Researchers at the Center for Molecular biology of Heidelberg University, the German Cancer Research center and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies collaborated on the project,
which we see in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and even in aging processes,"explains Prof.
Dr. Bernd Bukau, Director of the Center for Molecular biology of Heidelberg University (ZMBH), who is also a researcher at the German Cancer Research center (DKFZ.
"The formation of protein aggregates in different organs of the human body is associated with a large number of diseases,
"Dissolving protein aggregates is a critical step in recycling defective proteins and providing protection against stress-induced cell damage.
and develop novel strategies for therapeutic interventions. In addition to scientists from the ZMBH, DKFZ and HITS, researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology in Berlin, the Northwestern University in Illinois (USA) and The swiss Federal Institute of technology in Zurich (Switzerland) also participated in the work k
which has seen massive population decline over the last two decades from devil facial tumour disease.
#Cheaper, faster, more accurate test to identify gene defects in heart patients For the subset of heart patients whose illness isn't caused by a lifetime of cigarettes, trans fats or high glycemic foods,
In work that could advance precision health, Kitchener Wilson, MD, Phd, instructor of pathology, and Joseph Wu, MD, Phd, professor of cardiovascular medicine and of radiology, teamed up with a group of genome-sequencing specialists to develop the new technique:
a better way to test cardiac patients for any genes that might be causing their problems.
This approach--surveying a small subgroup of relevant genes instead of the whole genome--is used already to test for other diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.
But cystic fibrosis involves only one gene albeit with hundreds of variants.""By comparison, the heart diseases are more challenging just
because there are so many genes to sequence, "said Wilson.""To do that accurately has been difficult and, until now,
older cardiac patient who comes in with chest pain, the result of a lifetime of poor diet and little exercise."
such as surgical interventions. But what if a 30-year-old woman comes in with chest pain and her doctors can't find any obvious reason why she should be having heart problems at such a young age?"
"said Wu, who is also the director of Stanford's Cardiovascular Institute. That could be the moment for doctors to break out the complementary long padlock probes for inherited heart disease.
Complementary long padlock probes, or clpps, were developed at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. These simple probes accurately target specific parts of the genome
and can be made in large batches at low cost. Because of their simplicity, they are customized easily to target different genes.
Wilson and Wu spearheaded the effort to put clpps to work diagnosing cardiac diseases. A preliminary test of the assay on blood samples and some skin samples from 29 participants from families with inherited heart disease validated the clpp approach
the researchers said. The heart disease clpp assay was cheaper, faster and more accurate than whole-genome assays.
The Stanford team next plans to test the technique on a group of 200-300 patients.
"The assay will shorten the time it takes to diagnose difficult or unusual heart disease cases,
"Suppose you have a 60-year-old patient who comes in with heart failure, "he said."
and we find he has no history of heart attack or other issues, and yet the heart is not performing well.
and find the man's illness has a genetic cause, such as dilated cardiomyopathy, we now have both a cause and a diagnosis,
and we can initiate treatment right away.""Avoiding a'fishing expedition'"Not having that result delays diagnosis
and increases costs because you're going through a whole bunch of tests--sometimes it becomes a fishing expedition,
"But perhaps the most important benefit is that you can give the patient accurate answers about his or her disease."
"The development of the new test is an example of Stanford Medicine's focus on precision health,
and physicians to better predict individual risks for specific diseases, develop approaches to early detection and prevention,
#Better way to engineer therapeutic proteins into antibodies Some proteins exist so fleetingly in the bloodstream that they can't be given effectively as therapies.
and diagnostic compounds that would not have been possible otherwise--including powerful hormone-based therapies.""Unlike prior approaches to this design problem,
First identified by Friedman in 1994 as a satiety hormone that switches off hunger, leptin initially failed as an obesity therapy,
However, the hormone has drawn renewed interest in recent years as a possible basis for treating obesity--in conjunction with leptin-sensitizing compounds--and also diabetes.
Leptin on its own and in an unmodified state isn't ideal as a therapy because it doesn't last long in the bloodstream."
and function properly, the researchers used a selection system that they had developed previously for finding therapeutic antibodies in large antibody libraries.
and serve a greater number of silos with the same ozonation system providing great versatility in removing pathogens from stored grain.
which lowers glucose levels, triglycerides and hypertension. He also states that the benefits of the pomegranate are better than those of fruits like the cranberry, grapefruit, grape or black and green tea,
It also reduces some of the signs of metabolic syndrome as the index of circumference high blood pressure and triglyceride levels.
