Robocop Ford is developing a robot police car 01-31

robocop

Ford is developing a robot police car to catch speeding drivers and slap them with fines. 

The car giant has been issued with a patent for the artificial intelligence tech that will catch motorists breaking road laws.

The sketches filed with the US Patent & Trademark Office even show the sneaky Robocop hiding behind a tree.

Cameras and wireless sensors will allow it to track cars and connect over wifi to let them know they've broken the law.

The regular car would then message back revealing if it was in driverless mode - or with the driving licence photo of the person in control.

Robocop could then issue a warning or fine remotely.

The robotic cop car will be fitted with cameras and wifi allowing it to be used as a remote surveillance device - or to call in back up.

And the patent reveals it can even drive itself to hunt down rogue motorists - or be used with an officer inside.

The Ford patent said: "While autonomous vehicles can and will be programmed to obey traffic laws, a human driver can override that programming to control and operate the vehicle at any time.

"When a vehicle is under control of a human driver there is a possibility of violation of traffic laws. Thus, there will still be a need to police traffic.

"An autonomous police vehicle may enforce traffic laws by identifying violators, pulling over the offending vehicle, capturing an image of the licence plate of the offending vehicle, and determining whether to issue a warning or a ticket.

“Autonomous police vehicle may be trained or otherwise programmed using machine learning tools – deep neural networks – to find good hiding spots to catch violators of traffic laws.”

The futuristic tech is still some way off but the very fact Ford has filed a patent means it's on their radar.

It mimics the sci-fi cop cars seen in Sylvester Stallone's 1993 cult classic Demolition Man - plus the iconic 80s action star Robocop.

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Computational astrophysics team uncloaks magnetic fields of cosmic events 01-31

The development of ultra-intense lasers delivering the same power as the entire U.S. power grid has enabled the study of cosmic phenomena such as supernovae and black holes in earthbound laboratories. Now, a new method developed by computational astrophysicists at the University of Chicago allows scientists to analyze a key characteristic of these events: their powerful and complex magnetic fields.

In the field of high-energy density physics, or HEDP, scientists study a wide range of astrophysical objects—stars, supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies and galaxy clusters—with laboratory experiments as small as a penny and lasting only a few billionths of a second. By focusing powerful lasers on a carefully designed target, researchers can produce plasmas that reproduce conditions observed by astronomers in our sun and distant galaxies.

Planning these complex and expensive experiments requires large-scale, high-fidelity computer simulation beforehand. Since 2012, the Flash Center for Computational Science of the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at UChicago has provided the leading open computer code, called FLASH, for these HEDP simulations, enabling researchers to fine-tune experiments and develop analysis methods before execution at sites such as the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or the OMEGA Laser Facility in Rochester, N.Y.

"As soon as FLASH became available, there was kind of a stampede to use it to design experiments," said Petros Tzeferacos, research assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics and associate director of the Flash Center.

During these experiments, laser probe beams can provide researchers with information about the density and temperature of the plasma. But a key measurement, the magnetic field, has remained elusive. To try and tease out magnetic field measurements from extreme plasma conditions, scientists at MIT developed an experimental diagnostic technique that uses charged particles instead, called proton radiography.

In a new paper for the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, Flash Center scientists Carlo Graziani, Donald Lamb and Tzeferacos, with MIT's Chikang Li, describe a new method for acquiring quantitative, high-resolution information about these magnetic fields. Their discovery, refined using FLASH simulations and real experimental results, opens new doors for understanding cosmic phenomena.

"We chose to go after experiments motivated by astrophysics where magnetic fields were important," said Lamb, the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Astronomy & Astrophysics and director of the Flash Center. "The creation of the code plus the need to try to figure out how to understand what magnetic fields are created caused us to build this software, that can for the first time quantitatively reconstruct the shape and strength of the magnetic field."

Skyrocketing experiments

In proton radiography, energetic protons are shot through the magnetized plasma towards a detector on the other side. As the protons pass through the magnetic field, they are deflected from their path, forming a complex pattern on the detector. These patterns were difficult to interpret, and previous methods could only make general statements about the field's properties.

