according to Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience reporthuman stem cells can be differentiated to produce other cell types, such as organ cells, skin cells, or brain cells.
In a new study published in Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, researchers report successfully growing multiple brain structures
Mesencephalic dopaminergic (mda) neurons and their connections to other neurons in the brain are believed to be related to disorders including drug abuse, schizophrenia, Parkinson disease,
and perhaps eating disorders, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, Tourette syndrome, and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. However, studying mda neurons and neocortical neurons in isolation does not reveal much data about how these cells actually interact in these conditions.
This new capability to grow and interconnect two types of neurons in vitro now provides researchers with an excellent model for further study. his method,
#Tumour in a petri dish a way to a personalized cancer treatment Cancer is still one of those diagnoses that make people weak in their knees
That is why innovative cancer treatments are always in the spotlight of attention and that is why scientists have been puzzling how to treat cancer for a long time.
They understand that not every case is the same, individuals need individual treatment. And now scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison completed highly successful,
said that this research is one of the first steps of mimicking the body of the cancer patient in a dish.
which involves co-culturing multiple myeloma tumour cells with their surrounding cells that do not have cancer, all from the same patient, in a micro scale petri dish.
Then scientists treated this cancer in a dish with common drug called bortezomib, which is used often to treat myeloma,
and it only took them three days to see if treatment is effective or not.
so in is a universally fatal cancer. It is treatable but incurable. It rises in the blood marrow due to an accumulation of abnormal,
or testing process, may not help to reach the breakthrough in searching for cure for cancer.
Multiple myeloma is most likely to remain a universally fatal cancer until some major scientific discoveries are made.
However, it can save many multiple myeloma cancer patients the psychological stress of having to try multiple drugs until they find the most effective one.
Cancer is still able to interact with its surroundings as well as treatment, but outside of the body.
Scientists are already thinking how to expand this assay to test responsiveness to different drugs of other cancers as well.
This may not be a tool to cure cancer, but it will surely help cancer patients to receive personalized treatments.
It will reduce stress they get through usual trial and error method and will make treatment that a little bit less tormenting.
Which is very good news to many patients and to their families i
#Scientists announce first room-temperature magnetic skyrmion bubbles Researchers at UCLA and the U s. Department of energy Argonne National Laboratory announced a new method for creating magnetic skyrmion bubbles at room temperature.
as a result of human exploitation and disease-related die offs, says Joshua Miller, Phd student in the Department of Biological sciences and lead author on the study. hus,
Providing a realistic, cost-effective and rapid screening system such as ATHENA with high-throughput capabilities could provide major benefits to the medical field,
ranging from fundamental science to medicine. In astronomy, it will boost the performance of adaptive optics, a technology at the heart of the European Extremely Large telescope (E-ELT.
This device would be a great leap forward in cheap medical devices for underdeveloped countries, where simple medical care,
#New imaging technique could make brain tumor removal safer, more effective Brain surgery is famously difficult for good reason:
When removing a tumor, for example, neurosurgeons walk a tightrope as they try to take out as much of the cancer as possible
while keeping crucial brain tissue intact and visually distinguishing the two is often impossible. Now Johns Hopkins researchers report they have developed an imaging technology that could provide surgeons with a color-coded map of a patient brain showing
which areas are and are not cancer. A summary of the research appears June 17 in Science Translational Medicine. s a neurosurgeon,
I in agony when I taking out a tumor. If I take out too little the cancer could come back;
too much, and the patient can be disabled permanently, says Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, M d.,a professor of neurosurgery,
neuroscience and oncology at the Johns hopkins university School of medicine and the clinical leader of the research team. e think optical coherence tomography has strong potential for helping surgeons know exactly where to cut.
First developed in the early 1990s for imaging the retina, optical coherence tomography (OCT) operates on the same echolocation principle used by bats and ultrasound scanners,
but it uses light rather than sound waves, yielding a higher-resolution image than does ultrasound.
One unique feature of OCT is that unlike X-ray, CT SCANS or PET scans, it delivers no ionizing radiation to patients.
For the past decade, research groups around the globe, including a group at Johns Hopkins led by Xingde Li, Ph d,
thought OCT might provide a solution to the problem of separating brain cancers from other tissue during surgery.
