#Transparent Armor based on Spinel Could Also Ruggedize Your Smart Phone Imagine a glass window that tough like armor,
#Renal failure: location signals for cell division For the kidneys to function flawlessly, millions of cells must be arranged precisely according to a specified blueprint.
It involves a fundamental mechanism by which the kidneys heal following renal failure. The scientists now want to investigate
whether plexin B2 and the semaphorins also play a role in the repair of other organisms and in diseases such as cancer
and you are trying to figure out the body immune response to a particular pathogen, for example, Prof Roukes said. his new technique adds another piece of information to aid our identification of molecules,
which could prove useful in biomedical applications, among other uses. i
#More power to the mitochondria: Cells'energy plant also plays key role in stem cell development Researchers at NYU Langone Medical center have discovered that mitochondria, the major energy source for most cells,
also play an important role in stem cell development a purpose notably distinct from the tiny organelle traditional job as the cell main source of the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) energy needed for routine cell metabolism.
Indeed, Lehmann, who also serves as director of NYU Langone Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine and chair of its Department of Cell biology,
a potential boon for diabetics The 340 million diabetes sufferers in the world have plenty to worry about:
Most diabetics need to prick their fingers multiple times a day to draw blood samples
Arizona State university engineering professor Jeffrey La Belle use of biomarkers measurable indicators of wellness or disease in body fluids to diagnose
This noninvasive alternative would be a significant benefit in convenience, comfort and treatment compliance for the more than 340 million people living with diabetes.
Bishop is now cofounder and chief innovation officer of Qualaris Healthcare Solutions, a Pittsburgh-based medical-product development company.
and we look forward to commercializing this technology with one or more leading medical device companies that can benefit by making it easier and painless for diabetics to measure glucose,
Diabetes is a chronic disease that occurs either when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin,
Hyperglycemia, or elevated blood sugar, is a common effect of uncontrolled diabetes and over time leads to serious damage to many of the body systems
Earlier this year, Advanced Tear Diagnostics, a medical-products company based in Birmingham, Alabama, licensed the same technology to improve
and funding support from Mayo Clinic in Arizona. The measurements would help in the diagnosis
and treatment of a variety of ocular surface disorders particularly in detecting and differentiating between bacterial and viral infections,
including one of the most common infections, conjunctivitis, also called pinkeye. Advanced Tear Diagnostics is providing $496,
000 for the project over a year time and plans to commercialize the final product.
Azte really is a helpful resource we have here at ASU. r. La Belle promising technology has the potential to improve the diagnosis
monitoring and treatment of a wide range of medical conditions, said Yash Vaishnav, Azte vice president of business development for life sciences. ekcapital is also a great partner.
the biomedical engineers outlined how they had reinforced soft hydrogels via a 3d printed scaffold. Professor Dietmar W. Hutmacher, from QUT Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, said nature often used fibre reinforcement to turn weak structures into outstanding mechanically robust ones. uch
is the case with articular cartilage tissue, which is formed by stiff and strong collagen fibres intertwined within a very weak gel matrix of proteoglycans,
The School of Biomedical sciences team was able to observe the presence of the receptors as part of their ongoing research into the growth of human hearts during disease.
The research team primary focus is on how the heart grows normally as well as abnormally in disease. fter hypertension or a heart attack
Professor Thomas said. ut a common end result of this compensatory growth is eventual heart failure, a major cause of death in Australia. uring laboratory tests,
Professor Thomas said the project progressed from animal studies to human investigations through collaborations with the Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane. sing heart tissue from humans undergoing heart surgery
#Alzheimer pathology and neural activity An international research group including the University of Tokyo, Stanford university and Washington University has discovered that neuronal activity augments the accumulation of amyloid ß that is observed in the brains of patients with Alzheimer disease (AD).
The accumulation of deposits of a protein fragment termed amyloid ß is thought to be the cause of the development of dementia in AD brains.
