Homeostasis

• “Like concierge medicine itself, which allows for deeply personalized doctor-patient relationships, our model is grounded in a trusted and enduring partnership.
• It’s like night and day in terms of how I can care for and really know my patients.
• We signed up for her personalized medical care as soon as she made it available.
• I told her then ‘I’d been hoping for years you would start a practice like this.

• CTCs are tumor cells that are cast off from a primary tumor and enter the bloodstream which cause metastatic cancer.
• “This is an important milestone for ExThera Medical and we are thrilled to be advancing the OncoBindTM procedure into a novel category of clinical development,” said Sanja ILIC, M.D., M.S., RAC & Chief Regulatory Officer for ExThera.
• We are pleased to begin an important new clinical trial, and ecstatic that FDA has approved our recent IDE application.
• ExThera Medical is dedicated to transparency, safety, and efficacy of all of its products, developed under FDA oversight.

• And you likely have seen the opposite – someone whose body and mind seem much more ravaged by time than others.
• Aging research doesn’t tend to be about finding the one cure that fixes all that may ail you in old age.

What is aging?

• This process is both intrinsic, when your own body causes new problems, and extrinsic, when environmental insults damage your tissues.
• This includes metabolizing nutrients, getting rid of waste, exchanging signals with other cells and adapting to stress.
• The trouble is that every single process and component in each of your cells can be interrupted or damaged.

Repairing DNA and recycling proteins

• One of the cell’s chief jobs is to maintain its DNA – the instruction manual a cell’s machinery reads to produce specific proteins.
• DNA maintenance involves protecting against, and accurately repairing, damage to genetic material and the molecules binding to it.
• If the protein is damaged, the cell uses mechanisms involving special proteins that either attempt to fix the broken protein or send it off for recycling.

Aging disrupts a delicate biological network

• The cross-talk between the components inside cells, cells as a whole, organs and the environment is a complex and ever-changing network of information.
• For an organ to work well, the majority of the cells that make it up need to function well.
• Aging can lead to dysfunction at any of these levels, from the sub-cellular to the organismal.

Anti-aging interventions

• In fact, this is how the most successful anti-aging interventions work.
• There is no silver bullet to stop aging, but certain interventions do seem to slow aging in the laboratory.
• One of the best studied interventions is caloric restriction, which involves reducing the amount of calories an animal would normally eat without depriving them of necessary nutrients.
• However, researching interventions that target multiple important cellular processes simultaneously could help improve and maintain health for a greater portion of life.

• Indeed, the human microbiota – the natural bacteria inside the human body – use “quorum sensing” molecules to organise themselves and communicate with their human host.
• Recent research has shown that artificial bacteria, also called “synthetic probiotics”, could offer a promising new approach to treating gut-brain axis disorders.
• These artificial bacteria would use molecular communication, as it occurs naturally in living organisms, but here as a bio-inspired communication paradigm that uses molecules to transfer information.

What are artificial bacteria?

• The active use of artificial bacteria in the treatment of gut-brain axis-related disorders is projected to make significant breakthroughs.
• For example, by developing artificial bacteria to produce antimicrobial peptides, we can target and kill harmful bacteria with greater precision, avoiding the development of antibiotic resistance.
• The development of intestinal biosensors and artificial bacteria to detect disease-related biomarkers enables using them as diagnostic tools.

How to develop artificial bacteria?

• In the context of molecular communication, artificial bacteria refers to the development of engineered bacteria that can communicate with each other and human cells at the molecular level.
• This envisioned organism is nothing but a network of systems transmitting and receiving, or, in engineering speak, “transceiving” molecules at the microscale or the nanoscale.
• This bacteria-based transceiver can send and receive molecular signals inside the human body to further sense and control biological processes in real time.
• As stated before, envisioned artificial bacteria is a perfect candidate for biomedical applications of nano-communication networks such as diagnosis and treatment of diseases, health monitoring, drug delivery, and bio-hybrid implants.