Kut first built on the idea that cancers tend to be relatively dense, which affects how they scatter
Once they had found the characteristic OCT ignatureof brain cancer, the team devised a computer algorithm to process OCT data and,
nearly instantaneously, generate a color-coded map with cancer in red and healthy tissue in green. e envision that the OCT would be aimed at the area being operated on,
and the surgeon could look at a screen to get a continuously updated picture of where the cancer is
the team has tested the system on fresh human brain tissue removed during surgeries and in surgeries to remove brain tumors from mice.
The researchers hope to begin clinical trials in patients this summer. If those trials are successful
it will be a big step up from imaging technologies now available during surgeries, says Quinones-Hinojosa. ltrasound has a much lower resolution than OCT,
The system can potentially be adapted to detect cancers in other parts of the body, Kut says.
She is working on combining OCT with a different imaging technique that would detect blood vessels to help surgeons avoid cutting them s
Dr Perriman from Bristol School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine said: rom our preliminary experiments, we found that we could produce these artificial membrane binding proteins
or knee osteoarthritis or the severe injuries caused by major trauma, for example in road traffic accidents or war injuries. heir new methodology,
which helped to make possible the first successful transplant of a tissue-engineered trachea, utilising the patient own stem cells.
#New tool on horizon for surgeons treating cancer patients Surgeons could know while their patients are still on the operating table
if a tissue is cancerous, according to researchers from the Department of energy Oak ridge National Laboratory and Brigham and Women Hospital/Harvard Medical school.
which looks for specific protein biomarkers to make a diagnosis . Although the IHC approach provides a high degree of spatial recognition,
While yet other mass spectrometry-based techniques such as desorption electrospray ionization and rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry are being evaluated for classifying tumors and providing prognostic information,
and proteins would harness the diagnostic value of validated immunohistochemistry approaches for surgical decision-making, Kertesz said.
rapidity and specificity of our method, there is great potential for our technology to assist surgeons in the detection of cancer from tissue biopsy samples,
#Scientists successfully test immunogen a component for potential HIV vaccine Team of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute, INTERNATIONAL AIDS Vaccine Initiative and The Rockefeller University have shown successfully that an experimental vaccine candidate
can stimulate the immune system activity necessary to stop HIV infection. This research is extremely significant.
In fact, scientists believe that findings of the study could provide key information for the development of an effective AIDS vaccine.
may become one of the parts of first successful HIV vaccine. Image credit: scripps. eduefforts to create effective vaccine against HIV so far have been virtually fruitless.
However, scientists already describe results of this latest research as spectacular. The long-term goal of the research is to develop a vaccine that prompts the body to produce antibodies that bind to HIV
and prevent infection and current experiments with mice models showed promising results. Many vaccines for other diseases use a dead
or inactive version of the disease-causing microbe itself to trigger antibody production. However, this simple approach does not work with HIV immunizations with ativehiv proteins are ineffective in triggering an effective immune response
due to HIV ability to evade detection from the immune system and mutate rapidly into new strains.
This makes HIV vaccine a particularly challenging task for scientists, which explains why science still has produced not an effective one.
This challenge did not make scientists believe that AIDS vaccine is impossible. Instead they figured out that it has to consist of a series of related,
but slightly different proteins, called immunogens, to train the body to produce broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV.
until develops imunity to a certain disease. The research required a broad partnership between different institutions.
and block HIV infection. This suggests that eod-GT8 60mer immunogen could be a good candidate to serve as the first in a series of immunizations against HIV.
Professor David Nemazee evaluated results like that he vaccine appears to work well in our mouse model to rimethe antibody response In another research scientists used the same immunogen in a slightly different mouse model,
which showed promising results As well as scientists have taken approach to collect a variety of different immunogens to develop a united HIV vaccine,
HIV vaccine would be a major breakthrough at fight against AIDS, as it still is arguably the biggest threat to human population.
