Earlier research by Raichle, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Medicine, played a pivotal role in the discovery of brain regions now known as the efault mode network.
a biomedical engineer at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study. ot only is the number of subjects we get to study large,
and Genistein, the compound found in soybean which has been suggested to play a role in prevention of steroid-hormone related cancers, particularly breast cancer.
The tomatoes themselves could potentially become the source of increased nutritional or medicinal benefit.""Our study provides a general tool for producing valuable phenylpropanoid compounds on an industrial scale in plants,
"said Martin."Our work will be of interest to different research areas including fundamental research on plants, plant/microbe engineering, medicinal plant natural products,
""Medicinal plants with high value are often difficult to grow and manage, and need very long cultivation times to produce the desired compounds.
Our research provides a fantastic platform to quickly produce these valuable medicinal compounds in tomatoes,
which are the major groups of medicinal compounds from plants
#Scientists Produce Tomatoes with Industrial Quantities of Natural Compounds Given the opportunity to drink fifty bottles of wine or eat one tomato,
and Genistein, the compound found in soybean which has been suggested to play a role in prevention of steroid-hormone related cancers, particularly breast cancer.
The tomatoes themselves could potentially become the source of increased nutritional or medicinal benefit.""Our study provides a general tool for producing valuable phenylpropanoid compounds on an industrial scale in plants,
"said Martin."Our work will be of interest to different research areas including fundamental research on plants, plant/microbe engineering, medicinal plant natural products,
""Medicinal plants with high value are often difficult to grow and manage, and need very long cultivation times to produce the desired compounds.
Our research provides a fantastic platform to quickly produce these valuable medicinal compounds in tomatoes,
which are the major groups of medicinal compounds from plants
#Snake Venom-infused Hydrogel Stops Bleeding A nanofiber hydrogel infused with snake venom may be the best material to stop bleeding quickly, according to Rice university scientists.
The hydrogel called SB50 incorporates batroxobin, a venom produced by two species of South american pit viper.
and quickly turns into a gel that conforms to the site of a wound, keeping it closed,
The hydrogel may be most useful for surgeries particularly for patients who take anticoagulant drugs to thin their blood."
It has been used in various therapies as a way to remove excess fibrin proteins from the blood to treat thrombosis and as a topical hemostat.
This is important because surgical bleeding in patients taking heparin can be a serious problem. The use of batroxobin allows us to get around this problem
The substance used for medicine is produced by genetically modified bacteria and then purified, avoiding the risk of other contaminant toxins.
and injected at the site of a wound, where they reassemble themselves into a gel.
Tests showed the new material stopped a wound from bleeding in as little as six seconds, and further prodding of the wound minutes later did not reopen it.
The new work builds upon the Rice lab's extensive development of injectable hydrogel scaffolds that help wounds heal
""We think SB50 has great potential to stop surgical bleeding, particularly in difficult cases in
and respond to toxic injury in ways that are similar to kidney tubules in people.
and Women Hospital in Boston and is now an assistant professor of medicine in the nephrology division at the University of Washington. nswering this question was important for understanding the potential of mini-kidneys for clinical kidney regeneration and drug discovery.
To re-create human disease, researchers used the gene-editing technique called CRISPR. They engineered mini-kidneys with genetic changes linked to two common kidney diseases:
polycystic kidney disease and glomerulonephritis. The organoids developed characteristics of these diseases. Those with mutations in polycystic kidney disease genes formed balloon-like, fluid-filled sacks, called cysts, from kidney tubules.
The organoids with mutations in podocalyxin, a gene linked to glomerulonephritis, lost connections between filtering cells. utation of a single gene results in changes kidney structures associated with human disease,
thereby allowing better understand of the disease and serving as models to develop therapeutic agents to treat these diseases,
says Joseph Bonventre, senior author and chief of the renal division at Brigham and Women Hospital. hese genetically engineered mini-kidneys,
Freedman says, ave taught us that human disease boils down to simple components that can be re-created in a petri dish.
This provides us with faster, better ways to perform linical trials in a dishto test drugs
and therapies that might work in humans. Genetically matched kidney organoids without disease-linked mutations showed no signs of either disease,
Freedman says. RISPR can be used to correct gene mutations, explained Freedman. ur findings suggest that gene correction using CRISPR may be a promising therapeutic strategy.
