Because of its accuracy, it could also better distinguish between benign lung tumors that do not pose a threat
and malignant tumors that have the potential to grow and spread. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in both men and women in the United states. However,
the five-year survival rate increases dramatically if the disease is caught and treated early. According to the American Cancer Society,
if NSCLC is caught in its earliest stage, the five-year survival rate is 49 percent.
However, patients who are diagnosed when the disease has metastasized--meaning that it has spread to other organs--have only about a 1 percent chance of achieving survival after five years.
In 2013 the USPSTF recommended annual screening to patients at least 55 years old who had a history of smoking
. associate professor in the Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program at The Wistar Institute and lead author of the study."
we can detect the cancer earlier with a less expensive, less invasive and more accurate blood test.
"In this study, Huang and his colleagues focused on cancer testis antigens (CTAS), since they are often found in tumor cells that circulate in the blood.
After analyzing 116 different CTAS, the researchers identified the protein AKAP4 as a potential biomarker that could effectively distinguish between patients with and without NSCLC.
a method that calculates the ability of the test to distinguish those with disease from those without it.
and don't have a particular disease. In this study, when the researchers compared all 264 of the NSCLC samples with the 135 control samples,
When the researchers looked at only the 136 samples with known stage I disease, the AUC was 0. 9795.
While the researchers noted that the presence of AKAP4 increased with the stage of the disease
AKAP4 was still detectable in the samples with early stage disease.""The results of this study exceeded our expectations,
"said Dario C. Altieri, M d.,President and CEO of The Wistar Institute and director of Wistar's Cancer Center."
in order to have a meaningful impact on this devastating disease.""This is the second time Wistar has identified a potential method for creating a blood test to screen for lung cancer.
Researchers at the Institute are also currently analyzing more than 600 blood samples to develop a blood test that identifies a 29-gene"signature"that distinguishes patients with NSCLC from those without the disease.
carboplatin and oxyplatin, have been used to treat cancer for more than 35 years. While they remain among the most prescribed and most potent chemotherapy drugs,
and accumulate at the tumor site. However, tests of these nanodrugs show that only between one and 10 percent of the drugs are delivered to the tumor site
with the majority of the remainder being diverted to the liver and spleen.''The body's immune system, especially the liver and spleen, has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks in developing nanoscale chemotherapy drug delivery systems,
they become less available to treat the cancer, and can also cause toxicity.''In the past few years, Ho and his colleagues were developing cellular nanotags to help detect organ rejection,
The researchers believe that this increased availability will allow more of the drug to reach the tumor site,
#Early clinical trial success for new rheumatoid arthritis treatment Arrayrheumatoid arthritis is a disease in which the immune system attacks healthy tissues, particularly in the joints, causing inflammation, pain and deformity.
and slow the progression of the disease, "Professor Thomas said.""We have designed a vaccine-style treatment
and tissue, preventing disease and fighting infection by distinguishing between what is the body's own healthy tissue and
it could also be applied to other autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes s
#Drug-induced tissue regeneration demonstrated by scientists A study led by Ellen Heber-Katz, Phd, of the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR), part of Main line Health (MLH),
Almost 20 years ago, Heber-Katz noticed that the MRL mouse can spontaneously regenerate cartilage and other tissues after injury
of which is increased markedly before and after injury in the MRL mouse. Under normal oxygen conditions, HIF-1a is degraded by prolyl hydroxylases (PHDS.
Next, they selected a non-regenerating strain of mice to see what would happen when they experimentally up-regulated (stabilized) HIF-1a levels after an ear hole punch injury.
the drug-treated mice showed a pattern of molecular changes indistinguishable from that observed in MRL mice during regeneration in response to injury, confirming HIF-1a as a central driver of healthy regeneration of lost
#Your viral infection history in a single drop of blood With Virscan, scientists can run a single test to determine which viruses have infected an individual,
and compare viral infections in large populations. The comprehensive analysis can be performed for about $25 per blood sample.
The immune system ramps up production of pathogen-specific antibodies when it encounters a virus for the first time,
or decades after it clears an infection. That means Virscan not only identifies viral infections that the immune system is actively fighting,
but also provides a history of an individual's past infections. To develop the new test,
Elledge and his colleagues synthesized more than 93,000 short pieces of DNA encoding different segments of viral proteins.
either through infection or through vaccination. Elledge estimates it would take about 2-3 days to process 100 samples,
including HIV and hepatitis C."It turns out that it works really well,""Elledge says."
His own lab is also using it to look for antibodies that attack a body's own tissue in certain autoimmune diseases that are associated with cancer.