As previous attempts to prevent the spread of the disease proved ineffective and there is no cure for it,
vaccine could be one of the greatest scientific achievements of the century. Source: Scripp s
#Cancer Blocked by Halving Levels of Protein Thought To Be ntouchablein a surprising finding, a team of UC San francisco and Stanford university scientists has discovered that a protein thought to be crucial for the body to develop
and function correctly can be reduced by half in mice with no apparent ill effects. More strikingly, the group found that the full complement of the protein normally found in cells can be hijacked by cancer cells to fuel their growth.
The work raises the possibility that targeted cancer drugs that lower levels of the protein could suppress tumor growth without affecting healthy cells.
a UCSF graduate student in the Biomedical sciences Program. his represents a new and exciting finding in regard to how we might target the development of tumors.
who holds the Helen Diller Family Chair in Basic Cancer Research, and Maria Barna, Phd, assistant professor of developmental biology and genetics at Stanford, co-senior authors of the new study. he dogma in every textbook was that
said Ruggero, a member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (HDFCCC). During translation, strands of MESSENGER RNA (mrna) carry protein-making instructions from genes to ribosomes, the cellular machines in which proteins are made.
and co-first author Crystal S. Conn, Phd, a postdoctoral fellow in the UCSF Department of Urology,
especially since previous research has shown that eif4e is present at abnormally high levels in tumor cells. ancer cells rely on increases in protein synthesis as a critical means for sustaining their growth and survival,
In lab-dish experiments, mutations in certain genes known as oncogenes, such as Ras and Myc, reliably ransformnormal mouse cells into cancer-like cells the cells overproliferate,
just as tumor cells do. But when the researchers introduced oncogenic Myc and Ras into cells in
they again observed that the potential of these cells to develop tumors was weakened significantly. The researchers found,
when they set the stage for the development of cancer. These results were consistent with those seen in eif4e-deficient mice carrying Ras mutations
when cells are under stress, such as that caused by oncogenic transformation. Though cells require some ROS to survive,
stress conditions can push ROS levels beyond a threshold, triggering a program that causes cells to commit suicide.
To that end, in 2013 Ruggero and UCSF colleague Kevan M. Shokat, Phd, professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology and a Howard hughes medical institute Investigator, founded San diego-based effector Therapeutics
. effector is developing new treatments for patients with cancer and other serious diseases, in part by characterizing drug action and identifying targets related to the cell translational mechanisms.
but they make use of the surplus to initiate protective mechanisms when under stress. Cancer cells appear to hijack this mechanism,
using the extra reservoir of eif4e to ward off the stress response to enhance their own survival. his work pulls back the curtain on a very unique trick that cancer cells have developed during the course of evolution to promote their own growth, through a program that specific to cancer cells,
said principal investigator Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, UCSF professor of neurological surgery, Heather and Melanie Muss Endowed Chair and a principal investigator in the UCSF Brain tumor Research center and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research. t may be unwelcome
news for those who thought of adult neural stem cells as having a wide potential for neural repair.
Alvarez-Buylla also noted that the paper has possible implications for the success of human stem cell therapy in the brain
the likelihood of our being able to use stem cell therapy to repair brain injury is very low. ource:
which allows for a better therapeutic potential. The team of researchers tested the therapeutic potential of these carbon nanoparticles by loading them with an anti-melanoma drug
and mixing them in a topical solution that was applied to pig skin. However, scientists have to make sure they coated particles properly,
Scientists also found that they can alter the infusion of the particles into melanoma cells by adjusting the polymer coatings.
It is a very versatile platform to treat melanoma, other kinds of cancers and other diseases.
as well as to make it carry several different drugs at the same time to allow for a multidrug therapy with the same particles.
which will eventually lead to innovative drug therapies for cancer and other diseases i
#Access to electricity and artificial light shortened time of our sleep Science knows that nowadays people tend to sleep less than they used to before modern times.
#Smart insulin patch could replace painful injections for diabetes This is the mart insulin patch, developed by researchers in the joint UNC/NC State Biomedical engineering Department.
A joint effort between diabetes doctors and biomedical engineers could revolutionize how people with diabetes keep their blood sugar levels in checkpainful insulin injections could become a thing of the past for the millions of Americans who suffer from diabetes, thanks to a new invention
painless patch could lower blood glucose in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes for up to nine hours.