In the United states, costs for kidney disease are about 40 billion dollars per year. Kidney disease affects approximately 700 million people worldwide.
Twelve million patients have polycystic kidney disease and two million have complete kidney failure. Dialysis and kidney transplantation, the only options for patients in kidney failure, can cause harmful side effects and poor quality-of-life. s a result of this new technology,
we can now grow, on demand, new kidney tissue that is 100 percent immunocompatible with an individual own body,
"says Freedman. e have shown that these tissues can mimic both healthy and diseased kidneys, and that the organoids can survive in mice after being transplanted.
Traditional methods use methanol, a toxic solvent. Subcritical fluid technology uses water above its boiling point and below its critical temperature, under pressure.
a drug used to treat hepatitis C, while other individuals did not. A side effect of ribavirin is that it causes anemia--a condition characterized by a decrease in red blood cell levels--in approximately 8 to 10 percent of patients."
"A goal of our predictive model is to pinpoint specific regions in the red blood cell that might increase susceptibility to this side effect
microbiologists and infectious disease specialists led by Eric A. Franzosa of Harvard's School of Public health and the Massachusetts institute of technology's Broad Institute.
The ban, instated in 1985 in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, has long been criticized by members of the medical community
According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, men who have sex with men make up only 7%of the U s. male population,
Biochemical engineer Christina Smolke and colleagues had been working on the problem of synthesizing opioids and other plant-based medicines in the lab for about a decade.
the lab-based manufacturing approach wouldn't be vulnerable to weather and disease, the way poppy crops are--allowing millions of people around the world who do not have sufficient access to painkilling drugs to get the medications they need.
that it would require thousands of gallons of yeast to make a single dose of medicine."
would need to be addressed for engineered yeast to ever realize home-brew biosynthesis of medicinal opiates at meaningful yields."
While noting that the work will need still refinement before it becomes a public health threat, he marveled at how quickly developments had been unfolding in bioengineering--for morphine synthesis
Pollock became the first subject in a UCLA experiment that set out to meld electrical stimulation therapy with a robotic exoskeleton that effectively walks for paralyzed patients.
to help those with spinal cord injuries learn to walk again. After a fall out of a second-story window caused Pollock's catastrophic spinal cord injury in 2010,
physicians told him any return of sensation or function below his waist was out of the question. Pollock, who has been blind for 16 years,
Pollock's injury was broken so extensive bones had nicked and pierced his spinal cord in two places--that he was,
In the lab of V. Reggie Edgerton, professor of integrative biology and physiology, neurobiology and neurosurgery, Pollock had attached electrical patches to the skin over his spinal cord.
this week to the world largest international society of biomedical engineers, said the electrical stimulation to the spinal cord appears to reawaken neurons there.
"After the injury there a lot of functional capability that remains,"Edgerton said.""But it has to do some relearning"--a process that appears to be started jump by electrical stimulation,
Whether that process leads a paralyzed patient to walk again depends on the extent and location of his or her spinal cord injury
published this week by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, is UCLA research scientist Parag Gad.
and Dr. Daniel Lu, associate professor of neurosurgery at UCLA David Geffen School of medicine. In a study published by the same team this summer in the Journal of Neurotrauma,
while 20 took the Vitamin c supplements may also limit the uptake of its findings by public health officials,
As a result, these subjects were increased at risk of developing high blood pressure and suffering heart attacks and strokes.
The study's lead author, Caitlin Dow, said the findings were particularly important for people who cannot exercise because of injury or physical limitations."
"If we can improve different measures of risk for disease without changing weight, it takes a little bit of the pressure off some people,
While Vitamin c"certainly isn a new cure, "she added, "it important to know what other lifestyle changes we can offer people who can exercise."
The most common complaints with high doses of Vitamin c are diarrhea, nausea, abdominal cramps and other gastrointestinal disturbances.
which has not be replicated, has found that in postmenopausal women with diabetes, taking a daily 300-mg Vitamin c supplement was associated significantly with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease mortality.
High Vitamin c intakes also may contribute to the formation of kidney stones, especially in individuals with renal disorders i
#Cancer Tech: New Devices Could Speed up Treatment Treating cancer is sometimes a process of trial and error,
because any given drug or drug combination does not work the same for all patients.
while doctors seek the right chemicals to beat back a tumor. Now, two research teams say they have found ways to speed up the process by allowing doctors to try multiple treatments at once:
One is an implantable device, and the other is a special injection device. In Seattle, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center and the company Presage Biosciences designed a device called CIVO that includes up to eight needles arranged in an array.
