or MEG, is a noninvasive technique for investigating human brain activity for surgical planning or research,
and has been used in hospitals and universities for more than 30 years. It's just one of the many powerful technologies made possible by a tiny device called a SQUID, short for superconducting quantum interference device.
Scientists at the Univ. of Nebraska Medical center designed a new delivery system for these drugs that,
Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine. While current HIV treatments involve pills that are taken daily, the new regimens'long-lasting effects suggest that HIV treatment could be administered perhaps once or twice per year.
thereby prolonging its therapeutic effect.""The chemical marriage between URMC-099 and antiretroviral drug nanoformulations could increase drug longevity,
"We are excited about pursing this research for the treatment and eradication of HIV infections.""The two therapies were tested together in laboratory experiments using human immune cells
and in mice that were engineered to have a human immune system. Gendelman and Gelbard believe that the nanoformulation technology helps keep the protease inhibitor in white blood cells longer
Gelbard, director of UR's Center for Neural development and Disease, developed URMC-099 to treat HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders or HAND,
as any patient prescribed URMC-099 would also be taking antiretroviral therapy. The goal was to determine
"Our ultimate hope is that we're able to create a therapy that could be given much less frequently than the daily therapy that is required today,
reduce side effects and help people manage the disease, because they won't have to think about taking medication every day. a
#Snake venom helps hydrogels stop the bleeding A nanofiber hydrogel infused with snake venom may be the best material to stop bleeding quickly, according to Rice Univ. scientists.
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. t interesting that you can take something so deadly
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 extensive development of injectable hydrogel scaffolds that help wounds heal
What we did was combine it with the hydrogel wee been working on for a long time. e think SB50 has great potential to stop surgical bleeding, particularly in difficult cases in
Those results raised concerns about the use of CRISPR technology in studying human diseases. As a potential solution
Now, a team of researchers from Duke university have shown that these gene-controlling methods are capable of the high degree of precision required for basic science and medical research.
and potentially treating human diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative conditions and diabetes, which can be driven by mutations in control regions of the genome.
and fix the root causes of many diseases. It could also help researchers understand and change how different people respond to drugs.
how those switches differ between individuals and the implications of these insights for human traits and diseases.
Crawford, associate professor of pediatrics, has spent more than a decade developing techniques to identify control regions across the genome
a team of bioengineers at Rice Univ. and surgeons at the Univ. of Pennsylvania have created an implant with an intricate network of blood vessels that points toward a future of growing replacement tissues and organs for transplantation.
or weeks to grow in the lab prior to surgery. The new study was performed by a research team led by Jordan Miller, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice,
and Pavan Atluri, assistant professor of surgery at Penn. The study showed that blood flowed normally through test constructs that were connected surgically to native blood vessels.
In this study, we are taking the first step toward applying an analogy from transplant surgery to 3-D printed constructs we make in the lab. iller
and his team thought long-term about what the needs would be for transplantation of large tissues made in the laboratory. hat a surgeon needs
in order to do transplant surgery isn just a mass of cells; the surgeon needs a vessel inlet
and an outlet that can be connected directly to arteries and veins, he said. Bioengineering graduate student Samantha Paulsen and research technician Anderson Ta worked together to develop a proof-of-concept construct small silicone gel about the size of a small candy gummy bearsing 3
but they have some of the key features relevant for a transplant surgeon, Miller said. e created a construct that has one inlet and one outlet,
which are about 600 to 800 um. ollaborating surgeons at Penn in Atluri group connected the inlet
and unobstructed for up to three hours. his study provides a first step toward developing a transplant model for tissue engineering where the surgeon can directly connect arteries to an engineered tissue,
"Today's announcement presents a major environmental, social and public health opportunity for the U s, . and we're proud to be part of a national effort to reduce the food that goes into landfills."
#Brain training app could help people with schizophrenia Scientists at Cambridge university said tests on a small number of patients who played the game over four weeks found they had improvements in memory and learning.
Schizophrenia is a long-term mental health condition that causes a range of psychological symptoms, ranging from changes in behavior through to hallucinations and delusions.
While some psychotic symptoms can be treated reasonably well with medication patients often still have debilitating problems with memory
and cognitive function, meaning they struggle to get back to work or stay in education. There is increasing evidence that computer-assisted training can help people with schizophrenia overcome some of their symptoms, with better outcomes in their daily lives.
