which to test viruses and vaccines.""This plant is the'laboratory rat'of the molecular plant world,
"We have discovered that it is the plant equivalent of the nude mouse used in medical research.""
or sterile growing environments where plants were protected from disease --and space was an intriguing option."
So just as nude mice can be really good models for cancer research, 'nude'versions of crop plants could also speed up agricultural research,
Their new approach created the first-ever flexible Fresnel zone plate microlenses with a wide field of view--a development that could allow everything from surgical scopes to security cameras to capture a broader perspective at a fraction of the size required by conventional lenses.
Their new approach created the first-ever flexible Fresnel zone plate microlenses with a wide field of view--a development that could allow everything from surgical scopes to security cameras to capture a broader perspective at a fraction of the size required by conventional lenses.
The enhanced limit of detection will allow biomedical and environment monitoring of important molecules at high sensitivity by SERS."
Pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars testing therapeutic drugs on animals only to discover in human trials that the drug has an altogether different level of effectiveness.
but brain disorders like schizophrenia, and degenerative brain disease. ACES Director and research author Professor Gordon Wallace said that the breakthrough is significant progress in the quest to create a bench-top brain that will enable important insights into brain function,
in addition to providing an experimental test bed for new drugs and electroceuticals. e are still a long way from printing a brain
These brain-like structures offer the opportunity to reproduce more accurate 3d in vitro microstructures with applications ranging from cell behavior studies to improving our understanding of brain injuries and neurodegenerative diseases r
Stony Brook researchers publish experimental findings in the Journal of Neuroscience that show the lateral position more efficiently rids the brain of solutes that may contribute to disease.
The buildup of brain waste chemicals may contribute to the development of Alzheimer disease and other neurological conditions.
Dr. Benveniste, Principal investigator and a Professor in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Radiology at Stony Brook University School of medicine, has used dynamic contrast MRI for several years to examine the glymphatic pathway in rodent models.
and therefore the assessment of the clearance of damaging brain proteins that may contribute to or cause brain diseases. r. Benveniste and first-author Dr. Hedok Lee,
Assistant professor in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Radiology at Stony Brook developed the safe posture positions for the experiments.
Many types of dementia are linked to sleep disturbances, including difficulties in falling asleep. It is increasing acknowledged that these sleep disturbances may accelerate memory loss in Alzheimer disease.
Our findng brings new insight into this topic by showing it is also important what position you sleep in,
which has implications not only for a range of neuropsychiatric disorders such as ADHD, eating disorders and anxiety disorders,
but also for more common problems involving maladaptive daily decisions about drug or alcohol use, gambling or credit card binges.
lesions to other parts of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, known to be involved in certain aspects of decision-making,
and those with brain disease, said Prof. Yogita Chudasama, of Mcgill Psychology department and the lead researcher on the paper. n some ways this relationship makes sense;
to be a therapeutic target in human patient groups. m
#Brain Friendly Interface Could Change the Way People with Spinal cord Injuries Lead Their Lives Recent research published in the journal Microsystems
& Nanoengineering could eventually change the way people living with prosthetics and spinal cord injury lead their lives.
Instead of using neural prosthetic deviceshich suffer from immune-system rejection and are believed to fail due to a material and mechanical mismatch multi-institutional team,
helping people living with limb loss and spinal cord injury become more independent. However not only do neural prosthetic devices suffer from immune-system rejection,
this same methodology could then be applied in getting these extracellular matrix derived electrodes to be the next wave of brain implants,
There is a significant burden in cost of care and quality of life for people suffering from this disability.
Further, it rendered the implants sufficiently rigid for penetration into the target brain region and allowed them subsequently to soften to match the elastic modulus of brain tissue upon exposure to physiological conditions,
#How Chronic Inflammation Can Lead to Cancer Researchers discover how the immune system can create cancerous DNA mutations when fighting off infection.
Chronic inflammation caused by disease or exposure to dangerous chemicals has long been linked to cancer,
but exactly how this process takes place has remained unclear. Now, a precise mechanism by which chronic inflammation can lead to cancer has been uncovered by researchers at MIT a development that could lead to improved targets for preventing future tumors.
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
the researchers unveil how one of a battery of chemical warfare agents used by the immune system to fight off infection can itself create DNA mutations that lead to cancer.
