#Environment not genes dictates human immune variation study finds A study of twins conducted by Stanford university School of medicine investigators shows that our environment more than our heredity plays the starring role in determining the state of our immune system the body's primary defense against disease.
if you sequence someone's genome you can tell what diseases they're going have 50 years later said Mark Davis Phd professor of microbiology and immunology and director of Stanford's Institute for Immunity Transplantation and Infection.
But while genomic variation clearly plays a key role in some diseases he said the immune system has to be tremendously adaptable
in order to cope with unpredictable episodes of infection injury and tumor formation. The immune system has to think on its feet said Davis senior author of the new study which will be published Jan 15 in Cell.
But what we found was that in most cases including the reaction to a standard influenza vaccine
. and is now a consulting professor of medicine at Stanford began curating a registry of twins for research purposes.
or toxic exposures vaccinations diet and dental hygiene--trumped heritable ones when it came to accounting for differences within a pair of twins.
Davis and his associates also observed considerable environmental influence over the quantities of antibodies produced in members of twin pairs who had been vaccinated for influenza in a separate Stanford investigation directed by study co-author Cornelia Dekker MD professor of pediatric infectious disease
and medical director of the Stanford-Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Vaccine Program. While many previous studies have suggested a powerful genetic component in vaccine responsiveness Davis noted that those studies typically were performed in very young children who had undergone not yet the decades of environmental exposure that appears to reshape the immune system over time.
In a striking example of the immune system's plasticity the Stanford scientists found that the presence
or absence of a single chronic viral infection could have a massive effect on the system's composition and responsiveness.
A healthy human immune system continually adapts to its encounters with hostile pathogens friendly gut microbes nutritional components
Other Stanford co-authors of the study are Atul Butte MD Phd associate professor of pediatrics (systems medicine) and of genetics;
The authors also found a possible link to cancer. In mice prone to develop benign skin tumors-papillomas-the activation of Fra-2 reduced skin tumor burden.
The authors demonstrate that Fra-2 induces premature differentiation of keratinocytes. An additional novelty is related to the regulation of the transcriptional activity of Fra-2. The work reveals that the activation of this transcription factor depends on chemical protein modifications
whether inhibition of Ezh2 may be a valuable therapeutic strategy for skin diseases related to keratinocyte differentiation defects s
major disease implications"Instead of asking,'How do we study the immune response of the brain?''''Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?'
'now we can approach this mechanistically. Because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,
Kipnis also saluted the"phenomenal"surgical skills of Igor Smirnov, a research associate in the Kipnis lab whose work was critical to the imaging success of the study.
Arraythe unexpected presence of the lymphatic vessels raises a tremendous number of questions that now need answers, both about the workings of the brain and the diseases that plague it.
take Alzheimer's disease.""In Alzheimer's, there are accumulations of big protein chunks in the brain, "Kipnis said."
And there's an enormous array of other neurological diseases, from autism to multiple sclerosis, that must be reconsidered in light of the presence of something science insisted did not exist t
remove contraceptive implants To address a global health challenge, a team of biomedical engineering undergraduates has developed a kit to teach front-line health care workers in developing countries how to implant contraceptives.
In developing regions where the economy is weak and medical services are limited, global health experts say as many as 200 million women want access to long-term,
reversible contraceptives to avoid unintended pregnancies and to help space out the births of their children.
One of the most convenient and effective options--a tiny implant that can delay conception for three to five years--is inserted into a woman's arm
Sometimes, the cylindrical toothpick-shaped implant may be inserted inadvertently into the woman's fat tissue instead of just under the outer skin layer.
and makes removal of the implant far more difficult. To help prevent such problems, a team of Johns hopkins university biomedical engineering undergraduates has developed a teaching set called the Contraceptive Implant Training Tool kit or CITT Kit, for short.
The medical simulator includes two training models: a stand-alone replica arm and a layered band that can be worn by health workers who act as"patients"during practice sessions."
"We've produced a kit that's designed to effectively teach lower-level health-care providers the proper way to insert
and remove these subdermal contraceptive implants, "said team leader Taylor Lam from Thousand Oaks, Calif,
The CITT Kit's components also feature landmarks that can help the students identify the correct placement site for a cylindrical implant
and easily remove an implant, a procedure that's considered to be more challenging than insertion of the contraceptive.
when they actually perform these procedures in a clinic, "said rising junior Miguel Sobral, a team member from Lisbon, Portugal.
the student inventors were advised by physician Ricky Lu, technical director for reproductive health and family planning at Jhpiego,
"These pods have embedded placebo implants to simulate a range of removal challenges, from easy pop outs to deeply located and adherent implants requiring additional skills to extract them.
