with the majority of people belonging to a faith-based community. Many studies on faith and religion have shown that being religious is associated with a lower risk of death. It is unclear why, however, researchers speculate that this could be due to social support and reduced rates of depression. If this is the case, being a part of any meaningful community could also increase longevity, whether that be faith-based or not.

Put Family First

In the Blue Zones, family members are often close. Not only do younger generations value older generations, but they often live together and help care for older family members. In many Blue Zones, it is not uncommon for grandparents to live with their families. In fact, studies have shown that grandparents who help raise their grandchildren have a reduced risk of death than those who do not care for grandchildren. It seems that being close with family can influence lifespan.

Maintain a Fulfilling Social Life

People in Blue Zones have supportive social circles and actively participate in them. In Okinawa, the term moais refers to groups of five friends that are committed to each other for life. Social support and a sense of community are essential in all Blue Zones areas, and research has linked this to good health, happiness and longevity. Additionally, many studies have shown lower rates of hypertension, obesity and diabetes in those who have a strong support network.

Katie Greenawalt is a Penn State Extension educator for food, families and health in Lebanon County.

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Longevity Tips from the Blue Zones | The Heart of the Farm is the Family - Lancaster Farming

Insulation systems, comprised of thermal insulation, jacketing, mastics, and sealants, are designed to keep water out in order to maintain the integrity of the thermal insulation and limit corrosion under insulation (CUI). However, even the best designed and installed systems sometimes become compromised in real-world applications, resulting in the presence of water at the pipe surface and the potential for CUI.

As industry experts explore new ways to mitigate and inhibit CUI, a new strategy based on the chemistry of the insulation has been developed. This concept considers how the insulations chemistry can promote or inhibit corrosion after water has been introduced to the system. The first step in exploring this new mitigation strategy is understanding the corrosion by-products of different insulation types based on their chemistries. In order understand this, Johns Manville (JM) recently conducted two new studies to explore how insulation influences the chemistry that occurs on the metal surface of a pipe and whether or not the XOX Corrosion Inhibitor found in Thermo-1200 and Sproule WR-1200 maintains its efficacy after repeated wet-dry cycling. The purpose of the analysis is to better understand how CUI is impacted by the interaction between the thermal insulation chemistry and the metal surfaces that are routinely seen in industrial systems.

The first test protocol used in this study was based on ASTM C1617 Standard Practice for Quantitative Accelerated Laboratory Evaluation of Extraction Solutions Containing Ions Leached from Thermal Insulation on Aqueous Corrosion of Metals. Per the test method, the leachable content of the insulation was extracted via a boiling liquid extraction. The extractions were then dripped onto heated carbon steel coupons for a period of 96 hours to mimic accelerated wet/dry cycles.

In this study, after 96 hours of exposure, the surface corrosion and by-products on the carbon steel coupons were subjected to laboratory analyses via electron diffraction spectroscopy (EDS), optical microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The EDS analysis was used to determine the composition and relative amount of each element on the surface layer of the coupons. The enhanced optical and SEM analyses were used to visually inspect the surface of the coupons.

The insulation samples tested in this study and listed below cover the CUI range and are designed for use in applications up to 1200F:

JMs EDS analysis of surface corrosion layers on carbon steel showed that different chemical compositions form depending on the type of insulation that was in contact with the metal surface. Insulation materials with corrosion inhibiting chemistries, like Thermo-1200 and Sproule WR-1200, were shown to decrease the proliferation of corrosion on metal surfaces by depositing a protective layer of sodium silicate onto the metal surface. This layer was present when testing the Sproule WR-1200 (hydrophobic perlite with the XOX Corrosion Inhibitor) sample and the Thermo-1200 (water-resistant calcium silicate with the XOX Corrosion Inhibitor) sample.

The elements present in this study were predominantly metal oxides, including silica oxide, iron oxide, and calcium oxide, as well as sodium, magnesium, and chlorine. The close inspection of the metal coupons revealed that components leaching from different insulation chemistries interact with pipe surfaces in different ways, some propagating corrosion and others inhibiting it. By analysing the CUI surface layer (or absence of a CUI layer), engineers can understand how the insulation chemistry can influence the potential for long-term corrosion of the system as a whole. Johns Manville will discuss this research in greater detail in its live Insulation Intel webinar, Mitigating CUI: A Two-Pronged Approach on 25 February 2020 at 2pm ET (Register Now), and during its presentation at the upcoming NACE Corrosion 2020 Conference and Expo on 15 19 March. Part two of this article will discuss the results from the corrosion inhibitor longevity testing after repeated wet-dry cycles.