"Magnetic fields play important roles in essentially almost every astrophysical phenomena. If you aren't able to actually look at what's happening, or study them, you're missing a key part of almost every astrophysical object or process that you're interested in," said Tzeferacos.

By conducting simulated experiments with known magnetic fields, the Flash Center team constructed an algorithm that can reconstruct the field from the proton radiograph pattern. Once calibrated computationally, the method was applied to experimental data collected at laser facilities, revealing new insights about astrophysical events.

The combination of the FLASH code, the development of the proton radiography diagnostic, and the ability to reconstruct magnetic fields from the experimental data, are revolutionizing laboratory plasma astrophysics and HEDP. "The availability of these tools has caused the number of HEDP experiments that study magnetic fields to skyrocket," said Lamb.

The new software for magnetic field reconstruction, called PRaLine, will be shared with the community both as part of the next FLASH code release and as a separate component available on GitHub. Lamb and Tzeferacos said they expect it to be used for studying many astrophysics topics, such as the annihilation of magnetic fields in the solar corona; astrophysical jets produced by young stellar objects, the Crab Nebula pulsar, and the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies; and the amplification of magnetic fields and acceleration of cosmic rays by shocks in supernova remnants.

"The types of experiments HEDP scientists perform now are very diverse," said Tzeferacos. "FLASH contributed to this diversity, because it enables you to think outside the box, try different simulations of different configurations, and see what plasma conditions you are able to achieve."

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How to Build an Employee Experience That Rivals Your Customer Experience 01-29

Image credit :  Shyam's Imagination Library.

The marketing landscape is evolving rapidly. Hardly breaking news. There are new companies and
products constantly popping up that enable more efficient and effective work across all channels. The teams that achieve the most success are the ones that are constantly up-to-date with these new tools.

Finding new products is also a lot easier today than it was in the past. Today, there are far more thought leaders, newsletters, and blogs sharing the latest trends and ways in which companies are taking advantage of them.

Moving forward, the landscape is going to continue to morph and expand, which is truly saying something when you consider the number of martech options that were available in 2017 as per Scott Brinker's infamous chart. And if you can't read it here, and who can blame if you can't, you can see the full version here.

Here are 5 ways that tech is going to change marketing in 2018 that you should be on the lookout for:

1. It Will Be Easier To Find Customers

There are inbound leads, like site visitors, and there are also outbound leads, like a group of Sales VPs that get sent an email. Tech is making it easier to find and sell to both of these groups.
For inbound, technology has enabled marketing teams to find out more about their website visitors. Companies can run reverse IP lookups to match a visitor with the company they work for. Different services are also making it easier to capture emails. Emails are more valuable than ever because enrichment products can tell you everything about a person once given an email. Plus, that data is becoming more accurate as time goes on.

Outbound leads have also become easier to find. Marketing teams can take advantage of lead generation services that offer unique targeting of
audiences. The customization that companies will be able to do to gather leads, and the quality of those leads, will also increase in 2018. This is, consequently, enabling companies to spend more time figuring out who their target audience is, instead of actually gathering their information.

2. There Is Better Customization

Once you know the visitor's title, location, company and/or industry, anything about their site experience can be changed. This could be the images they are presented, the customers or testimonials they see for social proof, and even the messages sent by a chatbot. This customization, and the functionality for it, is going to improve dramatically in 2018.

The early movers are also going to get a huge bump in conversion rates. They will be able to target messaging and pictures to fit the psyche of each company and visitor. Instead of needing a catch-all site, companies can segment their audiences. Mark Rabe, SVP of Art Concrete Solutions told me, “We have 2 very different customers. One group are potential franchisees for our concrete repair business. The other group are consumers who might purchase our DIY concrete repair bucket. We have to segment our visitors and show them relevant info or they’re gone fast. We can display the best option given data we have on the visitor. That, inevitably, will increase conversion rates.”