This is critical to have in clinical training where removal cases for practice may be limited during a short training course."
Allen also is a lecturer in the School of medicine's Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics. Working with Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the students have obtained a provisional patent covering their invention.
which might give an impact on tyrosine kinase-targeted leukemia therapy, was found to be expressed in a leukemia cell line.
The function of the lncrna CCDC26 is understood not fully; however, researchers at Hiroshima University revealed the mechanisms by
The results provide new insights into leukemia recurrence and may help to develop new leukemia therapies.
Recent transcriptomic studies have revealed the existence of numerous RNAS that are relatively long but not translated into proteins.
therefore cause a variety of diseases such as cancer. However, the molecular functions of lncrnas remain to be elucidated fully.
Leukemia cells in which CCDC26 was knocked down showed enhanced survival periods after serum withdrawal. A KIT-specific inhibitor reversed this increased survival of the cells.
These results are published in a Molecular Cancer article titled""Long noncoding RNA, CCDC26, controls myeloid leukemia cell growth through regulation of KIT expression.""
Leukemia characterized by a mutated copy number of CCDC26 might be treated by KIT-targeted therapy"quoted Dr. Hirano o
Researchers at the University of Bonn and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have discovered two new groups of viruses within the Bunyavirus family in the tropical forest of Ivory coast.
"The most well-known bunyaviruses include, for example, the Rift valley fever virus, which can cause febrile illnesses with severe bleeding in humans,
"says Dr. Sandra Junglen from the Bonn Institute of Virology, also affiliated with the German Center for Infection Research.
In 2011, the"Schmallenberg virus"gained much attention: also a part of the Bunyavirus family and transmitted by gnats,
Agents of human disease have developed from insect viruses"These were two groups of as yet-unknown viruses
They performed infection trials in a large number of cell cultures at different temperature levels. While pathogenic bunyaviruses can multiply at temperatures that include the human body temperature,
"says the researcher from the University of Bonn Hospital. Simplified test to test novel viruses for risk of human infection Triggered by epidemics such as SARS and Ebola,
virologists are now reaching out to discover the plethora of unknown viruses lurking in natural reservoirs such as insects, in an attempt to forecast pandemic risks."
"We hope our temperature test for estimating the risk of vertebrate infection can be useful for assessing other viruses that keep being discovered,
#Intelligent bacteria for detecting disease Another step forward has just been taken in the area of synthetic biology.
in association with Montpellier Regional University Hospital and Stanford university, have transformed bacteria into"secret agents"that can give warning of a disease based solely on the presence of characteristic molecules in the urine or blood.
The bacteria thus programmed detect the abnormal presence of glucose in the urine of diabetic patients.
published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, is the first step in the use of programmable cells for medical diagnosis.
and are considered often to be our enemies, causing many diseases such as tuberculosis or cholera. However, they can also be witnessed allies,
Since the advent of biotechnology, researchers have modified bacteria to produce therapeutic drugs or antibiotics. In this novel study, they have actually become a diagnostic tool.
Medical diagnosis is a major challenge for the early detection and subsequent monitoring of diseases.""In vitro"diagnosis is based on the presence in physiological fluids (blood and urine, for example) of molecules characteristic for a particular disease.
Because of its noninvasiveness and ease of use, in vitro diagnosis is of great interest. However, in vitro tests are sometimes complex,
and require sophisticated technologies that are often available only in hospitals. This is where biological systems come into play.
Living cells are real nanomachines that can detect and process many signals and respond to them.
in association with Professor Eric Renard (Montpellier Regional University Hospital) and Drew Endy (Stanford university), applied this new technology to the detection of disease signals in clinical samples.
