#Building a biofuel-boosting Swiss Army knife Researchers at Michigan State university have built a molecular Swiss Army knife that streamlines the molecular machinery of cyanobacteria,
biotechnology and medical treatments.""The very simple design rules that we have discovered provide a powerful engineering tool for many biomedical
and biotechnology applications,"said Ashutosh Chilkoti, chair of the Department of Biomedical engineering at Duke.""We can now,
however, drugs could be encapsulated in protein cages that accumulate inside of a tumor and dissolve once heated.
they could break down into additional therapeutic agents. We can now design two things into one."
a two-drug combination discovered by UF Health researchers that inhibits tumors and kills cancer cells in mouse models.
For the first time, researchers have shown that a certain protein becomes overabundant in pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors, allowing them to thrive.
The findings were published recently in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute by a group that includes Rony A. François, an M d./Ph d. student working with Maria Zajac-Kaye, Ph d.
an associate professor in the UF College of Medicine's department of anatomy and cell biology. Finding new treatments is critical
because less than 5 percent of patients with pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors respond to everolimus, the most commonly used pharmaceutical,
Neuroendocrine tumors, which form in the hormone-making islet cells, account for 3 percent to 5 percent of pancreatic malignancies
and have a five-year survival rate of about 42 percent, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors are increasingly common, which medical experts and researches have attributed to better diagnostic imaging,
an aging population and heightened awareness of the disease stemming from the 2011 death of Apple Inc. cofounder Steve jobs. Zajac-Kaye's group discovered that a single protein is behind the process that allows pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors to thrive.
The protein, known as focal adhesion kinase, or FAK, activates an enzyme called AKT, which helps islet cells in the pancreas to survive.
But when islet cells begin turning into tumors, the FAK protein gets overproduced, researchers found.
This overabundance of the protein allows tumors to resist chemotherapy and evade efforts to kill them off.
After identifying FAK's role in tumor development François started looking for ways to get it in check.
One idea was finding something to make the antitumor drug everolimus more effective.""Once we figured out that FAK was started important,
Daily doses of the compound reduced tumor volume by about 50 percent after 25 days, they found.
While everolimus can extend some patients'lives by holding tumors in check, it does little to make them regress
The findings also have potential uses for most other types of solid tumors, including those affecting the lungs and ovaries,
this novel device is very suitable for applications such as soft robotics, wearable consumer electronics, smart medical prosthetic devices,
which are utilised already increasingly for monitoring critical parameters in biomedical applications, especially for those that may come in contact with human skin
With the rapid advancement of healthcare and biomedical technologies as well as consumer electronics, we are optimistic about new possibilities to commercialise our invention,
#Antimicrobial film for future implants The implantation of medical devices is not without risks. Bacterial or fungal infections can occur
and the body's strong immune response may lead to the rejection of the implant. Researchers at Unit 1121"Biomaterials and Bioengineering"(Inserm/Strasbourg university) have succeeded in creating a biofilm with antimicrobial, antifungal and anti-inflammatory properties.
It may be used to cover titanium implants (orthopaedic prostheses, pacemakers...prevent or control postoperative infections. Other frequently used medical devices that cause numerous infectious problems, such as catheters, may also benefit.
These results are published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials. Implantable medical devices (prosthesis/pacemakers) are an ideal interface for microorganisms,
which can easily colonize their surface. As such, bacterial infection may occur and lead to an inflammatory reaction.
This may cause the implant to be rejected. These infections are caused mainly by bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus,
originating in the body, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. These infections may also be caused fungal or by yeasts.
The challenge presented by implanting medical devices in the body is preventing the occurrence of these infections
which lead to an immune response that compromises the success of the implant. Antibiotics are used currently during surgery
or to coat certain implants. However, the emergence of multi-resistant bacteria now restricts their effectiveness.
A biofilm invisible to the naked eye It is within this context that researchers at the"Bioengineering
and Biomaterials"Unit 1121 (Inserm/Strasbourg University) with four laboratories1 have developed a biofilm with antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties.
Researchers have used a combination of two substances: polyarginine (PAR) and hyaluronic acid (HA), to develop and create a film invisible to the naked eye (between 400 and 600 nm thick) that is made of several layers.
As arginine is metabolised by immune cells to fight pathogens, it has been used to communicate with the immune system to obtain the desired anti-inflammatory effect.
Hyaluronic acid, a natural component of the body, was chosen also for its biocompatibility and inhibiting effect on bacterial growth.