This study, published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, found that 22 patients who played the memory game made significantly fewer errors
which doctors use to rate the social, occupational and psychological functioning of adults. Importantly, the patients also said they enjoyed the game
since lack of motivation is a common feature of schizophrenia.""We need a way of treating the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as problems with episodic memory,
but slow progress is being made toward developing a drug treatment, "said Barbara Sahakian from the department of psychiatry at Cambridge university."
"This proof-of-concept study...demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have failed so far.
was approved for oral use as a prescription adjunctive therapy in the treatment of epilepsy, the company said on Monday.
In the healthcare industry, these printers are used by dentists to create replicas of jaws and teeth as well as some finished dental implants and orthopedic surgeons have tested them to make customized hip replacements.
British scientists have used also 3d printing to create personalized replica models of cancerous parts of the body to allow doctors to target tumors more precisely y
#Eco-friendly 3d printed supercar Kevin Czinger of Divergent Microfactories has spent most of his career in the automotive industry.
The stickers are attached to the body using a medical-grade adhesive that can be peeled easily off after use without hurting the skin.
#This special chair is saving the lives of hundreds of dogs This might be the most regal solution for a medical problem wee ever seen:
#Non-Genetic Cancer Mechanism Found Cancer can be caused solely by protein imbalances within cells, a study of ovarian cancer has found.
The discovery is a major breakthrough because genetic aberrations have been seen as the main cause of almost all cancer.
The research in Oncogene demonstrates that protein imbalance is a powerful prognostic tool, indicating whether or not patients are likely to respond to chemotherapy
and whether a tumor is likely to spread to other sites. The findings also open the possibility of new therapies aimed at measuring
and preventing dangerous imbalances in cells. The research led by scientists at the University of Leeds and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, focused on the"Akt pathway,"a signaling pathway within cells that drives cancer formation and the spread of cancers
through the body. Under normal conditions, the cell receives external signals through a cell wall-bound receptor (FGFR2 in this study.
A conventional approach to diagnosing this cancer would be to look for genetic modification of the receptor
In this way, an imbalance in the amount of the two proteins can lead to cell proliferation and cancer formation.
whether you have a predisposition to cancer and, ultimately, use a precision medicine-based approach to develop a therapeutic approach.
Our study demonstrates that genetic screening alone is not enough.""Dr Zahra Timsah, University Academic Fellow at the University of Leeds'School of Molecular and Cellular biology, who was the lead researcher on the study,
which cancer can occur. We found that in cells where Grb2 is depleted, FGFR2 was vulnerable to Plc?
and found that Grb2 depletion results in the development of multiple tumors in the vicinity of a primary tumour,
indicating that protein imbalance can have a role in metastasis, the spread of a cancer through the body.
1 was predictive of the progress of ovarian cancers in patients. Measuring the levels of the proteins in patient tissues followed by database analysis of clinical information from The Cancer Genome Atlas
and other sources revealed that a high level of Grb2 relative to Plc? 1 and FGFR2 was associated with a significantly more favorable prognosis than patients with elevated levels of Plc?
It involved researchers from the University of Leeds, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the UT Health Science Center at Houston t
#Normalization Of Testosterone Level After Testosterone Replacement Therapy Patients with low testosterone levels who have gone then on to have testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) could be at lower risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attack or stroke,
In the study, researchers from Kansas city VA Medical centre in Kansas city, USA, examined the effect of TRT on cardiovascular outcomes by comparing incidences of heart attack, stroke,
Dr Rajat S. Barua, the corresponding author of the paper and a cardiologist, said:""With such widespread and ever increasing use of TRT,
#Researchers Discover Key Mechanism To Emergence Of Deadly Strep Bacteria The incidence of serious strep infections has risen dramatically in the last three decades,
a virus infected the strep bacteria creating a deadly strain of lesh-eatingbacteria that has evolved to produce serious human infections worldwide. ust like a computer virus might come in
. UCSD Professor of Pediatrics and Pharmacy. he consequences of this event on human health are still being felt three decades later.