The authors used the transcriptor's amplification abilities to detect disease markers, even if present in very small amounts.
and detected the abnormal presence of glucose in the urine of diabetic patients.""We have deposited the genetic components used in this work in the public domain to allow their unrestricted reuse by other public
"Our work is focused presently on the engineering of artificial genetic systems that can be modified on demand to detect different molecular disease markers,
In future, this work might also be applied to engineering the microbial flora in order to treat various diseases, especially intestinal diseases
135 K) which caused the"high-Tc fever"in the world 30 years ago, it obviously exceeds the record of other"high-Tc superconductors"such as fullerene (C60) superconductors (Tc 33 K) and Mgb2 (Tc 39k),
Disruption of the clock has been associated with a variety of health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
According to Carrie Partch a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa cruz and corresponding author of the paper, the connection between clock disruption and cancer is still unclear."
"The clock is disrupted not always in cancer cells, but studies have shown that disrupting circadian rhythms in mice causes tumors to grow faster,
and one of the things the clock does is set restrictions on when cells can divide,
including melanoma, lung cancer, and breast cancer. It belongs to a group of proteins known as"cancer/testis antigens,
"which are expressed normally in the germ line cells that give rise to sperm and eggs, but are also found in some cancer cells.
Cancer researchers have been interested in these proteins as markers for cancer and as potential targets for therapeutic cancer vaccines."
"For very few of these do we understand the roles they might play in driving cancer,
"Understanding how PASD1 is regulating the circadian clock could open the door to developing new therapies.
We could potentially find ways to disrupt it in those cancers in which it is expressed."
"Beyond its role in cancer, Partch is interested also in understanding the normal role of PASD1
causing either advanced sleep syndrome or delayed sleep syndrome. There is also a growing body of evidence showing that environmental changes affecting circadian rhythms
and we have ongoing studies to explore its role in cancer and other human health problems
Because of its accuracy, it could also better distinguish between benign lung tumors that do not pose a threat
and malignant tumors that have the potential to grow and spread. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in both men and women in the United states. However,
the five-year survival rate increases dramatically if the disease is caught and treated early. According to the American Cancer Society,
if NSCLC is caught in its earliest stage, the five-year survival rate is 49 percent.
However, patients who are diagnosed when the disease has metastasized--meaning that it has spread to other organs--have only about a 1 percent chance of achieving survival after five years.
In 2013 the USPSTF recommended annual screening to patients at least 55 years old who had a history of smoking
. associate professor in the Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program at The Wistar Institute and lead author of the study."
we can detect the cancer earlier with a less expensive, less invasive and more accurate blood test.
"In this study, Huang and his colleagues focused on cancer testis antigens (CTAS), since they are often found in tumor cells that circulate in the blood.
After analyzing 116 different CTAS, the researchers identified the protein AKAP4 as a potential biomarker that could effectively distinguish between patients with and without NSCLC.
I diagnosis. The researchers analyzed the effectiveness of the biomarker by looking at the area under the curve (AUC),
a method that calculates the ability of the test to distinguish those with disease from those without it.
and don't have a particular disease. In this study, when the researchers compared all 264 of the NSCLC samples with the 135 control samples,
When the researchers looked at only the 136 samples with known stage I disease, the AUC was 0. 9795.
While the researchers noted that the presence of AKAP4 increased with the stage of the disease
AKAP4 was still detectable in the samples with early stage disease.""The results of this study exceeded our expectations,
Multiple hospitals have agreed to provide blood samples for analysis to Wistar for this next study."
"said Dario C. Altieri, M d.,President and CEO of The Wistar Institute and director of Wistar's Cancer Center."
in order to have a meaningful impact on this devastating disease.""This is the second time Wistar has identified a potential method for creating a blood test to screen for lung cancer.
Researchers at the Institute are also currently analyzing more than 600 blood samples to develop a blood test that identifies a 29-gene"signature"that distinguishes patients with NSCLC from those without the disease.
carboplatin and oxyplatin, have been used to treat cancer for more than 35 years. While they remain among the most prescribed and most potent chemotherapy drugs,
and accumulate at the tumor site. However, tests of these nanodrugs show that only between one and 10 percent of the drugs are delivered to the tumor site
with the majority of the remainder being diverted to the liver and spleen.''The body's immune system, especially the liver and spleen, has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks in developing nanoscale chemotherapy drug delivery systems,
they become less available to treat the cancer, and can also cause toxicity.''In the past few years, Ho and his colleagues were developing cellular nanotags to help detect organ rejection,
The researchers believe that this increased availability will allow more of the drug to reach the tumor site,
#Early clinical trial success for new rheumatoid arthritis treatment Arrayrheumatoid arthritis is a disease in which the immune system attacks healthy tissues, particularly in the joints, causing inflammation, pain and deformity.