Embedded antimicrobial peptides on a thin silver coating The film is also unique due to the fact that it embeds natural antimicrobial peptides
in particular catestatin, to prevent possible infection around the implant. This is an alternative to the antibiotics that are used currently.
preventing and controlling infection The results from numerous tests performed on this new film shows that it reduces inflammation
and prevents the most common bacterial and fungal infections. On the one hand, researchers demonstrate, through contact with human blood,
that the presence of the film on the implant suppresses the activation of inflammatory markers normally produced by immune cells in response to the implant.
yeast strains (Candida albicans) or fungi (Aspegillus fumigatus) that frequently cause implant-related infection"emphasises Philippe Lavalle.
Researchers conclude that this film may be used in vivo on implants or medical devices within a few years to control the complex microenvironment surrounding implants
and to protect the body from infection n
#Physiologists uncover a new code at the heart of biology UT Southwestern physiologists trying to understand the genetic code have found a previously unknown code that helps explain which protein should be created to form a particular type of cell.
The human body is made up of tens of trillions of cells. Each cell contains thousands of proteins,
"said Dr. Liu, the Louise W. Kahn Scholar in Biomedical Research.""By influencing the speed with
This can have important implications for identifying human disease-causing mutations because this study indicates that a mutation does not have to change amino acid identity to cause a disease.
In fact, most mutations in human DNA do not result in amino acid change.""Therefore, our study indicates that the new"code"--the speed limit of assembly--within the genetic code can dictate the ultimate function of a given protein,
one cancerous cell breaks off from a tumor, slips into the bloodstream and quickly lodges elsewhere in the body.
These colonizers may bloom into deadly metastatic cancer right away or lie dormant for years, only to trigger a recurrence decades after the primary tumor is removed.
Metastases cause the vast majority of cancer deaths, but their tiny seeds are so difficult to track that few researchers have managed to study them.
Now, scientists from UC San francisco describe capturing and studying individual metastatic cells from human breast cancer tumors implanted into mice as the cells escaped into the blood stream
and began to form tumors elsewhere in the body. The researchers discovered that genetic programs expressed in these cells were quite distinct from the primary tumors in
which they originated and included genes typically expressed in mammary stem cells. The findings, published online Sept. 23,2015 in Nature, could change the way researchers think about how cancer spreads
and suggest new drugs to track down and disable its deadly seeds. For the most part, modern cancer drugs ignore differences between primary
and metastatic tumors, said Zena Werb, Phd, professor and vice-chair of anatomy at UCSF, and a senior author on the new study."
"We test drugs for their ability to make primary tumors shrink, but most just don't work on metastases,
"Patients have their original tumor treated or removed, but then the cancer comes back 20,30, 40 years later because there were just a few metastatic cells sitting around."
"Catching metastatic cancer cells in the act No one really knows how dormant metastatic cells can survive incognito for decades,
"It's a big black box in the cancer field--mostly because it's very difficult to study,
only about 7 percent of all breast cancer funding goes to studying metastatic cancer, despite the fact that it causes virtually all breast cancer deaths.
Previous work by Werb's group had found a subset of cells at the edges of breast cancer tumors that seemed primed to metastasize.
and with proteins in the surrounding tumor microenvironment seemed to turn on genetic programs akin to those of mammary stem cells--the cells that allow breasts to form during puberty
These genes for self-replication could make these cells particularly apt to generate new tumors elsewhere in the body.
which involves transplanting human tumor cells into mice. Against the backdrop of healthy mouse tissue, rogue metastatic cells from the human tumor stick out like flares.
The researchers developed a new method using flow cytometry that let them capture individual human metastatic cancer cells traveling through the mouse's blood
the cancer cells'gene activity looked much like that of the primary tumor that had been transplanted into the mice,
In contrast, early-stage metastases and cancer cells traveling through the blood expressed genes typically active in mammary stem cells and quite distinct from primary tumor cells.
Remarkably, the same signature pattern of gene activity was found in metastatic cells in mice whose tumors came from genetically and clinically diverse human patients.
In other words, the genetic program that makes a cell metastatic did not depend on the genetics of its tumor of origin--suggesting that new techniques might allow researchers to find
Insights could lead to targeted therapies The research team performed a proof of principle experiment to demonstrate how valuable information about metastatic gene expression could be for drug development.