More preclinical tests and subsequent clinical trials in humans will be required before the patch can be administered to patients,
but the approach shows great promise. e have designed a patch for diabetes that works fast,
and the UNC Diabetes Care Center. he whole system can be personalized to account for a diabetic weight and sensitivity to insulin,
Patients with type 1 and advanced type 2 diabetes try to keep their blood sugar levels under control with regular finger pricks and repeated insulin shots, a process that is painful and imprecise.
John Buse, MD, Phd, co-senior author of the PNAS paper and the director of the UNC Diabetes Care Center, said,
njecting the wrong amount of medication can lead to significant complications like blindness and limb amputations,
or even more disastrous consequences such as diabetic comas and death. esearchers have tried to remove the potential for human error by creating losed-loop systemsthat directly connect the devices that track blood sugar
they had to figure out a way to administer them to patients with diabetes. Rather than rely on the large needles
The researchers tested the ability of this approach to control blood sugar levels in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes.
They gave one set of mice a standard injection of insulin and measured the blood glucose levels,
They also found that the patch did not pose the hazards that insulin injections do.
Injections can send blood sugar plummeting to dangerously low levels when administered too frequently. he hard part of diabetes care is not the insulin shots,
or the blood sugar checks, or the diet but the fact that you have to do them all several times a day every day for the rest of your life,
the director of the North carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC Tracs) Institute and past president of the American Diabetes Association. f we can get these patches to work in people,
said Professor Shankar Balasubramanian of the Department of chemistry and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, who led the research. t had been thought this modification was solely a short-lived intermediate,
and the role that these modifications may play in the development of certain diseases, said Balasubramanian. hile work is continuing in determining the exact function of this xtrabase,
The research was supported by Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological sciences Research Council UK e
While conventional lithium-ion batteries are composed of brittle electrodes that can crack under stress, the new formulation produces battery cells that can be bent,
#Nanowire implants offer remote-controlled drug delivery A team of Purdue University researchers developed a new implantable drug-delivery system using the nanowires,
and wires required by other implantable devices that can lead to infection and other complications,
Purdue University Mari Hulman George Professor of Applied Neuroscience and director of Purdue Center for Paralysis Research. his tool allows us to apply drugs as needed directly to the site of injury,
which could have broad medical applications, Borgens said. he technology is in the early stages of testing,
but it is our hope that this could one day be used to deliver drugs directly to spinal cord injuries, ulcerations, deep bone injuries or tumors,
or chemotherapy. he team tested the drug-delivery system in mice with compression injuries to their spinal cords
Wen Gao, a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Paralysis Research who worked on the project with Borgens,
and transported a patch of the nanowire carpet on water droplets that were used used to deliver it to the site of injury.
The nanowire patches adhere to the site of injury through surface tension, Gao said. The magnitude and wave form of the electromagnetic field must be tuned to obtain the optimum release of the drug
Youngnam Cho, a former faculty member at Purdue Center for Paralysis Research; and Jianming Li, a research assistant professor at the center.
GFAP is expressed in cells called astrocytes that gather in high numbers at central nervous system injuries. Astrocytes are a part of the inflammatory process and form a scar tissue,
A 1-2 millimeter patch of the nanowires doped with dexamethasone was placed onto spinal cord lesions that had been exposed surgically,
The lesions were closed then and an electromagnetic field was applied for two hours a day for one week.
#Researchers develop a new means of killing harmful bacteria The global rise in antibiotic resistance is a growing threat to public health,
damaging our ability to fight deadly infections such as tuberculosis. In this illustration, phagemid plasmids infect a targeted bacteria.
for new approaches to tackle bacterial infection. In a paper published online in the journal Nano Letters, researchers at MIT, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard,
and kill bacteria have been used for many years to treat infection in countries such as those in the former Soviet union.