Also they administered five grams of powder per day to a group of people with diabetes, the equivalent of approximately two fruits,
"We hope this project will be useful to treat serious public health problems such as diabetes and obesity,"concludes the specialist s
But eventually those suppressed memories can cause debilitating psychological problems, such as anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder or dissociative disorders.
Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered for the first time the mechanism by which state-dependent learning renders stressful fear-related memories consciously inaccessible."
"said principal investigator Dr. Jelena Radulovic, the Dunbar Professor in Bipolar Disease at Northwestern University Feinberg School of medicine."
"This could eventually lead to new treatments for patients with psychiatric disorders for whom conscious access to their traumatic memories is needed
"It's difficult for therapists to help these patients, Radulovic said, because the patients themselves can't remember their traumatic experiences that are the root cause of their symptoms.
One kind, synaptic GABA receptors, works in tandem with glutamate receptors to balance the excitation of the brain in response to external events such as stress.
Extra-synaptic GABA receptors change the brain's state to make us aroused, sleepy, alert, sedated, inebriated or even psychotic.
The findings imply that in response to traumatic stress, some individuals, instead of activating the glutamate system to store memories,
The drug rerouted the processing of stress-related memories within the brain circuits so that they couldn't be accessed consciously d
but hopefully it will lead to medical applications. This gives us new opportunities to look at cell structures,
and whether there's any degradation of those structures in diseases.""Many diseases are caused either by an invading pathogen or degradation of a cell's internal structure.
Alzheimer's, for example, may be related to degradation of the cytoskeleton inside neurons.""The cytoskeleton system is comprised of a host of interacting subcellular structures and proteins,
Many mental disorders, including depression, schizophrenia and anxiety, affect neurotransmitter systems,"said Axel Brunger, the study's principal investigator.
and shared the 2013 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine. Thomas C. Südhof, a professor at the Stanford School of medicine and Howard hughes medical institute investigator who shared that 2013 Nobel prize with Rothman,
#Scientists uncover nuclear process in the brain that may affect disease Every brain cell has a nucleus,
may play a critical role in health and disease. The study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, was funded partially by the National institutes of health (NIH."
"Unexpectedly we may have discovered a hidden pathway to understanding how astrocytes respond to injury and control brain processes.
The pathway may be common to many brain diseases and we're just starting to follow it,
"said Katerina Akassoglou, Ph d.,a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute for Neurological disease, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San francisco,
including Alzheimer's disease and brain injury. Previous studies found that after brain injury astrocytes produce greater amounts of p75 neurotrophin receptor (p75ntr), a protein that helps cells detect growth factors.
The cells also react to TGF-beta by changing their shapes and secreting proteins that alter neuronal activity.
Dr. Akassoglou's lab showed that eliminating the p75ntr gene prevented hydrocephalus in mice genetically engineered to have astrocytes that produce higher levels of TGF-beta.
Hydrocephalus is a disorder that fills the brain with excess cerebral spinal fluid. Eliminating the p75ntr gene also prevented astrocytes in the brains of the mice from forming scars after injuries and restored gamma oscillations
which are patterns of neuronal activity associated with learning and memory. The cell nucleus is a ball of chromosomes wrapped in a protective fatty membrane.
and will continue to study how the nuclear pore complex controls neuronal development and disease
"said the trial's co-primary investigator, Sheri D. Weiser, MD, MPH, UCSF associate professor of medicine at the UCSF Division of HIV, Infectious diseases and Global Medicine at San francisco General
Hospital. In Sub-saharan africa, where 24.7 million people are living with HIV (71 percent of all people living with HIV),
and food insecure people with HIV are less able to take anti-HIV therapies, make clinic visits,
food insecurity gets worse due to loss of economic activity and productivity, loss of social support due to HIV stigma and the costs of medical care."
"We have the biomedical tools to treat and prevent HIV, but we need interventions like this that combine healthcare with development,
and address food insecurity, poverty and disempowerment if we are to achieve the UNAIDS goal of ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030."