3. There Will Be A Greater Push For Immediate Sales

People have many distractions today, and that will only increase in 2018. They are constantly flooded with emails and content, as well as spend a significant amount of time on social media. Therefore, in 2018, marketing is going to move further towards quick sales. E-commerce sites are trying to capture the sale upon a user’s first visit. They are already offering discounts for immediate buys and will likely continue to do so. Email follow-ups about open online orders will also continue to emerge as the norm.

Implementations of blockchain technologies, like PureGold’s new gold-backed payment gateway, will enhance consumer access to e-commerce using cryptocurrency. Being a brick and mortar company with gold ATMs, gold minting factories and storefronts, PureGold also offers many offline ways to provide instant transactions for consumers. Whether mobile, desktop, or in person, maximum flexibility is offered.

The recent emergence of chat-bots like Drift and Intercom enable a site visitor to schedule a demo with a sales rep in seconds. Being able to do so prevents the need for back and forth email exchange. It also takes advantage of the currently attentive visitor before they become distracted or overwhelmed with other things.

4. No Excuse For Poor Web Design

Engineers have become better and there are new tools enabling novices to design quality-looking sites. In just a few clicks, developers and designers can now easily build content-ready, production sites for their products. Landing pages are critical components of a brand’s image and will largely determine the effectiveness of a company’s funnel. This trend is putting a greater emphasis on people that can design, build front-end sites, or even navigate a CMS like WordPress.

5. There Will Be A Greater Emphasis On Data (if that's even possible)

Marketers can look at more metrics than ever. These include open rates, time spent on pages, and how people interact with a page. This data can drive better decisions and keep marketing people from guessing. There has even been an emergence of machine learning in marketing. Machine learning can qualify leads and determine customer projected value.

Companies like Repux are using data and artificial intelligence to help businesses maximize their potential. On the Repux platform, businesses can sell anonymized data to developers for use with machine learning algorithms. Once optimized as intelligent applications, the applications can be sold back to businesses for better business decision making.

Larger brands will likely put more resources towards their branding, images and messaging because they can. Smaller brands do not have the budget or time for that. In the past, this meant that they were less effective. Now, though, smaller brands can test a handful of approaches quickly.
Then, they can use that data to inform their decisions.

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Flip the Switch 01-29

Changes in fat metabolism may promote prostate cancer metastasis...

Prostate tumors tend to be what scientists call “indolent”—so slow-growing and self-contained that many affected men die with prostate cancer, not of it. But for the percentage of men whose prostate tumors metastasize, the disease is invariably fatal.

In a set of papers published in the journals Nature Genetics and Nature Communications, researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have shed new light on the genetic mechanisms that promote metastasis in a mouse model and implicated the typical Western high-fat diet as a key environmental factor driving metastasis.

“Although it is widely postulated that a Western diet can promote prostate cancer progression, direct evidence supporting a strong association between dietary lipids and prostate cancer has been lacking,” said first author Ming Chen, HMS research fellow in medicine in the laboratory of Pier Paolo Pandolfi, the HMS George C. Reisman Professor of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess.

Epidemiological data links dietary fats (and obesity) to many types of cancer, and rates of cancer deaths from metastatic cancers including prostate cancer are much higher in the United States than in nations where lower fat diets are more common. While prostate cancer affects about 10 percent of men in Asian nations, that rate climbs to about 40 percent when they immigrate to the U.S., mirroring the rates among the native-born U.S. population. That points to an environmental culprit that may work in concert with genetic factors to drive this aggressive, fatal disease.

“The progression of cancer to the metastatic stage represents a pivotal event that influences patient outcomes and the therapeutic options available to patients,” said senior author Pandolfi, who is also director of the Cancer Center and the Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess. “Our data provide a strong genetic foundation for the mechanisms underlying metastatic progression, and we also demonstrated how environmental factors can boost these mechanisms to promote progression from primary to advanced metastatic cancer.”

The tumor suppressor gene PTEN is known to play a major role in prostate cancer; its partial loss occurs in up to 70 percent of primary prostate tumors. Its complete loss is linked to metastatic prostate disease, but animal studies suggest the loss of PTEN alone is not enough to trigger progression. Pandolfi and colleagues sought to identify an additional tumor suppressing gene or pathway that may work in concert with PTEN to drive metastasis.