Written by Marybeth Jones, Johns Manville.

Read the article online at: https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/special-reports/20022020/understanding-the-mechanism-and-longevity-of-corrosion-inhibitors-in-insulation-part-one/

Excerpt from:
Understanding the mechanism and longevity of corrosion inhibitors in insulation: part one - Hydrocarbon Engineering

(Editors note: This article is part of an editorial partnership between Next Avenue and The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), a national nonprofit whose mission is to support and advance healthy aging through biomedical research.)

Are you as old as you feel, as old as you look or as old as your birth certificate says? The best answer may be none of the above.

Actually, you may be as biologically old as your blood says you are.

For many years, aging researchers have sought markers of biological age, or biomarkers simple signals that reveal the expected length of your future health. The expected length of future health, after all, is the key biological difference between younger and older people.

Some people have called such markers biological clocks. I dont know about you, but I dont typically calculate my age by thinking of clocks. I think of calendars. So, I prefer to call these hypothetical signals biological calendars.

The importance of these calendars is that they potentially allow researchers to quickly see whether a new drug, diet or other treatment that purports to slow, or even possibly reverse, aging is actually doing so.

Biological calendars of aging can also provide rapid feedback on how a lifestyle change, such as in diet or exercise habits, is affecting your biological age. This insight can motivate people to stick with that change.

Now, as a biological calendar, blood is a devilishly complex stew. Like a stew, it is liquid with lumps in it. We call the liquid plasma; the lumps, cells. Physicians for the past century have been using chemical analysis of plasma and counts of the various blood cell types to diagnose diseases. But we are now entering a brave new world of blood analysis.

Plasma contains not just the dozen or two chemicals that standard laboratory tests measure; it contains a constantly changing mixture of vitamins, nutrients, waste products, hormones and thousands of different proteins.

A hint that plasma might hold secrets about aging has come from research in which the plasma from young mice (or humans!) was found to rejuvenate the function of muscles, brain, heart and other organs of old mice. Dracula, it turns out, may have been onto something.

Recent advances in chemical analysis allow us to measure thousands of plasma chemicals at once, and advances in machine learning are helping make sense of that torrent of information. Plasma proteins may turn out to be just the type of biological calendar we are seeking.

I say this because a recent study of about 3,000 plasma proteins found that a specific combination of 373 of these proteins could accurately tell the age of the person from whom it was drawn. The study was conducted by AFAR Scientific Director Dr. Nir Barzilai with AFAR grantees David Gate of Stanford University and Dr. Sofiya Milman and Dr. Joe Verghese, both from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

On top of that, people who were judged by their proteins to be younger than their real age scored better on a panel of physical and mental tests. We dont know yet how well these proteins might predict future health or life, but those studies will soon follow.

Blood cells, in addition to plasma, might have an even more promising aging tale to tell.

Your white blood cells (but not your red cells) contain your DNA, which provides the instruction manual for pretty much everything that goes on in your body. A few years ago, it was hoped that telomeres those protective DNA caps at the ends of your chromosomes from white blood cells might be a useful biological calendar. But telomeres as predictors of future health have not held up to scientific scrutiny.

However, we may have just been looking at the wrong part of our DNA.

Although we tend to think of DNA as little more than a long-coded sequence of DNA letters, there is a bit more to it. In particular, there are a number of small chemical tags that attach to DNA at specific sites to help turn off, or turn on, genes.

In recent years, combinations of particular tags called DNA methylation have, like plasma proteins, been shown to be good predictors of age and health in people and animals. These tags have even been shown to predict time to death and the development of later life diseases in people.

Perhaps even more exciting, a small, very preliminary study of 10 middle-aged men taking a hormone cocktail designed to stimulate the immune system showed a one-and-a-half-year regression in their DNA methylation calendar.

Lets not get too excited about this result yet. It is easy to overinterpret such very preliminary results, as some of the media have done. We have no idea at present what a small backward trend in DNA methylation age means, and this study has more than a few limitations. But it is without doubt provocative.

Stay tuned. Analysis of blood cells and blood plasma may hold secrets of aging that we are just beginning to discover.

Read more:
Does our blood hold the secrets of our longevity? - The Oakland Press

Keeping Employees Nowadays Is Tough.