Participants were HIV positive individuals between 18 and 49 years old on anti-HIV therapy
"said the trial's co-primary investigator, Craig R. Cohen, MD, MPH, UCSF professor in the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive health in the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences.
and integrated disease and pest management. Financial training focused on record keeping, along with savings and investments."
immune components that help orchestrate the body's response to pathogens and other invaders. This mechanism may act as a firewall,
However, from a clinical standpoint, this discovery could lead to more effective cancer immunotherapies, better drugs for autoimmune conditions and new ways to expedite recovery from sepsis.
The research online July 28, appears in today's print edition of the journal Immunity.""There's a three-signal process to activate T cells
that approach could damage a patient's ability to fight off pathogens. While immunotherapies might fight cancer,
they may also open the door to opportunistic infections.""This was shown in mice which, after receiving systemic immunotherapy,
had trouble mounting a primary T-cell response. The finding was confirmed in samples from patients receiving high-dose interleukin 2 therapy to treat metastatic melanoma."
"We need to be very careful because immunotherapy could be generating both short-term gain and long-term loss,"noted lead author William Murphy, professor and acting chair in the UC Davis Department of Dermatology."
"The patients who were receiving immunotherapy were totally shut down, which shows how profoundly we were suppressing the immune system."
"In addition to illuminating how T cells respond to cancer immunotherapy, the study also provides insights into autoimmune disorders.
The researchers believe this CD4 paralysis mechanism could play a role in preventing autoimmunity, a hypothesis they supported by testing immunotherapy in a multiple sclerosis model.
By shutting down CD4 T cells, immune stimulation prevented an autoimmune response. This offers the potential to paralyze the immune system to prevent autoimmunity
"Transplant patients go on immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives, but if we could safely induce paralysis just prior to surgery,
it's possible that patients could develop tolerance, "said Sckisel. CD4 paralysis may also be coopted by pathogens, such as HIV,
which could use this chronic inflammation response to disable the immune system.""This really highlights the importance of CD4 T cells,
"For elderly people who have flu or pneumonia, their immune systems are activated, but maybe they can't fight anything else,
we may be able to better fight infection
#Engineers identify how to keep surfaces dry underwater for months Imagine staying dry underwater for months.
#New aortic heart valve does not require open surgery A new aortic heart valve does not require open heart surgery.
The system is much less invasive than open surgery. The device is called the Corevalve Evolut R System.
The system is much less invasive than open surgery. The newly designed system enables the physician to recapture
and design of the device, is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.
Dr. Lewis is an interventional cardiologist and a professor in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Tuchek said the unique design of the Corevalve Evolut R System llows for superior control during deployment of the Corevalve,
Loyola director of Interventional Cardiology. here no question that this is a superior product, Dr. Leya said. he technology is a game changer for patients with aortic stenosis.
Dr. Leya is a professor in the Division of Cardiology of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of medicine.
which was published in the New england Journal of Medicine. The study found that patients who received the device had significantly lower mortality than heart valve patients who underwent open-heart surgery.
Loyola dedicated implanting team includes two cardiovascular surgeons (Drs. Tuchek and Mamdouh Bakhos, MD) and two interventional cardiologists (Drs.
Leya and Lewis). The team is participating in ongoing Corevalve trials and leads the state in implanting the device.
The improved device now is approved FDA for patients judged to be at high or extremely high risk for conventional open-heart aortic valve surgery (with an estimated 30-day mortality rate of at least 15 percent.
The trial is called SURTAVI (SURGICAL vs. Transcatheter Aortic valve Implantation. SURTAVI is being conducted in 76 sites in eight countries for patients who do not qualify for the transcatheter valves commercially.
Dr. Bakhos is chair of the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. For more information,
Symptoms include fatigue, dizziness, chest pain/pressure, heart murmurs, shortness of breath during activity, heart palpitations and fainting.
Aortic stenosis can lead to heart failure and death. About 100,000 people in the United states have aortic stenosis a
55 patients with atypical moles agreed to have monitored their skin by researchers at Pisa University Hospital using a laser Doppler system.
which means that melanoma is identified in all cases where it is ruled present, and out in 90.9%of cases where it is not."
"Skin malignant melanoma is a particularly aggressive cancer associated with quick blood vessel growth which means early diagnosis is vital for a good prognosis.
The current diagnostic tools of examination by doctors followed by biopsy inevitably leads to many unnecessary invasive excisions."