The research focuses on the major human pathogen group A Streptococcus (trep) Among the most important of all human infectious disease agents,
strep is responsible for a wide range of diseases, ranging from simple throat and skin infections to life-threatening invasive conditions such as necrotizing fasciitis (lesh-eating disease and toxic shock syndrome.
Strep is estimated to cause over 700 million infections each year; over 650,000 of these are dangerous invasive forms.
The UCSD-Australian research team sought to identify what special characteristics make the invasive M1t1 strep clone so virulent for humans.
They observed that during the early stages of a simple skin infection, a small subpopulation of the strep bacteria hijack a protein called plasminogen from the human bloodstream.
the human immune system normally would clear a localized infection. But in the case of the M1t1 strep clone, natural selection instead favors the emergence of the invasive mutants.
can generate hypervirulent bacterial variants with an increased risk of producing invasive infections, said lead author Mark Walker, Ph d. a Professor of Biological sciences at the University of Wollongong. n the case of the invasive strep clone,
a bacteriophage provided the bacterium a genetic advantage that turned a relatively benign pathogen into a potential deadly disease agent.
When neutrophils of the immune system are summoned to clear a simple strep infection, they apply a natural selective pressure favoring the genetic mutation. he mutation allows the bacteria
and other severe forms of strep infection, said Walker. The research team used genetically engineered mice expressing human plasminogen
then spread throughout the body to produce a fatal infection. When the researchers eliminated the single bacteriophage gene encoding the neutrophil resistance factor
and could no longer spread to produce severe infection. Ancestral strains of the M1t1 strep, isolated before the acquisition of the bacteriophage,
also failed to undergo the mutation to produce serious disease. The collaborative study was initiated during Prof.
Katrin Dinkla and Gurshan Chhatwal of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany;
and John Buchanan, UCSD Assistant Research Scientist in Pediatrics
#Spontaneous Rare Mutations Cause Half Of Autism Researchers are saying a new analysis of data on the genetics of autism spectrum disorder disputes a commonly held belief that autism results from the chance combinations
of commonly occurring gene mutations, which are otherwise harmless. They find, instead, further evidence to suggest that devastating"ultra-rare"mutations of genes that they classify as"vulnerable"play a causal role in roughly half of all autism spectrum disorder cases.
The vulnerable genes to which they refer harbor what they call an LGD, or likely gene-disruption.
a Cold Spring Harbotr Laboratory assistant professor and on faculty at the New york Genome Center, finds that"autism genes"-i e.,
when mutated, may contribute to an ASD diagnosis-tend to have fewer mutations than most genes in the human gene pool.
and give rise to autism, usually don't remain in the gene pool for more than one generation before they are,
This is because those born with severe autism rarely reproduce. The team's data helps the research community prioritize which genes with LGDS are most likely to play a causal role in ASD.
The team pares down a list of about 500 likely causal genes to slightly more than 200 best"candidate"autism genes.
and Dr. Kenny Ye, a statistician at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. They predicted that unaffected mothers are"carriers"of devastating mutations that are transmitted preferentially to children affected with severe ASD.
#Drug Disarms Deadly C. Difficile Bacteria Without Destroying Healthy Gut Flora Scientists successfully defeated a dangerous intestinal pathogen, Clostridium difficile,
C. difficile is responsible for more than 250,000 hospitalizations and 15,000 deaths per year in the United states, costing the country more than $4 billion in health-care expenses,
said the study's senior author, Matthew Bogyo, Phd, professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology at Stanford university School of medicine.
By not aiming to kill the pathogen with antibiotics, scientists were able to avoid wiping out sizeable numbers of beneficial gut microbes.
"Unlike antibiotics--which are both the front-line treatment for C. difficile infection and, paradoxically, possibly its chief cause--the drug didn't kill the bacteria,
Infection often recurs About one in 20 people, and possibly many more, harbor C. difficile in their gut, said study co-author Justin Sonnenburg, Phd, professor of microbiology and immunology,
Usually, the pathogen causes no harm, he said. But in those with immune systems weakened by age,
Plus, the pathogen can dehydrate and condense into shrunken, long-lived spores, making it difficult to get rid of.
Most C. difficile infections originate in settings such as hospitals, clinics and assisted living facilities. Making matters worse,
the infection recurs despite antibiotic treatment. When it does succeed, antibiotics in eliminating it only 25 percent of the time.