Looking at recent genomic data, Pandolfi and colleagues noticed that another tumor suppressor gene, PML, tended to be present in localized (nonmetastatic) prostate tumors but was absent in about a third of metastatic prostate tumors. Moreover, about 20 percent of metastatic prostate tumors lack both PML and PTEN.

When they compared the two types of tumor—the localized ones lacking only the PTEN gene versus the metastatic tumors lacking both genes—the researchers found that the metastatic tumors produced huge amounts of lipids, or fats. In tumors that lacked both PTEN and PML tumor suppressing genes, the cells’ fat-production machinery was running amok.

“It was as though we’d found the tumors’ lipogenic, or fat production, switch,” said Pandolfi. “The implication is, if there’s a switch, maybe there’s a drug with which we can block this switch and maybe we can prevent metastasis or even cure metastatic prostate cancer,” he added.

Such a drug already exists. Discovered in 2009, a molecule named “fatostatin” is currently being investigated for the treatment of obesity. Pandolfi and colleagues tested the molecule in lab mice.

“The obesity drug blocked the lipogenesis fantastically, and the tumors regressed and didn’t metastasize.”

In addition to opening the door to new treatment for metastatic prostate cancer, these findings also helped solve a long-standing scientific puzzle. For years, researchers had difficulty modeling metastatic prostate cancer in mice, making it hard to study the disease in the lab. Some speculated that mice simply weren’t a good model for this particular disease. But the lipid-production finding raised a question in Pandolfi’s mind.

“I asked, ‘What do our mice eat?’” Pandolfi recalled.

It turned out the mice ate a vegetable-based chow, essentially a low-fat vegan diet that bore little resemblance to that of the average American male. When Pandolfi and colleagues increased the levels of saturated fats, the kind found in fast food cheeseburgers and fries, in the animals’ diet, the mice developed aggressive, metastatic tumors.

The findings could result in more accurate and predictive mouse models for metastatic prostate cancer, which in turn could accelerate discovery of better therapies for the disease. Additionally, physicians could soon be able to screen their early-stage prostate cancer patients for those whose tumors lack both PTEN and PML tumor suppressing genes, putting them at increased risk for progressing to metastatic disease. These patients may be helped by starving these tumors of fat either with the fat-blocking drug or through diet.

“The data are tremendously actionable, and they surely will convince you to change your lifestyle,” Pandolfi said.

This work was supported by a U.S. Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Research Program Postdoctoral Training Award and the National Institutes of Health (grants R01 CA142784, R35 CA197529, P01 CA120964 and R35 CA197459.)

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Wearable IoT Neuroflow for treating the PTSD patients. 01-29

A Veteran Entrepreneur

If you can lead soldiers into battle, you can cold call 140 investors.

Neuroflow founder Chris Molaro, WG’17, is a veteran, and he’s seen the effects of PTSD. As he reminds us, “20 veterans a day commit suicide, on average.”

Neuroflow is his way of fighting back. Neuroflow uses wearables to measure the physical effects of stress, and quantify them in a way that is useful to therapists who are treating people for severe anxiety and stress. For the first time, therapists can use quantifiable measurements to see if their therapies are working—and adjust for maximum effectiveness.
The Importance of Persistence

Neuroflow is also a story of persistence. Chris started working with his cofounder, Adam Pardes, who is an engineering PhD candidate at Penn, on a project for the Y-Prize, which asks students to commercialize Penn technologies. In Chris’s words, they “lost miserably.” But the idea was what set them on the path to Neuroflow.

They won the Innovation Prize in the Penn Wharton Startup Challenge, and got a lot of other support from across the University. Chris says that, “before raising the investment capital we won a total of $140,000 in business plan competitions, thanks in large part to Wharton.”
But when they set out to raise serious money, it took time, and a lot of persistence. They ultimately raised $1.25 million. Doing so took them months of conversations, and talks with 140 investors. This, as Karl points out, isn’t especially uncommon—so for you entrepreneurs out there who are looking to raise funds, get ready to start calling.
Our Own Battle

For Chris, he sees Neuroflow as “our own war zone, our own battle, and we have to figure out a way. And we’ve got great men and women to our left and right in the office, and we’ll figure it out.”