A similar approach could also be used to screen for antibodies against other types of pathogens s
may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens, according to researchers.
A new way of rapidly identifying bacteria, which requires a slight modification to a simple microscope,
may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens,
according to researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South korea.
"Why Speed Matters in Infection Control In hospitals and clinics worldwide, bacterial infections are a major source of illness,
In the most severe cases, bacterial poisoning causes severe disease and syndromes like sepsis, meningitis, pneumonia,
and gastroenteritis--all of which can be deadly unless the patient is given immediate and appropriate treatment.
The true challenge of fighting those infections is time. In order to best treat their patients, doctors would like to know exactly which bacteria they are infected with,
but the lost hours or days spent identifying the exact pathogen can make the road to recovery that much steeper.
Sepsis, for instance, can develop so rapidly that mortality has been seen to increase by 9 percent per hour until treatment is given.
For that reason, many hospital-acquired infections are treated presumptively, before they are identified definitively, using broad-spectrum antibiotics.
allowing doctors to prescribe the best drugs available to treat an infection and improving outcomes for people with hospital-acquired infections--though the effectiveness of the approach remains to be proven in future clinical trials.
In their initial experiments, Park and his colleagues showed as a proof of principle that they could identify bacteria with high accuracy.
The first three are known all pathogens to infect humans through the food chain or via hospital-acquired infections.
which is the base for Anthrax. Under a microscope, all four of these rodlike bacteria look nearly identical.
#New approach for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis Arrayprof. Dr. Oliver Eickelberg and Dr. Claudia Staab-Weijnitz of the Comprehensive Pneumology Center (CPC) at Helmholtz Zentrum München and their colleagues at LMU University Hospital in Munich and Yale university
The main focus of their research was to identify causative mechanisms involved in the disease.
"In the future, these results could also lead to new therapeutic options for the treatment of other fibrotic diseases."
however, the main focus is on delaying the progression of the disease and alleviating the symptoms."
"we want to help alleviate the suffering of patients with lung disease.""In the case of IPF, the researchers now want to establish a drug screening assay
#Ultrasound, algorithms to diagnose bacterial meningitis in babies Three researchers from Spain and one from UK, Javier Jiménez, Carlos Castro, Berta Martí and Ian Butterworth,
which will allow bacterial meningitis to be diagnosed in babies in seconds with a high-resolution ultrasound of the fontanelle.
which aims to revolutionise the detection of this illness, has already been tested on a small sample of patients at the La paz University Hospital and in ex vivo tissues of animal models.
-which already has a prototype-was to"facilitate the diagnosis of bacterial meningitis using imaging technologies and algorithms."
"We witnessed a LP on a 29-day-old baby that had arrived at the accident and emergency department at Boston Children's Hospital with a fever.
which tell whether there is an infection in the fluid, can take between 24 and 48 hours"says Castro.
meningitis is not the cause of the fever in babies and therefore, "lumbar punctures do not benefit the patient in any way."
which would indicate the cellularity in CSF in a simple, economical and noninvasive way for newborns and babies on suspicion of infection.
The image obtained is analysed then by image-processing algorithms to determine the presence of cells indicating infection
"The team believes that their system will mean a breakthrough for diagnosing bacterial meningitis in babies
whose speed and precision make them useful for cataract and other eye surgeries. A femtosecond is one-quadrillionth,
#Disrupting tumor cell'microenvironment'suggests a new way to treat a prevalent childhood leukemia Researchers at NYU Langone Medical center
and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center are reporting a potentially important discovery in the battle against one of the most devastating forms of leukemia that accounts for as many as one in five children with a particularly aggressive form of the disease
and attracts blood cells to the bone marrow--halted disease progression in bone marrow and spleen tissue within two weeks.
The experiments also left white blood cells cancer free for more than 30 weeks in live mice. Further, the research team found that in mice bred to develop T-ALL
Researchers say their study results for the first time"clearly establish CXCR4 signaling as essential for T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia cell growth and disease progression.""
""Our experiments showed that blocking CXCR4 decimated leukemia cells, "says co-senior study investigator and NYU Langone cell biologist Susan Schwab, Phd.
Schwab says T-ALL is"a particularly devastating cancer "because there are not many treatment options.
Co-senior study investigator and cancer biologist Iannis Aifantis, Phd, says the study offers the first evidence that"drugs targeting
and disrupting leukemia cells'microenvironment--or what goes on around them--could prove effective against the disease."