The device can be used to inject multiple drugs into tumors that are close to the surface of a person's skin.
First, the needles are loaded with drugs, pressed into the tumor and then withdrawn, with each needle leaving behind a columnlike trail of a drug that spans the full depth of the tumor.
Then one to three days later, researchers can remove a piece of the tumor and examine the cells to see the effect of each drug
whether it killed the tumor cells, slowed their growth or had no effect. That analysis can tell doctors
whether a certain drug or set of drugs will be more effective.""Ordinarily, when I write a prescription,
I have no way to know if the cancer is resistant"to the drug that's being prescribed,
said Dr. James Olson, a pediatric oncologist at Fred Hutchinson and the senior author of the CIVO report, published today (April 22) in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Top 10 Cancer-Fighting Foods With CIVO, doctors"can compare drug A to drug B,
"Olson said. The device could also be a boon to drug development, as it allows for controlled experiments that don't require flooding a patient's system with experimental chemotherapy drugs,
he said. So far, the device has been tested on mice, 20 dogs and four human patients.
The four human patients all had lymphomas, which are cancers of the lymph system, and had enlarged lymph nodes.
The patients said they had very little pain with the injections, according to the report. Meanwhile, researchers at MIT have built a cylindrical device the size of a rice grain that is riddled with microscopic tubes.
Each tube can contain a different drug, and the device can carry up to 30 drugs, according to the researchers'report,
also published today in Science Translational Medicine. Unlike CIVO the cylinder is designed to be implanted into the tumor,
and then diffusion allows the drugs to move from the tubes into the surrounding cancerous tissue.
A biopsy of the tumor is taken a day or two later a doctor removes the cylinder
and a small amount of the cancer tissue around it. As with CIVO, the aim is to let doctors look at the cancerous tissue,
to see which drugs worked better or which ones didn't work at all.""It's a way to predict
whether the patient will respond to the drug or not,"said Robert Langer, a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering at MIT who is one of the senior authors on the report.
So far, the implant has been tested only in mice, so it will likely take longer than CIVO to get into clinical testing.
But the implant offers a way to attack cancers that are deeper in the body and thus less accessible to injections.
because doctors will know early on whether certain drugs will work for a given patient. That would make it less likely that patients would have to endure ineffective chemo treatments with all of their associated side effects
because then doctors could make him or her comfortable, and the patient would avoid enduring the side effects of drugs that wouldn't end up treating the cancer."
"Some drugs make patients sick, "he said.""It would be great if we could do nothing more than prevent that."
and the MIT researchers'work was funded by the National Cancer Institute and Massachusetts-based biotech company Kibur Medical.
Health Threats Loom Over Survivors The aftermath of the Nepal earthquake brings a risk of disease outbreaks including measles and diarrheal diseases among the survivors,
Such a large congregation of people living out in the open can increase not only the risk of diseases spreading,
"If you have people living in very close proximity to each otherhen diseases can spread much faster,
Diarrheal and respiratory diseases are some of health experts'main concerns in the earthquake's aftermath."
"You're more at risk for something like a measles outbreak,"under these conditions, Tidey said.
said Dr. David Milzman, a professor of emergency medicine at Georgetown University School of medicine.""Even more than food, you need clean water,
and zinc supplements to help prevent diarrheal diseases. The rehydration salts are added to water and provide electrolytes to help people hydrate,
including the equipment needed to keep vaccines at the right temperature, UNICEF is working to make sure the country's vaccines are stored properly,
and assessing the population to see if people may need to be vaccinated to prevent measles spread,
Tidey said. One challenge after disasters like the Nepal earthquake is just providing people with the care they would normally need in their daily lives."
"You're going to have a lot of secondary spikes in illness, because people reliant on medical care can't get it,
"Milzman said. Still, several organizations are working to provide survivors with essential items and medical supplies.
The Red cross says it has 19,000 relief kits, which contain clothing, kitchen sets, personal hygiene items and more, available in Nepal.
And the World health organization has distributed medical supplies that can meet the needs of 40,000 people for three months,
#4d Implant Saves Babies with Breathing Problems Three baby boys with life-threatening breathing problems are alive today thanks to a 4d biomaterial,
a medical implant designed to change shape over time, that helped them keep breathing, researchers say."