What is Neuroflow, 

Originally appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, written by Anna Orso.

When Clark Griswold tried to blanket his home in Christmas lights, an electrical glitch rendered the facade completely dark. But it was his gruff in-laws who added insult to injury. “Beautiful, Clark,” said one. The other called it a “silly waste of resources.”

This is a scene from the 1989 classic National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. But you don’t need to summon Chevy Chase to feel some sort of way at the mere mention of your in-laws.

Finances, gift-giving and, yes, difficult family members all contribute to higher levels of stress during the holiday season. Now, thanks to a Philadelphia startup, there’s an app for that.

A Wharton grad and a Penn Ph.D. student last year founded NeuroFlow, a startup that’s developed software to interpret brain waves and heart rate to measure relaxation and help patients and clinicians visualize how external stressors trigger physical reactions.

The software shows that even the mention of one’s in-laws can set off in some people a physiological response – that gut-level feeling of uneasiness – and can then illustrate exactly how meditation and mindfulness techniques impact the body and brain. But the tool, now in beta and used by a handful of mental health professionals, has applications far beyond the holiday season. Its founders are planning a full launch in February, and believe their platform will ultimately help de-stigmatize mental illness by helping people see it, rather than just feel it.

A lofty goal for a company with eight full-time employees run by a couple of twentysomethings.

“We know it’s a stressful time of year, yet what we found is that the conversation around mental health, around anxiety, around stress is such that there’s this negative stigma,” said CEO and co-founder Christopher Molaro, 29, an Iraq war veteran and Wharton MBA who founded the company in large part to address post-traumatic stress disorder. “I think it’s because if you can’t understand something, measure something, see something, you just push it aside as something that doesn’t exist.”

NeuroFlow is a phone app and cloud-based program that, through bluetooth technology, interprets data to offer digestible information about how relaxed a person is. That data comes from a heart-rate monitor and an EEG (electroencephalogram), in this case a headset, which measures electrical activity in the brain.

The idea is that clinicians would be able to visualize exactly when a patient becomes more stressed, and can then watch in real-time as relaxation techniques like breath monitoring start to actually work. That visualization helps people see mental illness in the same way they can see a broken arm on an X-ray.
Sound complicated? I tried it out this week in a conference room at Benjamin’s Desk, the Center City coworking space where NeuroFlow is based.

Adam Pardes, the company’s 26-year-old co-founder and chief operating officer, helped me put on a headset (similar to the one in the photo above) that retails for about $250. The NeuroFlow program recognized I was wearing the headset, and the line that charted my score on the “relaxation index” was sky high.

Safe to say this reporter is not very relaxed. NeuroFlow confirmed it.

But with the help of a breathing guide that acts a bit like a metronome, I watched the line go down. After just about a minute, I’d gotten into the “relaxation zone,” and I was able to see it.

Other variances in anxiety and stress can be seen with NeuroFlow’s YouTube integration, a tool that allows therapists to show a patient a video – say it’s of a car driving over a bridge for a person who fears that – to see the exact point when a patient’s body goes into anxiety mode.

Using the technology, a patient would also be able to gauge progress with a therapist over time. The tool isn’t meant to replace a mental health professional, though. Think of NeuroFlow more as a thermometer for mental health.

“Your body physiologically changes when you’re more stressed and more relaxed,” Molaro said. “The fact that we can measure and better understand means that you don’t have to be ashamed of it and can go seek help, whether using our platform or not.”

Molaro said NeuroFlow closed its first major funding round in October, raising $1.25 million in venture capital. It’s also supported in part by Penn, where the company is conducting some research through the school’s Neuroscience Initiative.

Sixteen clinicians across the country are currently using NeuroFlow in beta, and the full software will be available for purchase online for about $100 per month.