About 7 percent of infected people die within 30 days of diagnosis. Treatments for C. difficile infection include fecal transplants,
as well as in neurological changes. Bogyo's group has extensive expertise in studying the activity of proteases, proteins capable of slicing up other proteins.
with symptoms ranging from severe diarrhea to intestinal lesions to death. Bogyo's team has developed ways of conducting high-throughput screens of small molecules to speedily test their ability to inhibit
Helping the good guys"We figured that a molecule that interfered with the pathogen's virulence could prevent inflammation
ebselen also has been tested in clinical trials for chemotherapy-related hearing loss and for stroke. Preclinical testing provided evidence that ebselen is safe and tolerable,
and it has shown no significant adverse effects in ensuing clinical trials. Bogyo's team conducted another test to see how ebselen affected human cells.
whose lab is adept at using mouse models of C. difficile infection. The researchers incubated Toxin B in a solution either containing
The upshot of this and other experiments conducted by Bogyo's team is that using ebselen to disable a toxin in C. difficile was enough to significantly reduce the clinical symptoms of the infection and block the persistent gut damage in mice e
#Hand And Arm Movement To Quadriplegic Patients Restored A pioneering surgical technique has restored some hand
and arm movement to patients immobilized by spinal cord injuries in the neck, reports a new study.
however, instead of trains on a track, the surgeons redirect peripheral nerves in a quadriplegic's arms and hands by connecting healthy nerves to the injured nerves.
The researchers assessed outcomes of nerve-transfer surgery in nine quadriplegic patients with spinal cord injuries in the neck.
"Physically, nerve-transfer surgery provides incremental improvements in hand and arm function. However, psychologically, these small steps are huge for a patient's quality of life,
assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at at Washington University School of medicine in St louis."One of my patients told me he was able to pick up a noodle off his chest
'Before the surgery, he couldn't move his fingers. It meant a lot for him to clean off that noodle without anyone helping him."
Ultimately, medical professionals hope to discover a way to restore full movement to the estimated 250,000 people in the United states living with spinal cord injuries.
More than half of such injuries involve the neck. However, until a cure is found, progress in regaining basic independence in routine tasks is important.
Indeed one of the most humbling effects of spine damage is the inability to manage bladder or bowel functions."
"People with spinal cord injuries cannot control those functions because their brains can't talk to the nerves in the lower body,
who performs surgeries at Barnes-Jewish Hospital?.""Patients often can't insert a catheter to empty their bladders
But after this surgery, one of my patients was able to independently catheterize himself, which he hadn't been able to do since his accident over a decade ago.
"Nerve-transfer surgery has been very successful in helping me because it restored triceps function and improvement in my grip,"said Bavlsik, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the School of medicine."
"I am extremely grateful for this surgery.""Surgeons at Washington University pioneered nerve-transfer surgery.
Developed about 25 years ago by the study's senior author, Susan E. Mackinnon, MD, director of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the School of medicine,
the technique initially was performed to restore movement in the extremities of patients who had injured peripheral nerves
and lost the ability to move a foot or an arm. But in the past five years, the same technique has been used to restore limited movement to patients with spinal cord injuries.
Quadriplegics from Colorado, Michigan and Arizona, among other states have traveled to St louis for the surgery.
The operation can be performed even years after a spinal cord injury. It usually takes four hours,
and most patients go home the next morning. Since surgeons connect working nerves in the upper arms to a patient's damaged nerves in their arms and hands,
the technique targets patients with injuries at the C6 or C7 vertebra, the lowest bones in the neck.
It typically does not help patients who have lost all arm function due to higher injuries in vertebrae C1 through C5.
Bypassing the spinal cord surgeons reroute healthy nerves sitting above the injury site, usually in the shoulders or elbows, to paralyzed nerves in the hand or arm.
Once a connection is established, patients undergo extensive physical therapy to train the brain to recognize the new nerve signals,
"The gains after nerve-transfer surgery are said not instantaneous Mackinnon, director of the School of medicine's Center for Nerve Injury and Paralysis,
and the Sydney M. Shoenberg Jr. and Robert H. Shoenberg Professor of Surgery.""But once established, the surgery's benefits provide a way to let individuals with spinal cord injuries improve their daily lives."