Neurons in the brain are connected through junctions termed synapses and function by transmitting electrical activity (i e.,
Professor Takeshi Iwatsubo, graduate students Kaoru Yamamoto and Zen-ichi Tanei, Assistant professor Tadafumi Hashimoto and Professor Haruhiko Bito at the University of Tokyo Graduate school of Medicine, Professor
and could ultimately lead to the design of a vaccine to prevent transmission of the virus. This innovative approach could also be part of the solution for one day eradicating the virus. Despite recent advances,
The experiments were conducted with serum samples from the AIDS and Infectious diseases Network (SIDA-MI) cohort of the Fonds de recherche en santé du Québec (FRSQ.
however, wild-type HIV-1 virus, responsible for the vast majority of infections in the world, still contains these proteins,
The antibodies that are naturally present after the infection can then target the infected cells
For decades, scientists have been trying to devise a vaccine to block HIV infection, which causes AIDS.
The discovery by Finzi team could help develop a two-part vaccine to prevent HIV infection:
As the spool pulls, the CNT ribbon is dragged between two surgical blades. While the blades appear straight to the naked eye
#Pressure-monitoring stockings to prevent wounds in diabetics Diabetics often have little feeling in their feet
This can result in unnoticed wounds that then develop into abscesses. Many diabetics have to have toes
or feet amputated. Now, a novel kind of pressure stocking developed by Fraunhofer researchers is set to help protect against wounds via an integrated sensor system that sends a warning
when pressure is too high. Diabetes patients often suffer from nerve and circulation problems in the feet,
which reduce their perception of pain. They literally don know when it time to take the load off their feet.
Diabetics, however, don notice that their toes, heels or the balls of their feet are loaded too heavily the foot receives no relief,
Even small uneven areas or shoe pressure can lead to open wounds or damaged tissue on the foot.
In-stocking sensors provide three-dimensional pressure readings To ensure that poorly healing wounds don occur in the first place,
40 very fine, dielectric elastomer sensors measure compression load and distribution for diabetes patients taking over the job usually performed by the nerves in their feet. xisting systems on the market measure the pressure distribution
which then informs the diabetes patient that it is time to change foot position or weight distribution. ith the current prototype,
lost contact with NASA. here were human operators On earth who were experts in diagnosis and repair,
and quantify infection by parasitic worms in a drop of blood. This next generation of UC Berkeley Cellscope technology could help revive efforts to eradicate debilitating filarial diseases in Africa by providing critical information to health providers in the field. e previously showed that mobile phones can be used for microscopy,
but this is the first device that combines the imaging technology with hardware and software automation to create a complete diagnostic solution,
The UC Berkeley engineers teamed up with Dr. Thomas Nutman from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID),
where health officials have been battling the parasitic worm diseases onchocerciasis (river blindness) and lymphatic filariasis. The video Cellscope,
May 6) in the journal Science Translational Medicine. his research is addressing neglected tropical diseases, said Fletcher. t demonstrates
but treatable, diseases. Battling parasitic worms River blindness is transmitted through the bite of blackflies and is the second-leading cause of infectious blindness worldwide.
Lymphatic filariasis, spread by mosquitoes, leads to elephantiasis, a condition marked by painful, disfiguring swelling.
It is the second-leading cause of disability worldwide and like river blindness, is highly endemic in certain regions in Africa.
The antiparasitic drug ivermectin, or IVM, can be used to treat these diseases, but mass public health campaigns to administer the medication have been stalled because of potentially fatal side effects for patients co-infected with Loa loa,
which causes loiasis, or African eye worm. When there are high circulating levels of microscopic Loa loaworms in a patient,
treatment with IVM can potentially lead to severe or fatal brain or other neurologic damage.
The standard method of screening for levels of Loa loa involves trained technicians manually counting the worms in a blood smear using conventional laboratory microscopes
representing a major setback in the efforts to eradicate river blindness and elephantiasis. Next generation Cellscope uses video, automation For this latest generation of the mobile phone microscope, named Cellscope Loa, the researchers paired a smartphone with a 3d printed plastic base where the sample of blood
whether it is safe to administer IVM. he availability of a point-of-care test prior to drug treatment is a major advance in the control of these debilitating diseases,
such as premature ovarian failure and polycystic ovarian syndrome, conditions that both result in hormone imbalances and infertility in women.