Molaro and Pardes, who has a background in bioengineering, see a host of applications for clinicians and patients down the line, from testing stress levels in soldiers to tracking mental health in professional athletes to managing that Griswold-level holiday stress.

“Twenty veterans a day killing themselves is unacceptable. Fourteen students at Penn killing themselves is unacceptable,” Molaro said. “My mom crying on Christmas because she’s anxious and stressed out is unacceptable. People deserve better.”

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An AI Bot Named Einstein Critiques Salesforce Execs Every Week 01-29

Imagine going to a staff meeting and being second-guessed by Einstein. Well, that’s what happens at Salesforce—sort of.

Chief executive Marc Benioff told Davos attendees on Thursday that, at a senior staff meeting every Monday for the last year, one seat has been occupied by the company’s “artificial intelligence” software, which is called Einstein.

“I ask Einstein, ‘I heard what everybody said but what do you actually think?'” Benioff said, according to a CNBC report.

Benioff explained that Einstein recently upset a European employee by saying “Well, I don’t think this executive is going to make their number, I’m so sorry,” before identifying the problems at hand.
While this early AI deployment is unusual, to say the least, it’s probably unsurprising that it’s happening at Salesforce.

The cloud software company has been very bullish on AI, having last year launched a $50 million fund to invest in startups that are deploying such technology.

Salesforce revealed Einstein’s existence a year and a half back, bringing together technologies it had recently acquired.

The company has been pitching the Einstein AI—which it originally wanted to call “Optimus Prime“—as a tool for things like identifying sales leads more quickly and efficiently. It is trying to encourage the functionality’s incorporation into a variety of business applications. 

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The Healing Power of Stem Cells 01-24

What Are Stem Cells?

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They are cells that maintain a state of “open-mindedness” thoughout the life of the individual from fetal life senescence, to enable them to participate in repair, replacement and regeneration of the tissue they happen to be in, in addition to affecting tissues in other parts of the body by migration and by producing growth factors and cytokines. They are regarded as undifferentiated and are found in different tissues of the body, throughout life. The early fetal stem cells are “pluripotent’ with a vast potential; while non-embryonic adult mesenchymal stem cells are “multipotent.” This means they are less versatile than those of the fetus, but non-the-less can turn into several different kinds of cells within any tissue type.

Where Are Stem Cells Found?

Undifferentiated, non-embryonic adult mesenchymal stem cells are found everywhere in the body, in all tissues, but especially in fat tissue, bone marrow and blood- in that order.  The stem cells found in blood and bone marrow are hematopoietic stem cells because, under normal circumstances, they are destined to form red blood cells (RBCs), white blood cells (WBCs), and platelets; and those stem cells that are found in fat (adipose) tissue, among fat cells, are called adipose stem cells.

GCSC&RMC uses adipose stem cells because they are approximately 2,500 times as abundant as hematopoietic stem cells, per a given mass of tissue. Furthermore, no organs are hurt or disturbed in the process of harvesting adipose tissue, which only requires local anesthesia.

How Are Stem Cells Used?

Stem cells have the potential to repair human tissue and certain internal organs by forming new cells and producing substances to regenerate cartilage, bone, ligaments, tendons, nerve, fat, muscle, and blood vessels. Stem cells are being investigated and researched as an innovative therapy option for more than 70 major diseases and conditions that affect millions of people worldwide. These include diabetes mellitus, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), spinal cord injuries, various eye conditions, and HIV/AIDS.

The GCSC&RMC Process

Gulf Coast Stem Cell & RMC has a specific SVF harvest and injection protocol. First, a couple of ounces of fat are harvested from the love handle areas of the back, under surgically sterile conditions and local anesthesia, by minimally-invasive mini-liposuction. This procedure lasts a mere 20 minutes; and this small amount of fat yields millions of stem cells (at least half a million per ml of fat). In fact, it is possible to obtain well over 50 million cells from a single harvest.

After the cells are harvested, the stem cells are separated from the fat cells and are ready for deployment within 90 minutes or less from harvest. They can then be injected into a vein to reach wider targets throughout the entire body, and directly into target areas like the spinal space, joints and specific tissues.