"Aifantis, the chair of the Department of Pathology at NYU Langone and a member of its Perlmutter Cancer Center,
and an early career scientist at the Howard hughes medical institute, says experiments in his laboratory had shown that leukemia-initiating cells concentrate in the bone marrow near CXCL12-producing blood vessels.
This finding prompted a collaborative effort to investigate expression and function of CXCR4 because it binds to CXCL12,
which in turn led to the researchers determining the vital role played by CXCR4-CXCL12 molecular signaling in disease growth.
Disease progression in the bone marrow stalled within three weeks and tumors were smaller than in similar mice that retained CXCL12 production.
Deletion of the CXCR4 gene led to sustained T-ALL remission within a month in similar mice,
#Researchers boost body's inflammation-reduction mechanism to combat obesity-fueled disease"This is a new way of reducing inflammation
"Essentially, we're boosting the body's natural response for reducing inflammation and showing the benefit in obesity-driven diseases."
"Catherine Godson, Phd, co-senior author and director of the UCD Diabetes Complications Research Centre in UCD School of medicine and UCD Conway Institute, said the study's findings demonstrate the value
"Drawing on collaborative expertise in synthetic chemistry, molecular biology and translational medicine, the team has produced findings with significant potential to reduce inflammation, a critical driver of the devastating consequences of obesity-related diseases,
In the body, inflammation is normally a natural healing response to infection or injury.""You get a recruitment of white blood cells that fight off the infection
or work to heal the injury, "explained first author Emma Borgeson, Phd, a postdoctoral fellow at UC San diego and UCD."
"It is a good thing. It's only when the inflammation becomes chronic that it can cause disease to occur."
"Borgeson said that a family of lipids, known as specialized pro-resolving mediators (SPMS), are the body's natural shut off mechanism for inflammation."
The results showed significant disease improvement, primarily by affecting fat tissue.""The mice had been on a high-fat diet for three months
We found that it significantly reduced inflammation in the fat tissues and improved kidney and liver disease.
"Our ultimate hope would be to use these findings to create a lipoxin-based drug for obese people to help protect them against associated illnesses, such as kidney and liver disease,
#How a gut feeling for infection programs our immune response An unexpected finding by an international team of scientists based at The University of Manchester
It's hoped the discovery will inform the development of better treatments for a range of conditions from inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) to certain cancers.
and Dr Yasmine Belkaid from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID) in the USA will be published in the journal Immunity.
These cells are called rapidly to sites of infection and injury and have an amazing ability to change
what they do to suit the situation in which they find themselves. This either involves them protecting the body from an attacking infection
or acting as a repair agent to aid wound healing. However, when these cells choose the wrong function this can result in severe inflammation leading to conditions such as inflammatory bowel diseases and even cancer.
What scientists haven't been able to do is identify how the cells decide which function to fulfil.
It has always been assumed that the programming takes place once the cells arrive at the point of injury
or infection but this has not been investigated well. Using mouse models Dr Grainger and his team looked at how
and where monocytes are programs in response to toxoplasmosis, an infection caused by a common parasite called Toxoplasma gondii.
The parasite infects the gut and is most commonly found in undercooked meat. Pregnant women are advised also to avoid cat faeces due to the risk of infection.
Dr Grainger, a Wellcome Trust and Royal Society Fellow, explains what they found:""Our work shows that very soon after the toxoplasma invades the gut the tissue starts to communicate with other parts of the body to alter the immune system.
Your initial gut feeling about the infection is literally telling the rest of the system what to do."
At the moment a lot of therapies are focused on the site of infection or injury itself but this data suggests that it's the signals that are being sent out from the gut that are impacting the whole immune system.
It might even be possible to develop drugs to target the programming mechanisms within the bone marrow,
not only program the monocytes to protect against the infection, but also to change to a repair function
and are focused on identifying situations where this gut information system may have gone wrong such as in inflammatory bowel diseases s
#Stem cell discovery paves way for targeted treatment for osteoarthritis Researchers in the Departments of Biology and Physics at York,
or joint tissue opening the way for improved treatment for arthritis. The research which was funded by Arthritis Research UK is published in the latest issue of Stem Cell Reports.
The York team also isolated a rare subset of stem cells in bone marrow that while having no capability for tissue repair appeared to have a prominent role in immune function.
"While stem cell therapy is an exciting new development for the treatment for osteoarthritis, up to now it has been something of a lottery
It will help in the search to develop more targeted therapies for arthritis patients.""Co-Lead author Dr James Fox said"Working with colleagues across the Arthritis Research UK Tissue Engineering Centre will help to bring our discovery closer to patient treatment."