"Current therapies only treat the symptoms and slow the progression of the disease, "Professor Thomas said."
"We have designed a vaccine-style treatment or'immunotherapy'specifically for individuals carrying high-risk rheumatoid arthritis genes and specific rheumatoid arthritis antibodies, called anti-CCP."
"This type of rheumatoid arthritis is called'CCP-positive'and accounts for the majority of cases.""Our immune system is made up of specialised cells that move through blood
and tissue, preventing disease and fighting infection by distinguishing between what is the body's own healthy tissue and
"Professor Thomas said a single injection of the patient's own immune-modified dendritic cells was found to be safe
clinically-practical vaccine technology that could deliver similar outcomes for patients. Professor Thomas is working on a delivery technology with Dendright Pty Ltd (a Uniquest start-up company) in collaboration Janssen Biotech Inc,
it could also be applied to other autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes s
#Drug-induced tissue regeneration demonstrated by scientists A study led by Ellen Heber-Katz, Phd, of the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR), part of Main line Health (MLH),
shows that a primordial form of energy production that still exists in mammals can be harnessed to achieve spontaneous tissue regeneration in mice, without the need for added stem cells.
The study findings were reported in the June 3, 2015, issue of Science Translational Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Almost 20 years ago, Heber-Katz noticed that the MRL mouse can spontaneously regenerate cartilage and other tissues after injury
of which is increased markedly before and after injury in the MRL mouse. Under normal oxygen conditions, HIF-1a is degraded by prolyl hydroxylases (PHDS.
Next, they selected a non-regenerating strain of mice to see what would happen when they experimentally up-regulated (stabilized) HIF-1a levels after an ear hole punch injury.
The mice received three injections of a PHD inhibitor in a slow-release formulation at 5-day intervals.
the drug-treated mice showed a pattern of molecular changes indistinguishable from that observed in MRL mice during regeneration in response to injury, confirming HIF-1a as a central driver of healthy regeneration of lost
"This remarkable work has vast importance in medicine and surgery and spotlights the diverse and important scientific investigations underway at LIMR,"says George Prendergast, Phd, President and CEO of LIMR."
"We are committed to the quest to discover therapies that make healthy tissue regeneration a possibility in humans
#Planarian regeneration model discovered by artificial intelligence Arrayin order to bioengineer complex organs, scientists need to understand the mechanisms by which those shapes are produced normally by the living organism.
#Your viral infection history in a single drop of blood With Virscan, scientists can run a single test to determine which viruses have infected an individual,
and compare viral infections in large populations. The comprehensive analysis can be performed for about $25 per blood sample.
Stephen Elledge, an HHMI investigator at Brigham and Women's Hospital, led the development of Virscan."
The immune system ramps up production of pathogen-specific antibodies when it encounters a virus for the first time,
or decades after it clears an infection. That means Virscan not only identifies viral infections that the immune system is actively fighting,
but also provides a history of an individual's past infections. To develop the new test,
Elledge and his colleagues synthesized more than 93,000 short pieces of DNA encoding different segments of viral proteins.
either through infection or through vaccination. Elledge estimates it would take about 2-3 days to process 100 samples,
including HIV and hepatitis C."It turns out that it works really well,""Elledge says."
Their findings on viral epitopes may also have important implications for vaccine design. Elledge says the approach his team has developed is limited not to antiviral antibodies.
His own lab is also using it to look for antibodies that attack a body's own tissue in certain autoimmune diseases that are associated with cancer.
A similar approach could also be used to screen for antibodies against other types of pathogens s
may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens, according to researchers.
A new way of rapidly identifying bacteria, which requires a slight modification to a simple microscope,
may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens,
according to researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South korea.
which is still the gold standard in the health care industry for making a definitive diagnosis. Also routinely used today is a newer method for rapidly identifying bacteria based on a DNA-analysis technique called quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qpcr),
"This means the present method can be utilized as a prescreening test for point-of-care bacterial diagnosis for various applications including medicine and food hygiene.""
"Why Speed Matters in Infection Control In hospitals and clinics worldwide, bacterial infections are a major source of illness,
In the most severe cases, bacterial poisoning causes severe disease and syndromes like sepsis, meningitis, pneumonia,
and gastroenteritis--all of which can be deadly unless the patient is given immediate and appropriate treatment.