Orthopedic

Stem cell therapy is a minimally invasive, low-risk option that may help patients who suffer from the daily discomforts of orthopedic conditions such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, sports-related injuries, spine disease, and general problems with shoulders, elbows, hands/wrists, hips, knees, or ankles. Research indicates that most orthopedic issues are fundamentally caused by inflammatory, autoimmune, or degenerative processes. Stem cells have the potential to reduce discomfort by decreasing inflammation, modulating autoimmunity, and repairing or replacing bone, tendons, and ligaments that have deteriorated due to injury or a degenerative joint disease. This investigational therapy could benefit the near 350 million people worldwide who are afflicted by arthritis, about 50 million of whom live in the United States, including over a quarter million children.

Neurological

Over one billion people worldwide suffer from neurological diseases. In universities and medical research centers around the world, stem cells are being explored for their regenerative potential. We at GCSC&RMC have research protocols for many neurological conditions, including multiple sclerosis, peripheral neuropathy, Parkinson’s disease, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries, and more. Beyond their ability to become different kinds of cells, stem cells are able to cross the blood-brain barrier, aided by hygroscopic molecules like Mannitol. This potential for transmigration, or crossing the barrier, means that stem cells can reach broader areas of brain tissue that have been affected by injuries or degenerative diseases. This has been shown to be the case in a rat model. Subtle differences in brain function can affect mood, balance, thought processes, and other areas that have significant impacts on a patient’s overall quality of life.

Cardiac & Pulmonary Diseases

Cardiac disease is the most common killer in the United States. Every day, 2,200 people die from cardiovascular diseases—that’s 1 in every 3 deaths. Stem cell therapy has the potential to help with cardiac and pulmonary conditions such as a heart attacks, myocardial infarctions, congestive heart failure, ischemic heart disease, COPD, and pulmonary fibrosis. The purpose of our research protocols is to target inflammation, reducing it; regenerating cells lost in cardiac ischemia, replacing damaged or diseased heart-muscle cells, and promoting the development of new coronary artery branches. The latter can be effected through the production of substances like the angiogenesis factor. When an intravenous dose of SVF or stem cells is given, the infused molecules and cells pass through the heart to the vast capillary network of the lungs, where a significant proportion of the cells stay. There they participate in various repair processes, which, according to published results and our own, often improve gaseous exchange and may result clinical improvement.

Autoimmune Diseases

Autoimmune diseases happen when the body’s immune system turns against itself and starts mistakenly attacking healthy cells. Many disease processes are considered autoimmune, and many of those conditions have shown response to research protocols using stem cell therapy, including lupus, hepatitis, Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, myasthenia neuropathy, CIDP, and ulcerative colitis. Deploying stem cells in these diseases may reduce inflammation of affected organs and tissues, regenerate damaged cells and tissue, and help modulate the immune response by possibly block compliment reactions.

UroGenital & Skin

Intersticial Cystitis (IC) and Lichen Sclerosis are among the most distressing, chronic conditions that can afflict women and men, although they are much commoner in women. There are an estimated 108 million people suffering from lichen sclerosis around the world. When women are afflicted, the labia may fuse together, adding to the distress. Our research findings, as well as those of others in our group (CSN), indicate that SVF deployment may help both women and men who suffer with those conditions. Furthermore, according to our research findings, patients who had local injections of filtered fat (nanofat) into the labia and surrounding skin, in addition to the SVF  appeared to have better outcomes. Clearly, in those who benefit the stem cells as well as growth factors and cytokines re-direct the atrophic, inflammatory process towards healing and resolution.

Erectile Dysfunction may be a very distressing entity to those afflicted and the condition afflicts approximately 50% of men over 40, to some degree. Naturally the causes may be multifactorial, but research results indicate that combining pressure wave therapy with SVF may result in significant improvement in over 60-70% of men.  In those who benefit, stem cells may have the potential to stimulate the growth of the smooth muscle lining of vessels and improve endothelial function, repair and rejuvenate damaged and effete cells and boost blood flow to erectile tissues.

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