"Another patient benefiting from the nerve-transfer technique is a 72-year-old right-handed man who had the surgery two years after he suffered a cervical spinal cord injury.
The doctors took healthy tissue from the patient's upper arm, connected it to a paralyzed nerve that controlled his ability to pinch
and then plugged it into a working nerve that restored the man's ability to flex his thumb and index finger.
This allowed him to feed himself and to hold a water bottle to maintain hydration, which,
in turn, reduced his risk of developing urinary tract infections and has bolstered his overall health h
#Rare Variant Discovered Through Deep Whole-genome Sequencing Of 1, 070 Japanese People A research group at Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization (Tommo) has constructed successfully a Japanese population reference panel (1kjpn), from the genome information of 1,
%and its value for identifying causal rare variants of complex human disease phenotypes in genetic association studies.
and study of the genes related to the physical constitution and diseases that are peculiar to the Japanese.
It has yielded so far important results that can accelerate the research of personalized healthcare and medicine.
which is the second most common cancer and accounts for over one-quarter of all cancer-related deaths.
"The scientists demonstrated that blocking PEPCK in cancer cells could slow tumor growth in mice. Alternative fuels for cancer cells The group also found evidence of increased PEPCK levels in tissues from lung-cancer patients."
"The fact that PEPCK levels are elevated in some cases of human lung cancer suggests that this enzyme may play a role in the human disease,
"adds Russell Jones, Associate professor of Physiology at Mcgill University's Goodman Cancer Research Centre. The study suggests that nutrient availability in the organism,
and other nutrients, can impact cancer progression.""Our work shows that cancers can use alternative fuel sources to help drive their growth under stressful conditions,"notes Prof.
Jones."This remarkable flexibility is part of what makes cancer so deadly, but offers hope in finding new therapies.""
""Understanding the mechanisms used by cancer cells to adapt to their environment creates new possibilities to treat this deadly disease,
"explains Alexey Sergushichev, bioinformatician and Phd student at the Department of Computer technologies at ITMO University."
"We hope our work on PEPCK and the metabolic alterations in lung cancer cells will lead to innovations in treatment for non-small cell lung cancer, one of the most deadly types of cancer
#Artificial skin That Can Send Pressure sensation To Brain cell Stanford engineers have created a plastic"skin"that can detect how hard it is being pressed
Assessing just three features of a common kind of testicular cancer-called non-seminomatous germ cell tumor-can identify those at most at risk of relapse even where there is no evidence of tumor spread.
The researchers believe the test could be used in the clinic to make decisions about which patients should be given chemotherapy.
Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, analyzed 177 tumor samples from patients with stage I non-seminomatous tumors enrolled in clinical trials through the Medical Research Council (MRC
Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR found that three different features of the tumors were important indicators of relapse risk:
the levels of a molecule called CXCL12, the percentage of the tumor with an appearance of cancer stem cells and whether or not blood vessels were present in the tumor.
They scored tumors based on these features, and found that combining scores could divide patients up into three different risk groups based on how likely patients were to suffer a relapse of the disease within two years.
It is rare for a patient to relapse from testicular cancer beyond this time. They found that the vast majority of patients were in the low-risk group-where 94.3 percent of patients were relapse free for two years.
Testicular germ cell tumors are the most common solid malignant tumor in young Caucasian men. Patients diagnosed with early-stage disease face a choice between monitoring with treatment
if relapse does occur or upfront chemotherapy with its associated long-term side-effects. Predicting who does
therefore important to minimize treatment in this largely curable disease. Study leader Professor Janet Shipley Professor of Cancer Molecular Pathology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said,
"Our research has led to the development of a test that can detect patients that will benefit from treatment up front
Approaches such as this to minimize chemotherapy are particularly important for cancers like testicular cancer, which affect young adults who could live with the side-effects for decades."
"Professor Robert Huddart, Professor of Urological Cancer at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Consultant at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said,
"Patients with stage 1 non-seminomatous germ cell tumors have to make a difficult choice of
We now need to test this prognostic index in larger groups of men in the clinic"The work was funded by the MRC with support from the National Cancer Research Institute Testis Cancer Clinical Studies Group,
and is published in Clinical Cancer Research h
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