The true challenge of fighting those infections is time. In order to best treat their patients, doctors would like to know exactly which bacteria they are infected with,
but the lost hours or days spent identifying the exact pathogen can make the road to recovery that much steeper.
Sepsis, for instance, can develop so rapidly that mortality has been seen to increase by 9 percent per hour until treatment is given.
Waiting two days may kill the patient, Park added. For that reason, many hospital-acquired infections are treated presumptively,
before they are identified definitively, using broad-spectrum antibiotics. These powerful combinations of potent drugs are often effective,
allowing doctors to prescribe the best drugs available to treat an infection and improving outcomes for people with hospital-acquired infections--though the effectiveness of the approach remains to be proven in future clinical trials.
In their initial experiments, Park and his colleagues showed as a proof of principle that they could identify bacteria with high accuracy.
The first three are known all pathogens to infect humans through the food chain or via hospital-acquired infections.
which is the base for Anthrax. Under a microscope, all four of these rodlike bacteria look nearly identical.
In addition to helping in the clinic the new method may be useful in the food industry or for homeland security applications.
#New approach for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis Arrayprof. Dr. Oliver Eickelberg and Dr. Claudia Staab-Weijnitz of the Comprehensive Pneumology Center (CPC) at Helmholtz Zentrum München and their colleagues at LMU University Hospital in Munich and Yale university
School of medicine have discovered now a new therapeutic target for IPF. The main focus of their research was to identify causative mechanisms involved in the disease.
The researchers analyzed microarray data of samples from German patients and from an IPF cohort of the Lung Tissue Research Consortium in the U s. The analysis revealed elevated levels of the protein FKBP10
in the lungs of IPF patients. The researchers hypothesized that if the production or activity of the protein could be inhibited,
this might lead to a new therapeutic approach. Further experiments confirmed that knockdown of this protein in IPF fibroblasts diminished the collagen synthesis."Thus,
FKBP10 represents a potential new target molecule for the individualized therapy of IPF, "said Claudia Staab-Weijnitz."
"In the future, these results could also lead to new therapeutic options for the treatment of other fibrotic diseases."
Together with his team of researchers, he is studying the pathogenic mechanisms with the aim to develop causal therapies--and thus one day to actually cure IPF.
however, the main focus is on delaying the progression of the disease and alleviating the symptoms."
"we want to help alleviate the suffering of patients with lung disease.""In the case of IPF, the researchers now want to establish a drug screening assay
#Ultrasound, algorithms to diagnose bacterial meningitis in babies Three researchers from Spain and one from UK, Javier Jiménez, Carlos Castro, Berta Martí and Ian Butterworth,
which will allow bacterial meningitis to be diagnosed in babies in seconds with a high-resolution ultrasound of the fontanelle.
which aims to revolutionise the detection of this illness, has already been tested on a small sample of patients at the La paz University Hospital and in ex vivo tissues of animal models.
The project has been financed by Madrid-MIT M+Visión a consortium that wants to boost the collaboration between research centres and hospitals in the autonomous community of Madrid with the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT) and other institutions in the Boston area (USA.
Carlos Castro tells Sinc, in a telephone interview from the Research Laboratory of Electronics of MIT in Boston,
-which already has a prototype-was to"facilitate the diagnosis of bacterial meningitis using imaging technologies and algorithms."
"Array"We were searching for an alternative to the lumbar puncture (LP), the only existing procedure up until now for its diagnosis,
"We witnessed a LP on a 29-day-old baby that had arrived at the accident and emergency department at Boston Children's Hospital with a fever.
which tell whether there is an infection in the fluid, can take between 24 and 48 hours"says Castro.
meningitis is not the cause of the fever in babies and therefore, "lumbar punctures do not benefit the patient in any way."
which would indicate the cellularity in CSF in a simple, economical and noninvasive way for newborns and babies on suspicion of infection.
The image obtained is analysed then by image-processing algorithms to determine the presence of cells indicating infection
"Therefore-he adds-it not only provides the doctor with an image, but information about the presence or absence of cells in the cerebrospinal fluid.
"The team believes that their system will mean a breakthrough for diagnosing bacterial meningitis in babies
Madrid hospitals La paz, Quirón and San Carlos also provided significant assistance. In Boston, they worked with Massachusetts General Hospital.
Arrayto date, 300,000 euros has been invested in the project, awarded by the Madrid-MIT M+Visión Consortium.
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