continued – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Today, Lyft announced that it’s now providing over one million rides per day. The company announced the milestone in a blog post , which highlighted some of its other achievements as well. Lyft noted that for the last four years, it has shown 100 percent year over year growth and it has launched in 160 new cities so far this year. That brings the company’s reach to 360 communities and 80 percent of the US population. While the continued growth shows Lyft is holding its own, it still has a long way to go before it catches up with Uber. Founded three years before Lyft, Uber reached the one million rides per day mark in 2014 and as of a year ago was giving an average of 5.5 million rides a day. Uber just recently surpassed its five billionth ride . But Uber has taken a hit recently. Business Insider reported last month that Uber’s market share fell from 84 percent earlier this year to 77 percent by the end of May and Lyft saw a substantial jump in activations in the week after the #DeleteUber campaign . Lyft has continued to adjust its service in order to make its ride-sharing more convenient for customers. And like its rival , Lyft is also working on self-driving cars . The company said in a post, “Since day one, we’ve worked to embed hospitality in everything we do. As more and more people choose Lyft and we continue to grow, we’ll remain focused on providing the best experience to our passengers and drivers.” Source: Lyft

More:
Lyft reaches one million rides per day but is still well behind Uber

As predicted , it happened: On October 28th, Chinese oncologists at Sichuan University were the first in the world to insert CRISPR-modified cells into a patient suffering from an aggressive form of lung cancer, according to Nature . The journal reports that this first round of treatment in a safety trial went well enough to warrant a second injection of the Cas9-edited cells, and that nine more people will undergo the treatments in the future. From there, the patients will be monitored for at least six months, if not longer, to “determine whether the injections are causing serious adverse effects.” The idea behind the continued monitoring is to ensure that the edited cells act as they should. That is, that their (now deactivated) PD-1 proteins no longer halt a cell’s immune response and let cancer spread. “The hope is, without PD-1, the edited cells will attack and defeat the cancer, ” Nature wrote. This might not be the silver bullet against cancer, though. Naiyer Rizvi from Columbia University’s Medical Center posits that the gene editing process could encounter a roadblock because it’s a complex procedure and isn’t very scalable — especially compared to other methods like using antibodies. “Unless it shows a large gain in efficacy, it will be hard to justify moving forward, ” he said. Source: Nature

Originally posted here:
China completes first human trial with CRISPR-edited genes