As many as one in five cancers are believed to be caused or promoted by inflammation. These include mesothelioma,
a type of lung cancer caused by inflammation following chronic exposure to asbestos, and colon cancer in people with a history of inflammatory bowel disease, says Bogdan Fedeles,
a research associate in the Department of Biological engineering at MIT, and the paper lead author.
Innate immune response Inflammation is part of the body innate response to invading pathogens or potentially harmful irritants.
However, these molecules can also cause collateral damage to healthy tissue around the infection site:
he presence of a foreign pathogen activates the immune response, which tries to fight off the bacteria,
and James Fox all professors of biological engineering at MIT had identified the presence of a lesion,
or site of damage in the structure of DNA, called 5-chlorocytosine (5clc) in the inflamed tissues of mice infected with the pathogen Helicobacter hepaticus.
This lesion, a damaged form of the normal DNA base cytosine, is caused by the reactive molecule hypochlorous acid the main ingredient in household bleach
The lesion 5clc, was present in remarkably high levels within the tissue, says John Essigmann, the William R. 1956) and Betsy P. Leitch Professor in Residence Professor of Chemistry, Toxicology and Biological engineering at MIT,
who led the current research. hey found the lesions were very persistent in DNA, meaning we don have a repair system to take them out,
Essigmann says. n our field lesions that are persistent, if they are also mutagenic, are the kind of lesions that would initiate cancer,
he adds. DNA sequencing of a developing gastrointestinal tumor revealed two types of mutation: cytosine (C) bases changing to thymine (T) bases,
and adenine (A) bases changing to guanine (G) bases. Since 5clc had not yet been studied as a potentially carcinogenic mutagen,
the researchers decided to investigate the lesion further, in a bid to uncover if it is indeed mutagenic.
The researchers found that, rather than always pairing with a guanine base as a cytosine would,
when triggered by infection, fires hypochlorous acid at the site, damaging cytosines in the DNA of the surrounding healthy tissue.
he explains. his scenario would best explain the work of James Fox and his MIT colleagues on gastrointestinal cancer.
the researchers replicated the genome containing the lesion with a variety of different types of polymerase,
or patterns of DNA mutations, associated with cancerous tumors. e believe that in the context of inflammation-induced damage of DNA,
says the paper provides a novel mechanistic link between chronic inflammation and cancer development. ith a combination of biochemical, genetic,
a type of mutation that is frequently observed in human cancers, Wang says. Studies of tissue samples of patients suffering from inflammatory bowel disease have found significant levels of 5clc,
Fedeles adds. By comparing these levels with his team findings on how mutagenic 5clc is,
the researchers predict that accumulation of the lesions would increase the mutation rate of a cell up to 30-fold,
who was honored with the prestigious Benjamin F. Trump award at the 2015 Aspen Cancer Conference for the research.
neuropathology or treatment prognosis. Thus far, the neuroscience of emotion has yielded many important results but no such indicators for emotional experiences.
Chang and his colleagues studied 182 participants who were shown negative photos (bodily injuries, acts of aggression, hate groups, car wrecks, human feces) and neutral photos.
A new study may have unlocked understanding of a mysterious part of the brain with implications for neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer.
& Technology (TVST), open up new areas of research in the pursuit of neuroprotective therapies. Glaucoma is a neurodegenerative disease where patients lose seemingly random patches of vision in each eye.
This random pattern of vision loss is in stark contrast to loss from a brain tumor or stroke,
which causes both eyes to develop blind spots in the same location. Scientists have thought long that glaucoma progression is independent of
or uncontrolled by the brain. Last year researchers found evidence that the progression of glaucoma is not random
and that the brain may be involved after all. Specifically, they found patients with moderate to severe glaucoma maintained vision in one eye where it was lost in the other like two puzzle pieces fitting together (a igsaw Effect. his suggests some communication between the eyes must be going on
and that can only happen in the brain, explains the study lead author, William Eric Sponsel, MD, of the University of Texas at San antonio, Department of Biomedical engineering.
In the latest TVST paper, Refined Frequency Doubling Perimetry Analysis Reaffirms Central nervous system Control of Chronic Glaucomatous Neurodegeneration
Sponsel and his research team found that the Jigsaw Effect begins at the earliest stages of glaucoma and discovered clues as to
which part of the brain is responsible for optimizing vision in the face of glaucoma slow destruction of sight.
which challenge longstanding assumptions about glaucoma, have been met with skepticism. Other glaucoma experts challenged the results in a letter to the TVST editor. f the brain controls the distribution of vision loss in glaucoma,
then a patient vision with their two eyes should be better than if you simply ix and matchthe vision of right and left eyes from different patients,
their letter analyzed a new cohort of glaucoma patients in which hat essentially what we did.