"This simple, accurate, in vivo distinction between malignant melanoma and atypical moles may lead to a substantial reduction in the number of biopsies currently undertaken
#Turning breath into words: New device unveiled to give paralysis victims a voice A new device
which transforms paralysis victims'breath 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,
the prototype analyses changes in breathing patterns and converts'breath signals'into words using pattern recognition software and an analogue-to-digital converter.
and Dr Kaddour Bouazza-Marouf, Reader in Mechatronics in Medicine, said the device learns from its user,
The academics have been joined in the project by Dr Atul Gaur, Consultant Anaesthetist at Glenfield Hospital."
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
Robert is no stranger to AAC devices, having already invented a prototype called the m (eye) DAQ--a low cost digital letter board that allows victims of paralysis to communicate via eye blinks or finger movements s
and decide which ones to implant to have the best chance of success, "said Dr Melanie White e
#New synthetic tumor environments make cancer research more realistic University of Illinois researchers have developed a new technique to create a cell habitat of squishy fluids, called hydrogels,
and grow into a tumor. They were able to observe how differently cells act in the three-dimensional, gel-like environment,
and expensive mouse avatars that are created by injecting human tumor cells into mice.""This is really the first time that it's been demonstrated that you can use a rapid methodology like this to spatially define cancer cells and macrophages,
Can therapeutics be used to disrupt that communication? What sets the team's model apart from mouse avatars
and finds out they've been diagnosed with some sort of solid tumor, "Kilian said.""You take a biopsy of those cells,
you put it into this device, grow them and see how they respond to different treatments
Scientists can use the NAPA to determine changes in cellular metabolite level distributions and metabolic noise upon environmental stress
the research group has determined the metabolic response of individual yeast cells to oxidative stress. Additionally, the NAPA platform has shown the capabilities to analyze a wide variety of biomolecules
have widespread implications for a broad range of industrial, scientific and medical applications in which enzymes are used."
who also serves as a Scientific Director for the Chicago Biomedical Consortium.""In this paper, we demonstrated their efficacy on sugars,
such as the preparation of foods, dietary supplements, therapeutics and chemical materials. A major goal in biotechnology is to modify enzyme activity
we could be taking samples of different components of a cancer patient's mammary gland and building a model of their tissue to use as a personalized drug screening platform.
But in diseases such as breast cancer, the breakdown of this order has been associated with the rapid growth and spread of tumors."
it sets the stage for cancer.""But studying how the cells of complex tissues like the mammary gland self-organize,
and break down in disease has been a challenge to researchers. The living organism is often too complex to identify the specific causes of a particular cellular behavior.
but also to experiment with specifically adding in a single cell with a known cancer mutation to different parts of the organoid to observe its effects.
or more cells expressing low levels of the cancer gene Rasg12v affected the cells around them.
or structural changes in mammary glands can lead to the breakdown of tissue architecture associated with tumors that metastasize,
and the UCSF Program in Breakthrough Biomedical Research h
#Alzheimer disease: Overlooked for 30 years, there is a new kid on the block Alzheimer's disease is associated with the appearance of characteristic neurotoxic protein aggregates in various regions in the brain.
Chemical analysis of these insoluble deposits reveals that they are made up of a family of short protein fragments,
referred to as beta-amyloid peptides, which are derived from a precursor protein called APP by the sequential action of two enzymes.
An international team of researchers led by Christian Haass (Professor of Metabolic Biochemistry at LMU and Speaker for the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Munich) and Dr. Michael Willem (LMU) has made now a discovery
which extends this picture of the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease, and has potentially far-reaching implications for our understanding of the condition:"
"A second mode of APP cleavage exists, which involves a previously unknown cleavage and generates an alternative peptide,
transmit neurodegeneration Multiple System Atrophy (MSA), a neurodegenerative disorder with similarities to Parkinson's disease, is caused by a newly discovered type of prion,
akin to the misfolded proteins involved in incurable progressive brain diseases such Creutzfeldt-jakob disease (CJD), according to two new research papers led by scientists at UC San francisco. The findings suggest new approaches to developing treatments for MSA,
which currently has no cure, but also raise a potential concern for clinicians or scientists who come in contact with MSA tissue.
The new findings mark the first discovery of a human disease caused by a new prion in 50 years
since work at the National institutes of health in the 1960s showed that human brain tissue infected with CJD could transmit neurodegeneration to chimpanzees.
