Technology that matters

Biotechnology

Decade-Old Frozen Human Brain Shows Perfect Preservation

What Happened Greg Fahy, chief scientific officer at biotech companies Intervene Immune and 21st Century Medicine, recently completed his analysis of brain tissue samples from his deceased colleague L. Stephen Coles. The samples came from Coles’s brain, which has been stored at the Alcor cryonics facility in Arizona since 2014. Fahy’s findings, published after more than a year of analysis, show the brain tissue is “astonishingly well preserved.” When the frozen samples were slowly rewarmed and rehydrated, the cellular structure “bounced back” with every microscopic detail intact.

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Japan Approves World's First iPSC Cell Treatment

What Happened Japan’s regulatory authorities have issued the first-ever approvals for manufacturing and selling medical products based on induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology. This groundbreaking decision represents the culmination of two decades of scientific development that began when Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka first successfully reprogrammed adult mouse cells in 2006, work that later earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The approved treatments utilize iPSCs—adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed to return to an embryonic-like state while maintaining the patient’s original DNA.

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