The progression of Alzheimer and Parkinson diseases, which have neurodegenerative biology similar to glaucoma, may also be mediated actively by the brain. ur work has illustrated that the brain will not let us lose control of the same function on both sides of the brain
if that can be avoided. It seems likely that the same kind of protective mechanism will be at work with other neurodegenerative disorders,
he says. The investigative team believes that if the brain regulates neurodegeneration that if the brain controls how it loses control then researchers will now be able to look into largely unexplored regulatory processes for opportunities to slow
or stop the progression of these diseases. ee opened up this beautiful new world; there is so much to discover here,
says Sponsel. Additional Information: The letter to the editor xtraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence: Centrally Mediated Preservation of Binocular Visual field in Glaucoma is Unlikelyby Jonathan Denniss
and Paul H. Artes is available here. The response to the above letter efinitive Response to Denniss and Artes:
Case control study of 41 consecutive patients with bilaterally mild to severe glaucoma; each right eye visual field locus was paired with randomly-selected co-isopteric left eye loci,
Refined data analysis of paired Matrix visual fields confirms the existence of a natural optimization of binocular visual function in severe bilateral glaucoma via interlocking fields that could only be created by CNS involvement.
The paired eyes and brain are reaffirmed to function as a unified system in the progressive age-related neurodegenerative condition chronic open angle glaucoma,
Given the extensive homology of this disorder with other age-related neurodegenerations, it is reasonable to assume that the brain will similarly resist simultaneous bilateral loss of paired functional zones in both hemispheres in diseases like
Alzheimer and Parkinson disease. Glaucomatous eyes at all stages of the disease appear to provide a highly accessible paired-organ study model for developing therapeutics to optimize conservation of function in neurodegenerative disorders. efined Frequency Doubling Perimetry Analysis Reaffirms Central nervous system Control of Chronic
Glaucomatous Neurodegenerationby Matthew A. Reilly; Analaura Villarreal; Ted Maddess; and William Eric Sponsel in Translational Vision Science & Technology d
#Giving Paralyzed People a Voice A new device which transforms paralysis victimsbreath into words believed to be the first invention of its kind has been developed by academics from Loughborough University.
Billed as a tool to help bring back the art of conversation for sufferers of severe paralysis and loss of speech,
and Dr. Kaddour Bouazza-Marouf, Reader in Mechatronics in Medicine, said the device learns from its user,
Consultant Anaesthetist at Glenfield Hospital. hat we are proposing is a system that learns with the user to form an effective vocabulary that suits the person rather than the machine,
A new device which transforms paralysis victimsbreath into words believed to be the first invention of its kind has been developed by academics from Loughborough University. hen it comes to teaching our invention to recognise words and phrases,
or other speech disorders communicate. In an intensive care setting, the technology has the potential to be used to make an early diagnosis of locked-in syndrome (LIS),
by allowing patients, including those on ventilators, to communicate effectively for the first time by breathing an almost effortless act
#Oxytocin Delivering Nasal Device to Treat Mental illness Researchers at the University of Oslo have tested a new device for delivering hormone treatments for mental illness through the nose.
This method was found to deliver medicine to the brain with few side effects. About one out of every hundred Norwegians develop schizophrenia or autism in the course of their lifetime.
Moreover, at any one time some 20,000 people are receiving treatment for these problems. Many psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are characterised by poor social functioning.
Oxytocin is a hormone that influences social behaviour and has shown promise for the treatment of mental illness.
Researchers at Uio have discovered now that low doses of oxytocin may help patients with mental illness to better perceive social signals.
As part of this project, they have collaborated with the company Optinose, who have developed a new device designed to improve medicine delivery to the brain via the nose.
Regulates social behaviour Oxytocin has historically been known to play a crucial role in child rearing as it facilitates pregnancy, birth,
Medicine through the nose Because of oxytocin role in social behaviour, researchers have explored the possibility of administering the hormone for the treatment of mental illness.
Breathing helps Optinose uses a new technology to distribute medicine to the brain, making use of the user breath to propel medicine deep into the nasal cavity.