It wasn't until 1982 that UCSF's Stanley Prusiner, MD isolated the causative agent for a related disease called scrapie,
found in sheep, and characterized it as a prion, for"infectious protein.""He then determined that the same prion protein caused bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE),
and spread disease was dismissed by the scientific community, as a tenet of modern biology held that only viruses
and living microbes such as bacteria could transmit disease. But subsequent work by Prusiner and others led to an understanding of how prions function at a molecular level.
Prusiner, a professor of neurology and director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases (IND) at UCSF
was awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work in 1997. Prion researchers have suggested
since that similar misfolded proteins may contribute to more common forms of neurodegeneration, such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease."
"said UCSF's Kurt Giles, DPHIL, associate professor of neurology, IND researcher and senior author on the second of the two new studies."
First described in 1960, MSA is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is rare but more common than CJD:
Its early symptoms can be mistaken for those of Parkinson's disease, and include movement and balance problems,
Unlike Parkinson's patients, who often live 10 to 20 years after their diagnosis, MSA patients typically die within five to 10 years
As in Parkinson's disease, neurodegeneration in MSA is accompanied by a buildup of clumps of alpha-synuclein protein within brain cells.
Both MSA and PD can arise sporadically in families with no history of the disease,
such as cellular stress and the aging process also are thought to make misfoldings more likely. The new work has its origins in experiments conducted in Prusiner's lab in 2013,
showing that samples of brain tissue from two human MSA patients were able to transmit the disease to a mouse model for Parkinson's disease,
the Massachusetts Alzheimer's disease Research center in Boston, the Parkinson's UK Brain Bank at Imperial College London,
When exposed to human MSA tissue, the mice developed neurodegeneration. In addition, the team found that the brains of infected mice contained abnormally high levels of insoluble human alpha-synuclein,
and that infected mouse brain tissue could itself spread the disease to other mice. The discovery that alpha-synuclein prions can transmit MSA raises a public health concern about treatments
and research that involve contact with brain tissue from neurodegeneration patients, because standard disinfection techniques that kill microbes do not eliminate the Prp prions that cause CJD.
Whether the same challenges hold for alpha-synuclein prions in MSA remains to be determined. The authors write that clinicians
and researchers should adopt much more stringent safety protocols when dealing with tissue from patients with MSA and other neurodegenerative diseases, many
of which they believe may also be caused by prions. For instance, MSA is diagnosed frequently initially as Parkinson's disease,
which is treated often with deep-brain stimulation. The disease could potentially be transmitted to other patients
if deep-brain stimulation equipment is reused.""You can't kill a protein, "Giles said.""And it can stick tightly to stainless steel,
People are living longer and likely getting more brain surgeries. There could be undiagnosed neurodegenerative diseases that
--if they're caused by prions--mean infection could be a real worry.""Unlike the danger of BSE from contaminated beef, the researchers stress that there is no apparent risk of infection by MSA prions outside of specialized medical or research settings.
In the earlier of the group's two PNAS papers published this month, Woerman led a research team in the development of a rapid new method to test prion transmission using human cell cultures.
The team demonstrated that it only takes 4 days for human MSA tissue to infect cultured cells with alpha-synuclein mutations,
in contrast to the 120 days it takes for the disease to spread to mouse models."
"The challenge of studying neurodegeneration is that it's a disease of aging, "Woerman said."
"You have to let the mouse models develop for such a long time that research on cures is really slow to progress.
They presented their findings Aug 26 at the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Milan, Italy.
The researchers also pointed out that this technique does not pose any serious health risks. Since this technique is intended for applications in ultra low power communication systems
the transmitting power of the magnetic signals sent through the body is expected to be many times lower than that of MRI SCANNERS and wireless implant devices.
#Genetic cause of unknown disease uncovered Using modern high-tech methods, followed by thorough clinical, biochemical and molecular biological investigations,
and characterized the disease which is given the name RCDP5. The researchers believe that studies of the effect of the newly discovered genetic error will provide new insight into other diseases.
Arrayin 2004, professor Petter Strømme examined a child with congenital cataract, growth delay and symptoms from the brain, the peripheral nervous system,
and muscles as well as calcifications in cartilage tissue. The patient had two siblings with similar symptoms
Strømme assumed that the disease was caused by a defective gene inherited from the parents, whom he suspected were both carriers of the unknown disease causing mutation.
After clinical and diagnostic odyssey in the following years, and in depth discussions with colleagues internationally, the cause remained unknown.
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