Since metastatic cells that were beginning to differentiate into secondary tumors showed high expression of genes cmyc and CDK2, the researchers treated 24 PDX mice with dinaciclib,
Whereas 44 percent of control mice (11 of 25) developed secondary tumors within four weeks, researchers could only find metastatic cells in one drug-treated mouse (4 percent.
was that the drug managed to nearly eliminate metastases without shrinking the primary tumor.""If this drug had only been tested on primary tumors,
we would have said it doesn't work, "she said.""This tells us you actually have to look at metastases
"Preventing metastatic cells from invading other parts of the body has been a priority for cancer researchers for many years,
and of medicine at UCSF and a co-corresponding author on the new study.""But practically speaking,
by the time you've detected the tumor, that horse is either already out of the barn
--which a consortium of researchers at UCSF are applying to diverse biological and clinical questions--could have a major impact on the emerging field of precision medicine."
and while many of these are beneficial, some can cause disease. For example some reports have linked Crohn's disease to the presence of certain strains of E coli."
"We'd like to be able to remove specific members of the bacterial population and see what their function is in the microbiome,
but more information about the microbiome is needed to effectively design such therapies.""The paper's lead author is Hiroki Ando, an MIT research scientist.
but efforts to harness them for medical use have been hampered because isolating useful phages from soil
and gastrointestinal infections, including pneumonia, sepsis, gastritis, and Legionnaires'disease. One advantage of the engineered phages is that unlike many antibiotics,
they are very specific in their targets.""Antibiotics can kill off a lot of the good flora in your gut,
"We aim to create effective and narrow-spectrum methods for targeting pathogens.""Lu and his colleagues are now designing phages that can target other strains of harmful bacteria,
as well as treating human disease. Another advantage of this approach is that all of the phages are based on an identical genetic scaffold,
The newly described Cpf1 system differs in several important ways from the previously described Cas9, with significant implications for research and therapeutics,
including in cancer research, "said Levi Garraway, an institute member of the Broad Institute, and the inaugural director of the Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital,
and the Broad Institute. Garraway was involved not in the research. Zhang, Broad Institute, and MIT plan to share the Cpf1 system widely.
These groups plan to offer licenses that best support rapid and safe development for appropriate and important therapeutic uses."
"Our goal is to develop tools that can accelerate research and eventually lead to new therapeutic applications.
#Cabozantinib improves survival in patients with advanced kidney cancer: Results from the METEOR trial Patients with advanced kidney cancer live for nearly twice as long without their disease progressing
if they are treated with cabozantinib, a drug that inhibits the action of tyrosine kinases--enzymes that function as an"on
"or"off"switch in many cellular processes, including cancer. In the second of two late-breaking presentations of research that is predicted to change the way kidney cancer patients are treated,
Professor Toni Choueiri will tell the presidential session of the 2015 European Cancer Congress 1,
about results from the first 375 patients out of a total of 658 patients recruited to the phase III clinical METEOR trial comparing cabozantinib with everolimus,
the current standard treatment for the disease. Analysis of results in July 2015 showed that the estimated median (average) progression-free survival time for patients with advanced clear cell kidney cancer,
randomised to receive cabozantinib, was 7. 4 months, while it was 3. 8 months for those receiving everolimus.
The findings are published simultaneously with the ECC2015 presentation in the New england Journal of Medicine. 2 Prof Choueiri
who is Associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical school and Clinical Director and Kidney Cancer Center Director at The Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute,
since the results may change the standard of care in patients with advanced kidney cancer who have received prior standard therapy that targets the vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR)."
"Although treatment with VEGFR-targeted drugs has been very effective in the first line of therapy for patients with advanced kidney cancer,
This has resulted in a significant reduction in the rate of disease progression or death in the cabozantinib arm as compared with the everolimus arm.
Regaining tumour control after prior targeted therapy may reduce symptoms related to kidney cancer and eventually help patients live longer."
"An early evaluation of overall survival from the ongoing METEOR trial has shown a strong trend indicating that survival may be improved in patients receiving cabozantinib compared to standard therapy.
Overall, these results should give new hope to patients diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer as cabozantinib may become a new treatment option."
"Clear cell kidney cancer (or renal cell carcinoma) is one of the commonest kidney cancers--70-80%of kidney cancer patients have this type.
81%of patients with stage I disease, in which the tumour is confined to the kidney,
with only around eight percent of patients with stage IV disease surviving for five years.
Their disease had to have progressed within six months of receiving prior treatment with VEGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy.
%shortness of breath (3. 7%)and pneumonia (3. 7%).Prof Choueiri said:""The METEOR results are important from a clinical and scientific point of view.
or resistance to standard therapies is critical for improving long-term outcome for our patients with advanced kidney cancer.
Further studies include a randomised phase II study of cabozantinib versus standard of care with sunitinib as a first treatment for advanced renal cell cancer.