"Today, we see a way to cure a disease that has been killing children for generations,
"said Dr. Glenn Green, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the University of Michigan's C. S. Mott Children's Hospital and the senior author of a new report on the boys'cases.
a research fellow and resident surgeon at the University of Michigan Health System, told Live Science.
The researchers made the implants using a 3d printer. Three-dimensional printers can create items from a wide variety of materials:
Advances in 3d printing have enabled the rapid production of medical devices that are customized for individual patients, such as hearing aids, dental implants and prosthetic hands.
However, devices made of rigid materials are often unsuitable for young patients who can quickly outgrow the implants.
The three infant boys who were implanted with the new device all had the same life-threatening condition a severe form of a disease called tracheobronchomalacia,
The disease causes the windpipe to regularly collapse preventing normal breathing. There was no cure, and at the time these children received their implants,
their life expectancies were estimated at days to weeks, Green said.""It is hard to convey how very sick these children were said,
"Green. All three boys had been in the intensive care unit for months. During that time, to stay alive,
when the doctors implanted the new device. Gionfriddo had turned blue when he was a newborn
a biomedical engineer at the University of Michigan, told Live Science.""This is very important for quality and design control,
"This is the first time 3d printing has been used to create a medical implant for treating a life-threatening disease,
narcotics or paralytics to keep them breathing.""Holidays are spent not in the hospital anymore, "Green said."
"Instead of lying flat on their backs for weeks on end, these children are learning to sit and stand and run.""
and their windpipes eventually will have no signs of the disease that nearly killed them as newborns.
doctors told us he may not make it out,"Kaiba's mom, April Gionfriddo, said in a statement."
"The doctors received emergency clearance from the FDA to perform these procedures as a last resort. The researchers are now pursuing a clinical trial for the 4d biomaterials for patients with less severe forms of tracheobronchomalacia."
The scientists detailed their findings online today (April 29) in the journal Science Translational Medicine e
#Simple Chemical Stops Prion Disease Mad cow, scrapie and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease are all diseases of the brain that debilitate before they kill,
and have no cure, or even many good treatment options beyond supportive care. But now, researchers in Switzerland say it's possible to block the misfolded proteins called prions that cause these diseases,
by using a compound that biologists have used to track other molecules. Prions are a distinct type of protein they can self-replicate,
said Adriano Aguzzi, professor of neuropathology at the University of Zurich, who led the study.
and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD) affects people. In the new study, Aguzzi's team used chemicals called luminescent conjugated polythiophenes,
The team first infected mice with a prion disease, then injected them with polythiophenes. They found that some polythiophenes extended the mice's survival by more than 80 percent,
This meant some mice survived up to 140 days after infection if they got the polythiophene before being infected with prions,
and give the brain the"spongy"appearance that is characteristic of prion diseases (the diseases are called formally transmissible spongiform encephalopathies).
whether polythiophenes could be given safely to people their toxicity is known not yet, and even further away are tests studying
However, the new findings show that there's a pathway to making molecules that could stop the diseases prions cause
They said that the antibodies used in the original study were not specific, meaning that they reacted to other proteins in the blood besides irisin.
"said study researcher Bruce M. Spiegelman, a professor of cell biology and medicine at Harvard Medical school.
it can help us to design therapeutics, and learn how effective our exercise or physical therapy programs are. o
If you've lost a healthy bone to an accident or illness, or if you were born with bones that aren't the right shape,
what it sees as a foreign object, leading to infections or defective transplants after these operations.
the late American film critic who lost his jawbone to cancer, is autograft. This is basically a euphemism for cutting a piece of bone out of one part of the body
Though it is surgeons'current best option, it still isn't that great. The surgery is invasive and destructive.
It can leave patients with a whole host of new issues, including the need for multiple surgeries.
Roger Ebert because doctors cut bone out of his hip and shoulder, suffered a limp for the rest of his life.
And with children who need the procedure, autografts are an even worse option; there's often quite simply not enough bone to go around.
