Nonfungible token (NFT) entrepreneur Wylie Aronow of Yuga Labs — the team behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and CryptoPunks — will be taking a leave of absence from the office to manage a host of heart failure symptoms. In a Jan. 28 Twitter post to his 144,900 followers, Aronow said the tough decision to step back came on the back of a heart failure diagnosis after experiencing a myriad of symptoms over the last few months. Some heavy news: a few days ago I was told by my doctor I have congestive heart failure. Symptoms started last year out …

Lifespan.io President and co-founder Keith Comito was into longevity before longevity was cool. “We started our nonprofit back in 2014,” Comito said. “Back then, few credible researchers would be caught dead saying they were working on aging. It was still kind of a scientific backwater. So, we wanted to emulate what the cancer research advocates did, starting in the ‘40s.” He said those early advocates identified the most credible research at the time and used “old-school” fundraising approaches like telethons to crowdfund for their work. They built a grassroots movement and grew their scientific expertise. Through their efforts, defeating cancer …

Smart contracts are self-executing lines of code that run atop blockchains and are triggered once a set of predetermined conditions are met. They are used to automate the execution of online agreements without the involvement of third parties. Today, they are used across many industries, including the healthcare industry. The healthcare sector stands to benefit a lot from the widespread implementation of these self-executing programs, especially when it comes to streamlining arduous manual processes, automating bureaucratic procedures and alleviating issues caused by human error. Today, many healthcare institutions rely on highly centralized conventional management systems to handle sensitive tasks such …

The nascent longevity industry focuses on the research and implementation of solutions and technologies to extend the lifespan of human beings — making people live healthier, longer lives. Longevity is not yet considered an official medical term, and aging is not officially considered a disease but a natural occurrence in every living thing. However, some biologists, researchers and practicing doctors believe this approach should change, and they are striving to discover the mechanisms of aging in humans. In doing so, they are creating age clocks by defining biomarkers for measuring biological age, exploring the best lifestyle habits and natural supplements, …

On Thursday, Dutch blockchain startup Triall announced that it partnered with American non-profit medical center Mayo Clinic to optimize clinical trial design and management of study data. Starting this September, Triall's eClinical platform will support a 2-year multi-center pulmonary arterial hypertension clinical trial that includes 10 research sites and more than 500+ patients across the U.S. The software will support activities such as data capture, document management, study monitoring, and consent. As told by Triall, the purpose of the collaboration is to demonstrate an immutable public ledger audit trail through its blockchain technology for boosting clinical trial integrity. Investigators, regulators, …

Expected to reach a market size of $128 billion by 2028, the longevity sector is no longer something that those outside the medical world can ignore. In the next few years, life-extending technologies and treatments for aging-related diseases will reach human trials. There is an exciting wave of development happening in research labs and technology centers across the globe, with more and more early adopters embarking on their longevity journeys. As I’ve remarked in my earlier article, the crypto community would do well to learn more and engage in the growing longevity field. Longevity not only incorporates disruptive technologies, such …

It’s predicted that nonfungible tokens (NFTs) will have a vast impact on society. Given this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the trillion-dollar healthcare sector has begun to explore NFTs tokens to advance medicine. It’s also important to point out that blockchain technology can play an increasingly important role within the healthcare sector. This was recently highlighted in a report from the European Union Blockchain Observatory, which specifically documents how blockchain applications can solve challenges facing the healthcare industry. For example, the paper notes that patient engagement and transparency of how data is stored, along with the effective distribution …

New technologies may have rapid, dramatic effects on society, but they may also spread slowly and subtly. Blockchain-powered decentralized science (DeSci) is taking off after some years of gestation. Its impact is being felt not only in the rarified confines of high-tech labs but more broadly in the business world as well. Psychedelics and longevity Paul Kohlhaas, co-founder and CEO of Molecule — a platform for biotech decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) founded in 2019 — spoke about pharmaceutical research and its funding on the Zima Red podcast in April. “We believe it could be way cheaper, if it was coordinated …

The EU Blockchain Observatory published its fifth report under the headline “Blockchain Applications in the Healthcare Sector.” The document highlights the importance of distributed ledger technology for the European healthcare sector, which faces a number of challenges on its route to the “Healthcare 4.0” revolution. The 66-page document was announced on the EU Blockchain Observatory's Twitter on April 11. Its authors take an optimistic perspective on the implementation of blockchain technology in healthcare, noting its compatibility with the core principles of “Healthcare 4.0”, such as interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, real-time capability, service orientation and modularity. Below are 7 key takeaways from …

The world is becoming more connected as cryptocurrency, blockchain, nonfungible token projects, the Metaverse and other online communities gain popularity. However, we’re also seeing rates of depression and feelings of isolation and loneliness skyrocket. This development is certainly not causal, but it is something to consider as younger generations become more involved in virtual spaces. The global COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated a national mental health crisis. Mental Health America reported that 47.1 million people in the U.S. are living with a mental health condition. That’s one in five Americans, folks. Unsettling as those figures may be, progress is being made …

As the first month of 2022 drew to a close, the internet was abuzz with trend predictions for the year ahead. Bloggers, Twitter influencers and established business moguls alike were, and still are, incredibly excited about the new opportunities afforded by an explosion of innovation in Web3. However, something you may have missed in scrolling pages of celebrity-backed NFT drops or speculations about the metaverse was the launch of a new company called Altos Labs, reportedly backed by Amazon’s former CEO Jeffrey Bezos. The language that followed the launch was largely typical of how many mainstream journalists talk about the …

On Jan. 30, the South China Morning Post reported that one of the largest Asian pharmaceutical companies, Zuellig, had launched a blockchain-based system to track the quality of COVID-19 vaccines. Called “eZTracker,” it allows any user to “instantly verify the provenance and authenticity” of vaccines by scanning the QR code on the package. Somewhat surprisingly, throughout the pandemic, there have not been many reports of blockchain-based products adopted by big pharma or global healthcare organizations to bolster the anti-COVID effort. Here is a rundown of the major cases of such adoption, along with possible reasons for the limited interest in …