#Ebola Vaccine Demonstrates 100%Protection in Latest African Trial According to an unusual new study, published last week in the world most prestigious medical journal Lancet, the deadly outbreak
might finally come to an end a vaccine, developed by the Public health Agency of Canada and manufactured by the American pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dome, was shown just to confer 100%protection against the disease,
starting mere 10 days after receiving a single shot. his will go down in history as one of those hallmark public health efforts,
said Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious disease Research and Policy in Twin cities, Minnesota,
who wasn involved in the study. e will teach about this in public health schools. he vaccine,
which consists of the Vesicular stomatitis virus (pathogenic in livestock, but harmless in humans) with the Ebola surface protein stitched onto it,
the researchers opted for a design called ring vaccination, whereby only the contacts, and the contactscontacts, of new Ebola patients were vaccinated.
This type of approach has never been used in a formal vaccine study ever before. The rings, also called clusters, were randomized such that 48 of them received the vaccine right after a new Ebola case sprung up in their community,
while the other 42 received a shot only three weeks afterwards. Of the 2, 380 people who were assigned to the latter group,
16 got infected. In the second group consisting of 2 014 people the count of new Ebola cases was zero,
The Director-General of THE WHO Margaret Chan called for further studies to clear up any lingering doubts about the vaccine efficacy,
while current statistics on the epidemic are the most promising in well over a year last week only four new cases were observed in Guinea
#Artificial blood vessels become resistant to thrombosis Scientists from ITMO University developed artificial blood vessels that are not susceptible to blood clot formation.
The results of the study were published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Surgery, associated with cardiovascular diseases, such as ischemia,
often require the implantation of vascular grafts artificial blood vessels, aimed at restoring the blood flow in a problematic part of the circulatory system.
which results in compulsory and lifelong intake of anticoagulants among patients and sometimes may even require an additional surgical intervention.
they actively release medicine into the blood. The lifetime of such grafts is determined often by the amount of drug stored within the graft
but to any kind of implants. You just need to take the right kind of drug. For example, after the implantation of an artificial ureter, urease crystals often start to grow inside
and doctors do not know how to deal with this problem. It is possible to apply a similar drug-containing coating that dissolves urease.
The same approach may be used for kidney or liver surgery but these are plans for the future,
#Molecular spies to fight cancer Tracking the tumor: PNA-antibodies detect initially the diseased cells (red)
and accumulate at the tumor site. Afterwards the radioactively labeled probes (blue) selectively bind to them by specific base pairing.
thus to visualize the tumor. Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), in cooperation with colleagues at the University of Zurich and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, have tested for the first time successfully a new tumor diagnosis method under near-real conditions.
The new method first sends out an antibody as a pyto detect the diseased cells and then binds to them.
The scientists could then clearly visualize the tumor by utilizing a tomographic method. This procedure could improve cancer treatment in the future by using internal radiation.
The human immune system forms antibodies that protect the body from pathogens. Antibodies can also, however, be produced in a laboratory to precisely bind to tumor cells.
They are used in cancer research to detect and fight malignant tumors. For example, antibodies can serve as transport vehicles for radionuclides, with
which the affected regions can be visualized or can even be damaged. Until recently, a stumbling block has been their large molecular mass. his causes them to circulate in the body for too long before they reach the diseased cells
explains Dr Holger Stephan from the Institute of Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Research at HZDR. his is a disadvantage
because organs that are affected not by the disease are exposed to radiation. It also makes the exact localization of the tumor in the body more difficult
because the resulting images are less sharp. ogether with colleagues at the University of Zurich and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum,
the researchers from Dresden therefore chose an alternative strategy. y using what is known as re-targeting the antibodiestask is divided into two steps, Dr Kristof Zarschler, a member of Stephan team,
explains. n a figurative sense, we first send spies out in advance, over a longer period of time,
to scout out the enemy the tumor cells. The piesthen share their position with their troops,
In various types of tumors, there is an increase in this molecule formation or it might be found in a mutated form,
the scientists first injected the PNA-EGFR antibody into tumor-bearing mice and gave this pytime to accumulate at the tumor site.
They then administered the PNA counterpart, labeled with the radioactive substance technetium-99m. mages we took using single photon emission computed tomography show that both the antibody
The tumor could thus be visualized clearly within a short period of time. urthermore, the radioactively labeled probes had disappeared already from the bloodstream after sixty minutes,
and their matching PNA counterparts can be used in diagnosing tumors in humans. ur results however show that the PNAS we tested are suitable candidates for further preclinical studies, Stephan sums up.