One emerging technology for skeletal reconstruction is 3d printed synthetic implants made to match the anatomical shape of a patient's defects,
Others are developing stem-cell therapies, such as those from Stempeutics, Novadip or Bonus Biogroup. In this method
This is an implant that the patient's body hopefully won't reject because it's made from his or her own cells.
we might also adapt cells to groundbreaking new uses in other realms of medicine, or even entirely different fields, such as architecture, art and fashion.
problem-prone bone transplants are statistics from the past. Countless patients, present and future, hope so too o
#Another Fatal Brain Disease May Come from the Spread of'Prion'Proteins A rare and fatal brain disorder called multiple system atrophy (MSA) may be caused by a newly discovered prion, a protein similar to the ones
a progressive disorder that causes symptoms similar to Parkinson's disease and has no cure. What's more, the researchers say that the prion they believe causes MSA,
Eventually, the buildup of misfolded proteins can cause lesions to form in the brain, leading to disease."
Because prion diseases can be transmitted through certain types of contact with infected tissue, the findings suggest a potential concern for doctors
and researchers who work with tissue from MSA patients, the researchers said. 10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain A new prion Patients with MSA can experience tremors,
The disease is rare: About three out of 100,000 Americans over age 50 are diagnosed with MSA yearly.
The researchers found that the injections caused the mice to develop progressive neurological disease within about four months,
"We conclude that MSA is a transmissible human neurodegenerative disease caused by alpha-synuclein prions,
when instruments used during brain surgery are cleaned without using certain methods. This is because traditional disinfection methods don't work to get rid of prions.
Although it's not clear if MSA could also be transmitted this way, the researchers said that doctors
and scientists should adopt more-stringent safety protocols when working with tissue from MSA patients,
and even other similar diseases, such as Parkinson's.""We do not yet know whether or not MSA prions exhibit the same ability to stick to surgical instruments,
we encourage a cautious approach to sterilizing instruments used on MSA patients to minimize potential public health concerns."
and that there is no evidence that MSA spreads in the way that other prion diseases do.
Dr. Valerie Sim, of the Centre for Prions and Protein Folding Diseases at the University of Alberta in Canada, said that the traditional definition of a prion is an infectious protein that can transmit disease to another host.
because brain tissue from MSA patients did not cause disease in normal mice. Rather brain tissue from MSA patients caused disease only in mice that were engineered genetically to have a mutant alpha-synuclein protein.
In contrast,"true"prions can cause disease in normal mice, Sim said.)""The problem with branding something a prion is it induces fear,
because people have heard of it as a scary transmissible disease, "Sim said. But the new study,
"if anything, shows MSA is not easily transmissible, "she said. Still, the new findings are important to consider in research and treatment of MSA,
a polymath who wrote about literature, science, philosophy, religion, history and medicine, Clarke said.""The 13th-century manuscript may have been written by Bar Hebraeus himself,
"and refers to its ability to bore through a person's intestines and into the liver and other organs, causing ulcers, internal bleeding and chronic diarrhea.
Doctors have only one antibiotic that can treat people with E. histolytica infections, and they fear the parasite will soon develop resistance to it.
"said Dr. William Petri, an expert on parasitic infections and chief of the Division of Infectious diseases & International Health at the University of Virginia.
But a chance meeting between Petri and a bladder cancer expert, Dr. Dan Theodorescu, who is director of the University of Colorado Cancer Center,
or more effective in killing the cancer. Petri merely substituted E. histolytica for a drug.
"This could be the plan B targeting the human genes that enable the parasite to cause disease,
and that this could have a broad impact on the field of infectious diseases. The finding was published today (Sept. 8) in the journal Scientific Reports.
or water contaminated with its cysts. The ameba passes into the environment via feces and can survive outside the human body for several weeks in this protective cyst form.
E. histolytica infection is endemic in regions with poor sanitation and improving sanitation has been the primary means to stop infections,
said Chelsea Marie, a postdoctoral fellow in Petri's lab and first author on the report.
The sole antibiotic that is effective in killing E. histolytica is metronidazole, which many patients find hard to tolerate, because of its side effects.
represents an entirely new approach in thwarting E. histolytica infection, Marie said. In the lab, Marie reversed the experiment
challenges lie ahead in developing medicine for use in humans, she said.""The challenge with developing drugs that target ion channels"such as potassium channels is that these channels are found all over the body,
and could be targeted specifically to prevent cell death during ameba infection, "she said.""This approach also could be informative for colon cancer chemotherapy,
"What's an ameba have to do with cancer, after all?""Theodorescu said. But recently the two were working together, on a hiring committee,
when blocked, would make cells resistant to the infection. He had the cells ready to go.
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