Now more than ever spotting your right employees got more challenging than ever. In its 2018 Employee Tenure Summary, theBLSreported, the median employee tenure was 4.3 years for men and 4.0 years for women. We dont have the data for 2019, but we also know that this longevity varies by age and occupation while retention becomes a catch and release game.

That is why any tool that can help you as an employer to at leastpredict retention probabilitiescan be a game-changer. And here comes the undeniable utility ofthe mindset method.I call it the mindset method because it uses one of thesubconscious mindset filters involved to run us on autopilot. And so, working with the filters is like hacking someones brain.

Every time I used this method it was stunningly accurate. I mean I did it in my training with 10, 20 people, or in private coaching. I did this while helping companies with new hires. I did it with my husband, he with his colleagues. Same amazing accuracy.

The only downfall is I didnt use it enough or speak about it when its so valuable for all of you to know. It can save you time, money, or at least prepare you for some changes in the near future. I couldnt do it with myself because, you know, I was already spoiled with the rules. But other than that it worked magic.

Not to mention it works the same for relationships. That can get intriguing. Thats because the subconscious filter youll use to determine the longevity of your new employee is calledThe Relationship Filter.

Youll need 3 coins for that (nickels, dimes, euro cents, you name it). It doesnt matter what type of coins, just to be the same carrying the same value. They can be fake coins if you want. But you need them for this test.

Once you evaluate a candidate for the job, place the 3 coins in front of the person. Two of them should have the same orientation. Like if its a nickel you have two heads pointing straight up and one of the heads pointing at the other two, or in a different direction. If you use number based coins you orient the numbers straight up for two of the coins and one pointing in a different direction. You got the idea.

Now, ask this question:

Whats the relationship between these 3 coins?

Its crucial to not change the question, ask it exactly this way, using these exact words. This will give you the ability to hear their language using an ambiguous question based on similarities, not differences.

Now its time to listen. Consider every word they say.This wayyoull get the answer youre looking for, based on 5 categories. Youll include your new employee or candidate in one of these 5.

You look for percentages. This way to can plan for the change.

Lets translate the data.

You look for percentages and which comes first. Sameness people will always start with similarities. Those with differences will start with that.

First, dont panic. Especially if you want someone badly but it turns out he/shes in category 5, or 4, and you want that person around for many years to come.

Someone with the difference filter on can stay longer at the job if the job itself changes in that period. If you can count on max. 6 months you need to plan new responsibilities, department changes, different schedules, and a different routine, or even title.

Here is the magic.

If that person perceives the change like a new opportunity it can stay.

Since I am a promoter of a remote work environment, wherever is possible, lets include the simplest way to use this method no matter where your employees are.

It doesnt matter what kind of screening software you use. There are those cool quizzes where you can include this test. You can even do it through a simple form of a questionnaire (text and image).

If its a video interview you just include a slide to share during the question and listen.

If the coin method is not available for whatever reason, here is another question you can ask.

What is the relationship between what youre doing this year on the job and what you did at this time last year?

The same rules apply. Listen to the words your candidate is saying.

These filters are not good or bad. They reflect how you perceive the relationship between things in your life. How they are related to each other. Once you know what youre dealing with you can plan things out.

The same goes for personal relationships. If your significant other is with you for 2 years and you know its differences with exception (or sameness and differences equally) you understand its time to spark up the relationship or create some significant changes. If you want to keep that person of course.

I know its not ideal, especially if you are forever sameness, but at least a big hallo is lifted from your head, and now you know what to expect and evaluate if the sacrifices worth the effort.

Note!Just to be clear. The Mindset Method using the Relationship Filter wont take all the other evaluation methods out of the table. Your employee still needs to match the company, its culture, and be an overall good fit. And then the relationship filter can come into play.

This article was inspired by the emails I received after thisFREE Masterclass. Its still running for a limited time. Feel yourself invited:HOW TO READ PEOPLE BY DISCOVERING THEIR SUBCONSCIOUS FILTERS.

Originally published atMindset to Greatness

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How To Tell If Your New Employee Will Quit On You After 6 Months Or 7 Years. The Mindset Method. - Thrive Global

A

Percentage of reported significant AI-induced increases in profitability by current R&D ... [+] expenditure on AI (Figure 2.17 in Survey)

A significant number of financial industry executives from 151 financial institutions in 33 countries report that within the next two years they expect to become mass adopters of AI and expect AI to become an essential business driver across the financial industry. This information was collected as part of a survey on AI in Financial Services conducted by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and supported by EY and Invesco. The objective of the study was to understand the opportunities and challenges that will result from mass adoption of AI in Financial Services.The research was published in a 127-page report entitled Transforming Paradigms A Global AI in Financial Services Survey.