They could provide new possibilities not only for visualizing diseased cells but also for fighting them. f the method is proven to work,
it could also be used to transport therapeutically effective radioactive substances to the tumor in order to irradiate it from within
, cancer or infections), or to silence it when it mistakenly attacks the body itself (e g.,
, autoimmune disorders or allergies. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute have discovered that T cell triggering relies on a dynamic protein network at the cell surface,
in order to recognize and eliminate diseases. Lillemeier team is working to identify new principles that determine
#Nanoparticles used to breach mucus barrier in lungs Proof-of-concept study conducted in mice a key step toward better treatments for lung diseases Nanotechnology could one day provide an inhaled vehicle to deliver targeted therapeutic genes
that therapeutic genes may one day be delivered directly to the lungs to the levels sufficient to treat cystic fibrosis (CF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,
asthma and other life-threatening lung diseases. o our knowledge, this is the first biodegradable gene delivery system that efficiently penetrates the human airway mucus barrier of lung tissue,
. a biomedical engineer and faculty member at the Center for Nanomedicine at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins. A report on the work appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 29.
Unfortunately, Suk notes, this essential protective mechanism also prevents many inhaled therapeutics, including gene-based medicine,
from reaching their target. His team experiments with human airway mucus and small animals, Suk adds,
Suk says their work with nanoparticles grew out of failed efforts to deliver treatments to people with lung diseases.
In patients with CF, for instance, they experience a buildup of excess mucus caused by impaired ciliary beating, resulting in an ideal breeding ground for chronic bacterial infection and inflammation.
but it also makes the airway mucus harder to overcome by inhaled therapeutic nanoparticles. Most of the existing drugs for CF help clear infections but do not solve the disease underlying problems.
A couple of recently approved drugs designed to target the underlying cause of CF require daily treatment for the entire lifetime
This could eventually become an effective therapy for the lungs of patients, regardless of the mutation type.
and are capable of rapidly penetrating human airway mucus freshly collected from patients visiting the Johns Hopkins Adult Cystic fibrosis Program directed by Michael Boyle,
production of therapeutic proteins for several months, Suk says, adding that the nanoparticles did not appear to show any adverse effects,
and that treatment of human disorders with nanowrapped therapies is years away a
#Small tilt in magnets makes them viable memory chips UC Berkeley researchers have discovered a new way to switch the polarization of nanomagnets,
put stress on power generators and lead to instabilities in the power system. Grid coordinators have the daily challenge of forecasting the need for
M d.,Ph d.,who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical school and Boston Children Hospital,
creating an asymmetrical stress that makes the membranes fold. Zhang Jiang and Jin Wang, X-ray staff at the APS,
#Real-time data for cancer therapy In the battle against cancer, which kills nearly 8 million people worldwide each year,
doctors have in their arsenal many powerful weapons, including various forms of chemotherapy and radiation.
however, is good reconnaissance a reliable way to obtain real-time data about how well a particular therapy is working for any given patient.
Magnetic resonance imaging and other scanning technologies can indicate the size of a tumor, while the most detailed information about how well a treatment is working comes from pathologistsexaminations of tissue taken in biopsies.
Yet these methods offer only snapshots of tumor response and the invasive nature of biopsies makes them a risky procedure that clinicians try to minimize.
Now, researchers at MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research are closing that information gap by developing a tiny biochemical sensor that can be implanted in cancerous tissue during the initial biopsy.
The sensor then wirelessly sends data about telltale biomarkers to an external eaderdevice, allowing doctors to better monitor a patient progress
and adjust dosages or switch therapies accordingly. Making cancer treatments more targeted and precise would boost their efficacy
while reducing patientsexposure to serious side effects. e wanted to make a device that would give us a chemical signal about what happening in the tumor,
says Michael Cima, the David H. Koch (1962) Professor in Engineering in the Department of Materials science and engineering and a Koch Institute investigator who oversaw the sensor development. ather than waiting months to see
if the tumor is shrinking, you could get an early read to see if youe moving in the right direction.
Two MIT doctoral students in Cima lab worked with him on the sensor project: Vincent Liu, now a postdoc at MIT,
and Christophoros Vassiliou, now a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley. Their research is featured in a paper in the journal Lab on a Chip that has been published online.
allowing doctors to better monitor a patient progress and adjust or switch therapies. Photo courtesy of the researchers.