The device administers oxytocin high up into the patient nasal cavity. When the medicine is targeted deep inside the nose,
it enables brain delivery along nerve pathways from the uppermost part of the nasal cavity. Conventional nasal spray devices are suited not to consistently deliver medicine high up enough into the nose.
The device also expands the nasal cavity, facilitating nose-to-brain medicine delivery. As the user exhales into the device
this closes the soft palate and prevents the medicine from being lost down the throat. Since less medicine is lost along the way,
patients can take smaller doses and accordingly experience fewer side effects. May yield new treatments The next step in the research is to carry out the same tests on people with mental illness. e are now running tests in volunteers diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders,
says Dr Quintana. e hope that this research project is the first step in the development of a series of new medicines that may be of great help to more people with mental illness,
concludes Professor Andreassen o
#New Technology Enables Completely Paralyzed Man to Voluntarily Move His Legs Robotic step training and noninvasive spinal stimulation enable patient to take thousands of steps.
A 39-year-old man who had had been paralyzed completely for four years was able to voluntarily control his leg muscles
complete paralysis has regained enough voluntary control to actively work with a robotic device designed to enhance mobility.
the man was aided by a novel noninvasive spinal stimulation technique that does not require surgery.
That earlier achievement is believed to be the first time people who are paralyzed completely have been able to relearn voluntary leg movements without surgery.
and suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. At UCLA, Pollock made substantial progress after receiving a few weeks of physical training without spinal stimulation
The research will be published by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the world largest society of biomedical engineers. t will be difficult to get people with complete paralysis to walk completely independently,
but even if they don accomplish that, the fact they can assist themselves in walking will greatly improve their overall health
and quality of life, said V. Reggie Edgerton, senior author of the research and a UCLA distinguished professor of integrative biology and physiology, neurobiology and neurosurgery.
Edgerton said. e need to expand the clinical toolbox available for people with spinal cord injury and other diseases.
and we are encouraged by these findings to broaden our understanding of possible treatment options for paralysis,
which helped fund the research. iven the complexities of a spinal cord injury, there will be no one-size-fits-all cure
and approaches to remind the spine of its potential even years after an injury, he said.
his is a great example of a therapeutic approach that combines two very different modalities neuromodulation
much like multi-drug therapy, may ultimately benefit patients with impaired mobility in a wide variety of rehabilitation settings.
Neurorecovery Technologies, a medical technology company Edgerton founded, designs and develops devices that help restore movement in patients with paralysis. The company provided the device used to stimulate the spinal cord in combination with the Ekso in this research.
he now believes it is possible to significantly improve quality of life for patients with severe spinal cord injuries,
as a result of a spinal cord injury has become the first person to be able to eelphysical sensations through a prosthetic hand directly connected to his brain,
a feat previously accomplished under the DARPA program by another person with similar injuries. Then, breaking new neurotechnological ground, the researchers went on to provide the volunteer a sense of touch.
and experience for individuals living with paralysis and have the potential to benefit people with similarly debilitating brain injuries or diseases,
he said. In addition to the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program that focuses on restoring movement and sensation DARPA portfolio of neurotechnology programs includes the Restoring Active Memory (RAM) and Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS) programs,
which seek to develop closed-loop direct interfaces to the brain to restore function to individuals living with memory loss from traumatic brain injury or complex neuropsychiatric illness y
#X-ray Vision: Transparent Brains Ready for Study Researchers at the RIKEN Brain science Institute in Japan have developed a new technique for creating transparent tissue that can be used to illuminate 3d brain anatomy at very high resolutions.
the work showcases the new technology and its practical importance in clinical science by showing how it has given new insights into Alzheimer disease plaques. he usefulness of optical clearing techniques can be measured by their ability to gather
and collected data that may resolve several current issues regarding the pathology of Alzheimer disease.
mouse model of Alzheimer disease developed at the RIKEN BSI by Takaomi Saido team. After showing how Scales treatment can preserve tissue,
the researchers put the technique to practical use by visualizing in 3d the mysterious iffuseplaques seen in the postmortem brains of Alzheimer disease patients that are typically undetectable using 2d imaging.