But bacteriophages can also cause potentially harmful side effects, according to James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT Department of Biological engineering and Institute of Medical Engineering and Science,
as it can lead to the release of nasty toxins from the cell. hese toxins can lead to sepsis and even death in some cases,
Collins says. ou can use this to kill off very specific species of bacteria as part of an infection therapy,
in order to get a more effective therapy, he says. This is in contrast to repeated infection with bacteriophages,
where the researchers found that the bacteria did develop resistance over time. Although Collins acknowledges that bacteria will ultimately develop resistance to any stress that is placed upon them
the research suggests that it is likely to take them far longer to develop resistance to phagemids than to conventional bacteriophage therapy,
he says. A ocktailof different phagemids could be given to patients to treat an unclassified infection,
in a similar way to the broad-spectrum antibiotics used today. But they are more likely to be used in conjunction with rapid diagnostic tools, currently in development,
which would allow physicians to treat specific infections, Collins says. ou would first run a fast diagnostic test to identify the bacteria your patient has,
and then give the appropriate phagemid to kill off the pathogen, he says. The researchers are planning to expand their platform by developing a broader range of phagemids.
but now hope to create particles capable of killing off pathogens such as Clostridium difficile and the cholera-causing bacterium Vibrio cholerea.
The paper demonstrates that using synthetic biology to modify a gene in a phage to make it more toxic to a pathogen can lead to more effective antimicrobial particles than classical approaches,
The researchers have created an improved form of phage therapy that may become the antibiotics of the future,
#New approach holds promise for earlier, easier detection of colorectal cancer Caltech chemists develop a technique that could one day lead to early detection of tumors Chemists at Caltech
have developed a new sensitive technique capable of detecting colorectal cancer in tissue samples a method that could one day be used in clinical settings for the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer.
Colorectal cancer is the third most prevalent cancer worldwide and is estimated to cause about 700,000 deaths every year.
Metastasis due to late detection is one of the major causes of mortality from this disease; therefore, a sensitive and early indicator could be a critical tool for physicians and patients.
the average biopsy size required for a colorectal biopsy is about 300 milligrams, says Furst. ith our experimental setup,
which could be taken with a syringe biopsy versus a punch biopsy. So it would be much less invasive.
but that has also recently been identified as an early indicator of cancer, especially the development of tumors,
if the process goes awry. When all is working well, DNMT1 maintains the normal methylation pattern set in the embryonic stages,
like suppress the growth of tumors or express proteins that repair damaged DNA, and that, in turn, can lead to cancer.
Building on previous work in Barton group, Furst and Barton devised an electrochemical platform to measure the activity of DNMT1 in crude tissue samples those that contain all of the material from a tissue
each composed of a colorectal tumor sample and an adjacent healthy tissue from the same patient.
and the presence of cancer the correlation was with activity. he assay provides a reliable and sensitive measure of hypermethylation,
so this technique could provide a useful route to early detection of cancer when hypermethylation is involved.
portable tests that could be used in the home to catch colorectal cancer in its earliest, most treatable stages.
NA Electrochemistry shows DNMT1 Methyltransferase Hyperactivity in Colorectal Tumors, was supported by the National institutes of health a
#Risk of bowel cancer reduced by taking aspirin for Lynch syndrome patients An international study led by The University of Melbourne has confirmed that long-term regular taking of aspirin
or ibuprofen reduces the risk of bowel cancer by more than half for people with the genetic mutation causing Lynch syndrome.
At least 1 in 1000 people in the population have the genetic mutation that causes Lynch syndrome.
These people have a much higher rate of bowel cancer than the general population and about half would develop the disease without regular screening.
In a paper published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute University of Melbourne researchers and international collaborators, led by Dr Driss Ait Ouakrim
and Dr Aung Ko Win from the School of Population and Global Health confirmed that those with Lynch syndrome who took aspirin regularly were less likely to develop bowel cancer than Lynch syndrome patients who did not take aspirin.
The research team also uncovered a new finding that Lynch syndrome patients who took ibuprofen regularly,
another nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, were about 60%less likely to develop bowel cancer compared with those who did not take ibuprofen.
This protection was seen in both men and women. he main risk reduction method for these people is to have regular colonoscopy screening.
Almost nothing is known about if and how lifestyle factors and medications can modify their risk of bowel cancer,
Dr Win said. ur data is the first to confirm the finding of a previous international randomised clinical trial that found a protective effect of aspirin on bowel cancer for these high-risk people.
Also, we were able to show the similar protective effect of ibuprofen such as Nurofen on bowel cancer for people with Lynch syndrome,
Dr Win said
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