Combinations with other emerging therapies, such as agents boosting the immune system, are of interest and an early stage clinical trial combining cabozantinib with immune checkpoint inhibitors has been initiated in urological cancers,
including patients with kidney cancer.""The trial has stopped recruiting patients and researchers are hoping that cabozantinib may become available to patients with advanced kidney cancer some time in 2016.
In the USA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has designated it as a breakthrough therapy,
which may allow expedited development of the drug. Professor Peter Naredi, the ECCO scientific co-chair of the Congress,
who was involved not in the research, commented:""I am excited over the advances in treatment of renal cell carcinoma that we are at present.
The results of the METEOR study are remarkable and most likely will be practice changing. This, together with the report of the Checkmate 025 study, are definitely among the highlights of this congress."
who will be reporting results from the Checkmate 025 randomised phase III trial of nivolumab versus everolimus in advanced kidney cancer r
The device is particularly beneficial to patients who are of high surgical risk or are unsuitable for existing clinical interventions.
and this may lead to congestive heart failure or it may worsen an existing heart failure. Pioneered by Associate professor Leo Hwa Liang from the Department of Biomedical engineering at NUS'Faculty of engineering
and Dr Jimmy Hon from the Department of Surgery at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of medicine, this novel invention addresses a clinical gap in the current treatment of mitral valve regurgitation.
This research project is supported by the Medical Engineering Research & Commercialization Initiative (MERCI) under the Department of Surgery of the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of medicine.
or are suffering from multiple chronic diseases are not suitable for the treatment. Although current mitral valve interventions delivered via a small incision through the skin could be a viable alternative treatment
therefore be a viable option for patients who are not suitable for surgeries or the standard treatment.
This transcatheter valve offers palliative treatment for the patients who were denied surgery, especially those with multiple co-morbidities."
"Dr Hon is also a Senior Consultant at the Department of Cardiac, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery, National University Heart Centre, Singapore.
They hope to work with medical technology companies to commercialise their invention to benefit patients soon n
and development of new medicines by greatly accelerating the computer-aided design of pharmaceutical compounds (and minimizing lengthy trial and error testing);
Medical researchers have developed now a highly effective in vitro technique for producing light sensitive retina cells from human embryonic stem cells.
"Cone transplant represents a therapeutic solution for retinal pathologies caused by the degeneration of photoreceptor cells,
offering hope that treatments may be developed for currently non-curable degenerative diseases, like Stargardt disease and ARMD."
ARMD is in fact the greatest cause of blindness amongst people over the age of 50
But in order to undertake a complete therapy, we need neuronal tissue that links all RPE cells to the cones.
In 2001, he launched his laboratory at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital and immediately isolated the molecule.
Beyond the clinical applications, Professor Bernier's findings could enable the modelling of human retinal degenerative diseases through the use of induced pluripotent stem cells,
offering the possibility of directly testing potential avenues for therapy on the patient's own tissues s
The authors see numerous applications for terahertz accelerators, in materials science, medicine and particle physics, as well as in building X-ray lasers.
as well as medical applications using X-rays and electron radiation.""The rapid advances we are seeing in terahertz generation with optical methods will enable the future development of terahertz accelerators for these applications,
#Possible new treatment for bladder cancer using a mycobacterium Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona researchers have found a mycobacterium that is more effective in treating superficial bladder cancer
and does not cause infections, unlike those used up to now. Mycobacteria are the only bacteria used in cancer treatment.
The administration of the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis (BCG), is the current treatment for superficial bladder cancer.
It is inserted directly into the bladder through a catheter. BCG prevents new tumours from appearing,
the most serious being BCG infections that need to be treated with antituberculous drugs. A study on the characteristics of a wide group of mycobacteria begun seven years ago by the Mycobacteria Research Group
Preclinical studies using mouse models of bladder cancer have demonstrated the efficacy of the mycobacterium M. brumae in the treatment of this disease.
presenting no risk of causing infections, which means it would have fewer adverse side effects on patients than BCG.
which is given significant that in the last few years BCG production problems have led to supply issues for certain bladder cancer patients."