Measurements without MRI The sensors developed by Cima team provide real-time, on-demand data concerning two biomarkers linked to a tumor response to treatment:
ph and dissolved oxygen. As Cima explains, when cancerous tissue is under assault from chemotherapy agents,
you can see the response chemically before you see a tumor actually shrink, Cima says.
In fact, some therapies will trigger an immune system reaction, and the inflammation will make the tumor appear to be growing,
even while the therapy is effective. Oxygen levels, meanwhile, can help doctors gauge the proper dose of a therapy such as radiation,
since tumors thrive in low-oxygen (hypoxic) conditions. t turns out that the more hypoxic the tumor is,
the more radiation you need, Cima says. o, these sensors, read over time, could let you see how hypoxia was changing in the tumor,
so you could adjust the radiation accordingly. The sensor housing, made of a biocompatible plastic,
is small enough to fit into the tip of a biopsy needle. It contains 10 microliters of chemical contrast agents typically used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
and an onboard circuit to communicate with the external reader device. Devising a power source for these sensors was critical,
a radiologist and director of the Center for Systems Biology lab at Massachusetts General Hospital who is familiar with the research. hatever you can do right then and there without any complicated testing,
he says. ee making these sensors out of materials that are in these kinds of long-term implants,
so we can use them to monitor tumor response, Cima says. e did a little bit of that in these experiments,
While the primary application of these sensors would be cancer care, Cima is also eager to collaborate with researchers in other fields, such as environmental science. or example,
#Researchers discover cancer markers may be visible early during human development Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute have uncovered a link between the genomes of cells originating in the neural crest
and development of tumors a discovery that could lead to new ways to diagnose and treat cancer.
The new finding, recently published in Oncotarget, resolves why some cancer types share genomic and clinical features.
The discovery may also lead to new ways to diagnose and treat brain cancer, such as gliomas, medulloblastomas, and neuroblastomas;
and skin cancer, known as melanoma. More than 22,000 new cases of brain cancer and more than 73,000 new cases of skin cancer and were expected to arise in Americans in 2015, according to the National Cancer Institute.
To reveal when cancer-causing genomic changes occur, a research group led by Harold kipgarner, a professor in the departments of biological science, computer science,
and basic science at Virginia Tech Carilion Medical school, analyzed an often ignored part of the human genome repetitive DNA sequences referred to as microsatellites.
More than 1 million microsatellites exist in the human genome including in neural crest tissues, a thin layer of cells within an embryo that contains genetic instructions to build hundreds of cell types, from neurons to adrenal cells.
Neurological tumors, for example, may arise from glial cells that develop from the crest. Researchers with the institute Medical Informatics Systems division say cancer types can be found
or predicted from specific markers within these repetitive sequences, known as cancer-associated microsatellite loci, or CAML.
Long considered unk DNAOR ark matterwithin the genome because their function was unclear microsatellites are known for their role in certain diseases such as Fragile X and Huntington disease.
Garner group has shown that these regions can be informative about diseases ranging from cancer to autism spectrum disorder.
With more study, researchers believe interrelated hereditary and genetic traits of certain cancers can be traced to their common origin at the neural crest,
leading to potentially better therapies and easier tumor identification. The findings have been licensed to Genomeon, a company co-founded by Garner to develop new ways to assess cancer risk,
create diagnostics, and explore potential drug targets to help cancer patients p
#How chronic inflammation can lead to cancer 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 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.
The immune system attacks the invader with a number of reactive molecules designed to neutralize it,
including hydrogen peroxide, nitric oxide and hypochlorous acid. 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,
but in this process it also damages some of the normal cells, Fedeles explains. Previous work by Peter Dedon, Steven Tannenbaum, Gerald Wogan,
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
which is generated by the immune system. 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.
Using a technique previously developed in Essigmann laboratory, the researchers first placed the 5clc lesion at a specific site within the genome of a bacterial virus. They then replicated the virus within the cell.
The researchers found that, rather than always pairing with a guanine base as a cytosine would,
the 5clc instead paired with an adenine base around 5 percent of the time a medically relevant mutation frequency, according to Essigmann.
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,
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 r
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