but not in later stages of the disease after the plaques have accumulated. learing tissue with Scales followed by 3d microscopy has clear advantages over 2d stereology or immunohistochemistry,
not only for visualizing plaques in Alzheimer disease, but also for examining normal neural circuits and pinpointing structural changes that characterize other brain diseases. t
#Researchers Identify Three Distinct Subtypes of Alzheimer Disease Alzheimer disease, long thought to be a single disease,
really consists of three distinct subtypes, according to a UCLA study. The finding could lead to more highly targeted research and, eventually, new treatments for the debilitating neurological disorder,
which robs people of their memories. The study further found that one of the three variations,
a UCLA professor of neurology and member of the Easton Laboratory for Neurodegenerative Disease Research. ecause the presentation varies from person to person,
there has been suspicion for years that Alzheimer represents more than one illness, said Bredesen, who also is the founding president of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. hen laboratory tests go beyond the usual tests,
but other metabolic abnormalities are present. Cortical, which affects relatively young individuals and appears more widely distributed across the brain than the other subtypes of Alzheimer.
but people with this subtype of the disease tend to lose language skills. It is misdiagnosed often,
No effective therapy for Alzheimer exists. And scientists have yet to completely identify the cause,
although multiple studies have pointed to metabolic abnormalities such as insulin resistance, hormonal deficiencies and hyperhomocysteinemia, a condition characterized by an abnormally high level of an amino acid in the blood.
exercise and diet changes designed to improve the body metabolism reversed cognitive decline in nine out of 10 patients with early Alzheimer disease or its precursors.
and it could eventually help scientists pinpoint more precise targets for treatments the same approach that has led to major advances in treating other diseases.
researchers have recently been able to develop precise treatments for cancer by sequencing tumor genomes
and comparing them to the patientsgenomes to better understand what drives the formation and growth of tumors. owever,
in Alzheimer disease, there is no tumor to biopsy, Bredesen said. o how do we get an idea about
The approach we took was to use the underlying metabolic mechanisms of the disease process to guide the establishment of an extensive set of laboratory tests, such as fasting insulin, copper-to-zinc ratio and dozens of others.
It is the most common age-related dementia, and the number of people with the disease in the U s. is expected to increase to 15 million in 2050,
from nearly 6 million today. The cost to treat people in the U s. with Alzheimer
and other dementias is expected to be $226 billion in 2015 alone, and could reach $1. 1 trillion in 2050 h
#Researchers Identify Protein That Opens the Door to Cell Death Findings could aid development of novel therapeutics for conditions ranging from heart failure and stroke to cancer and neurodegeneration.
The new study, appearing online September 17 in the journal Molecular Cell, suggests that blocking the door with a small molecule inhibitor could be key to the treatment of cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke
and the Center for Translational Medicine at Temple University School of medicine (TUSM), shows that the protein, spastic paraplegia 7 (SPG7), is the central component of the so-called permeability transition pore (PTP),
a protein complex in the mitochondrial membrane that mediates necrotic cell death (death caused by cell injury).
Much of what is known about the PTP comes from studies of mitochondria in disease. In pathological states, particularly those involving hypoxia (oxygen deficiency),
calcium and ROS accumulate within mitochondria, causing them to swell and prompting the PTP to open.
In the absence of disease, precisely how the PTP helps to mediate normal cellular physiology remains unclear.
Dr. Madesh also explained that the new findings could aid the development of novel therapeutics for conditions ranging from heart failure and stroke to cancer and neurodegeneration all of
which involve hypoxia and mitochondrial dysfunction to varying degrees. In these diseases if the PTP could be prevented from opening,
mitochondria could potentially continue to function, and cell death could be averted. With colleagues at TUSM, Dr. Madesh plans to explore the effects of SPG7 inhibitors in animals and, potentially, human patients t
The new study shows that this crosstalk is important not only for launching immune responses against tumors,
but also for regulating the inflammatory responses that may result in autoimmune diseases. his finding could be helpful for developing strategies to target cancer
and inflammatory diseases, said TSRI Assistant professor of Immunology Young Jun Kang, who collaborated on the study with the lab of TSRI Institute Professor Richard A. Lerner,
which protects the body from harmful mutations and infections. However, scientists had understood not fully RIPK3 role in the immune system.
the immune cells that play dual roles in the development of autoimmune diseases and the destruction of cancers.
scientists may be able to develop ways to better control NKTS to attack tumors. The new study also suggests there may be a way to intervene in the pathway to block inflammation.
implying a role for RIPK3 in autoimmune diseases. Kang said future studies will focus on understanding the details of this new signaling pathway,
possibly paving the way for new therapies that can either hone the pathway cancer-killing role or reduce its role in inflammation
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