"Our results suggest that Micobacterium brumae is an ideal candidate to replace the current BCG treatment for superficial bladder cancer,
The study, published in the journal European Urology Focus, was conducted in collaboration with Dr Rosa M. Rabanal of the Murine and Comparative Pathology Unit, Department of Animal Medicine and Surgery, UAB,
and with the group Bacterial Infections and Antimicrobial Therapies led by Dr Eduard Torrents, of the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) I
#New test predicts teens'future risk of heart disease Risk for cardiovascular disease, currently running rampant in the United states,
The test accounts for many risk factors for the deadly disease and has the potential to be adapted by physicians nationwide to assess teenagers'future risk
Risk Factors for Cardiovascular disease Approximately 610,000 people die from heart disease every year in the United states--that's one of every four deaths.
Cardiovascular disease has predominantly modifiable risk factors meaning that the disease is entirely preventable. These modifiable risk factors include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, physical inactivity, diabetes, unhealthy diets and smoking.
The only risk factor unable to be changed is genetic predisposition. The Role of Metabolic syndrome The new diagnostic test has been developed by a team that included Mark Deboer, MD, of the University of Virginia Children's Hospital's Department of Pediatrics,
and Matthew Gurka, Phd, of West virginia University's School of Public health. The test relies on an evaluation of metabolic syndrome,
a conglomeration of conditions including increased blood pressure, high levels of blood sugar, excessive body fat around the abdomen and waist,
and abnormal cholesterol levels that together increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. It takes into account variables specific both to race and gender."
"The way that we normally diagnose metabolic syndrome appears to have some racial discrepancies where African-american individuals are diagnosed not with metabolic syndrome at a very high rate
and yet they are at very high risk for developing type 2 diabetes and CVD cardiovascular disease,
so Dr. Gurka and I formulated a metabolic syndrome severity score that is specific to sex and ethnicity,
"Deboer said. In creating the test, Deboer and Gurka examined metabolic severity scores from children in the 1970s that assessed body mass index (BMI), systolic blood pressure, fasting triglycerides, HDL cholesterol and fasting glucose.
The children were followed up as recently as 2014 at an average age of 49.6 years."
"The current study was targeted at using that metabolic syndrome severity score on data from individuals who were children in the'70s to see
if it correlated with their risk on developing CVD and type 2 diabetes later in life,
and we found that there was a high correlation between the metabolic severity score for those children and for their later development of cardiovascular disease and diabetes,
The Use of the Test The test is innovative in that it is able to assess changes in metabolic syndrome severity in a person over time
or does not have metabolic syndrome, but the new test is able to create a scale,
"We are hopeful that this score can be used to assess the baseline risk for adolescents regarding metabolic syndrome
and their risk for future disease and use it as a motivator for individuals to try to change their risk
or get medication to reduce their metabolic syndrome severity and their future risk for disease, "Deboer said d
#Groundbreaking computer program diagnoses cancer in two days In by far the majority of cancer cases, the doctor can quickly identify the source of the disease, for example cancer of the liver, lungs, etc.
However, in about one in 20 cases, the doctor can confirm that the patient has cancer
and attempts to locate the origin of the cancer before starting any treatment. Now, researchers at DTU Systems Biology have combined genetics with computer science
which--on the basis of a biopsy from a metastasis--can with 85 per cent certainty identify the source of the disease
Each year, about 35,000 people are diagnosed with cancer in Denmark, and many of them face the prospect of a long wait until the cancer has been diagnosed and its source located.
However, even after very extensive tests, there will still be 2-3 per cent of patients where it has not been possible to find the origin of the cancer.
In such cases, the patient will be treated with a cocktail of chemotherapy instead of a more appropriately targeted treatment
are based on analyses of DNA mutations in cancer tissue samples from patients with metastasized cancer,
i e. cancer which has spread. The pattern of mutations is analysed in a computer program which has been trained to find possible primary tumour localizations.
whether an individual cancer patient will benefit from a specific type of medicine. This is a very effective method,
and it is becoming increasingly common to conduct such sequencing for cancer patients. Associate professor Aron Eklund from DTU Systems Biology explains:"
"We are pleased very that we can now use the same sequencing data together with our new algorithms to provide a much faster diagnosis for cancer cases that are difficult to diagnose,
and to provide a useful diagnosis in cases which are currently impossible to diagnose. At the moment, it takes researchers two days to obtain a biopsy result,
but we expect this time to be reduced as it becomes possible to do the sequencing increasingly faster.
And it will be straightforward to integrate the method with the methods already being used by doctors."
and thus also as an effective and easy way of monitoring people who are at risk of developing cancer.
Tumor tracer A diagnostic method for determining the primary site of the cancer. The method combines genetics and computer science,
and can analyse a biopsy from a metastasis, and on this basis provide a number of possible scenarios for where the cancer may have developed
and indicate the probability of it being correct. At the moment analysing a biopsy takes two days s
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