Highlights from the Survey

Financial Services sectors represented in the survey sample(Figure 1.2 in Survey)

Insights from the Survey

Perceived strategic importance of AI over time (Figure 3.1 in Survey)

R&D expenditure spent on AI (Figure 2.15 in Survey)

The Widening Technological Gap

The report addressed the widening technological gap between high and low spenders as high spenders increase funding for AI R&D. Researchers speculated that AI supremacy might be determined between high-spenders vs. low-spenders rather than incumbents vs. disruptors.That prediction may be true, but consider that in the last 10 years investment in the FinTech industry has exceeded $350 billion dollars. During the same period a similar amount of funding was invested in other industries such as AI, healthcare, and aerospace. There have been a number of breakthroughs in these other areas but not that much in FinTech. The amount of money invested in FinTech has not yielded so significant results compared to other domains. In the last 10 years FinTech received more investment but accomplished less with it.

Long term AI supremacy in financial services is likely to result from a combination of factors including technical prowess, domain knowledge, and AI friendly senior management driving AI strategy. The companies most likely to achieve AI supremacy will be the ones capable of attracting interdisciplinary teams that have deep experience in both AI and financial services who can design, build, and implement AI-powered novel FinTech solutions. Companies with AI-friendly executives will demonstrate how the effective use of AI can increase a company's valuation. The presence of AI-friendly CEOs in financial services could be an indication that a company is more likely to succeed.

Development teams with experience using Data Science and AI will understand both its potential and also its practical limitations at this stage. Experts with specific domain knowledge in FinTech will be able to understand the real-world processes that they are modeling, and be able to develop superior products. Companies that achieve leadership in FinTech 2.0 will be the ones that are able to build teams that have experience in both AI and financial services.

FinTech, AI, and data-driven technologies will converge into a single advanced technology

The Convergence of FinTech, AI, and Data-Driven Technologies

In the near future, FinTech, AI, and data-driven technologies will converge into a single advanced technology. Next-generation financial companies will use engineering methods with integrated systems to treat business, finance and technology as a single unit with complementary parts. The resulting FinTech 2.0 will offer unprecedented potential for growth and disruption.The 7 Components of FinTech 2.0 are:

In the HealthTech space, the application of data science and AI has already enabled P4 Medicine (personalized, predictive, precision, participatory). The integration of data science, AI, and FinTech will result in P4 FinTech (personalized, predictive, precision, participatory). AI will enable personalized financial products optimized for individuals. Several cycles of feedback between the user and the AI system will deliver products specifically tuned to each individual. This level of AI enabled personalization is already standard in progressive medical clinics and soon will be incorporated in progressive FinTech. Companies using AI enabled FinTech 2.0 will surpass low tech FinTech companies and financial institutions using outdated technologies.

Financial Inclusion

In the next few years FinTech 2.0 will provide financial inclusion for people over 60 many of whom have been excluded in the past. There has never been a bank focused on the needs of people over 60. With FinTech 2.0, financial institutions will be able to explore this untapped multi trillion market. The AI-enabled Longevity Economy is an opportunity for the Financial Industry. Soon AI-powered FinTech companies and Longevity Banks will provide services designed for people 60+ who want to optimize their wealthspan. The global spending power of this demographic is $15 trillion per year, and is expected to grow to $27 trillion by 2026.Very advanced FinTech technology is already emerging in London and AI tools for FinTech 2.0 are already in development there.

Longevity Banks

Clients of Longevity Banks will have more time to accumulate wealth, will have a longer investment horizon, and will benefit from compounding.These banks will utilize AI to develop and deploy fully integrated AgeTech-WealthTech solutions to grow their clients healthspan and wealthspan simultaneously and in a coordinated way, enabling elderly people to have a higher quality of life in their golden years. Integrated FinTech and HealthTech will help older people manage their health and wealth simultaneously. Financial services innovators will use AI to provide personalized financial products that provide a comprehensive view of investments, taxes, insurance, and regulation without unneeded complexity. This will appeal to 1 billion people over 60 who make up the wealthiest part of the financial system.

The complete report is available here: Transforming Paradigms A Global AI in Financial Services Survey.

Margaretta Colangelo is co-founder of Longevity Bank which is expected to launch in Switzerland later this year.

Read more:
Mass Adoption Of AI In Financial Services Expected Within Two Years - Forbes