"Director of research at the charity Arthritis Research UK Dr Stephen Simpson added:""There are 8 million people in the UK living with the pain
and disability caused by osteoarthritis. We are fighting to find better treatments and one day, a cure.
This research is exciting and promising. Identifying specific stem cells that could help the damaged joint to repair itself,
takes us a step closer to our aim of developing an injectable, safe, stem cell therapy for people with osteoarthritis
an important process that when abnormal can promote diabetes, cancer, and rare genetic diseases. The researchers determined that an enzyme called Protein kinase c (PKC) can regulate
whether more or less glucose should be transported into cells, serving as a kind of thermostat to ensure that proper levels are maintained.'
'said senior author Dr. Richard Wang, assistant professor of dermatology and a member of UT Southwestern's Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center.'
'This process is defective in a variety of diseases including diabetes and cancer.''Scientists have known how glucose is transported across cells,
The researchers further found that the regulation of GLUT1 by PKC was impaired in some patients with a genetic disease called GLUT1 Deficiency Syndrome (G1d.
Patients with G1d have seizures, movement disorders, speech disorders, and developmental delays as infants because insufficient glucose is transported to the brain.'
and treatment of diseases, including G1d, diabetes, and cancer,'said Wang, whose lab focus includes non-melanoma skin cancer, in
which GLUT1 is expressed highly d
#First live birth after transplantation of ovarian tissue removed and frozen during childhood Arraythe patient, who was born in the Republic of congo,
was diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia when she was five. After emigrating to Belgium at the age of 11,
doctors decided that her disease was so severe that she should be treated with a bone marrow transplant,
-versus-host disease and had to continue with immunosuppressive drugs for 18 months after the transplant.
When they are diagnosed with diseases that require treatment that can destroy ovarian function, freezing ovarian tissue is the only available option for preserving their fertility."
many experts working on disease control and prevention have seized upon it as a key material in creating diagnostic tools for the developing world."
Germinal centers are a sign of infection and are not present in healthy immune organs.
the organ could be used to study specific infections and how the body produces antibodies to fight those infections--from Ebola to HIV.'
'You can use our system to force the production of immunotherapeutics at much faster rates,
and environmental factors that contribute to infections or organ malfunctions. The process of B cells becoming germinal centers is understood not well,
blood cancer can result.''In the long run, we anticipate that the ability to drive immune reaction ex vivo at controllable rates grants us the ability to reproduce immunological events with tunable parameters for better mechanistic understanding of B cell development and generation of B cell tumors,
as well as screening and translation of new classes of drugs,'Singh said d
#'Chromosome shattering'seen in plants, cancer Plants can undergo the same extreme'chromosome shattering'seen in some human cancers and developmental syndromes,
UC Davis researchers have found. Chromosome shattering, or'chromothripsis,'has until now only been seen in animal cells.
Although plants don't get cancer it might also allow cancer researchers to use the laboratory plant Arabidopsis as a model to study chromosome behavior in cancer.
Chromothripsis involves slicing chromosomes into apparently random pieces, and reassembling it like a broken vase,
although in one recently published case a woman was cured of a genetic disorder when the gene responsible was lost due to chromothripsis.
#Single protein causes Parkinson's disease and multiple system atrophy Typical of neurodegenerative disorders is disrupted the communication between brain cells together with a loss of cells in specific brain regions.
For some brain diseases this phenomenon is linked to a protein known as alpha-synuclein. The exact function of this protein remains unclear,
However, in the case of specific diseases, including Parkinson's disease, Multiple System Atrophy (MSA), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), this protein forms aggregates that cause neurodegeneration."
"When alpha-synuclein aggregates accumulate within a brain cell, they interfere with the normal functioning of the cell.
Up to now, nobody understood how aggregates of this single protein could induce different pathologies, "says Professor Veerle Baekelandt from the Research Group for Neurobiology and Gene therapy."
while the'cylinders'induced Parkinson's disease, the'ribbons'caused MSA symptoms.""This clearly demonstrates that distinct diseases result from alpha-synuclein fibres that are structurally different."
"We are gaining more insight into the differences between the diseases. But we suspect that more fibres with different shapes
and effects are waiting to be discovered, apart from the two that we examined in this study.
A drug that counteracts the development of aggregates could be used to treat a whole range of brain diseases
#Vitamin d shows promise for treating Crohn's disease Crohn's disease (CD) is a lifelong chronic relapsing and remitting gastrointestinal condition, characterised by inflammation,
CD is associated with abdominal pain, diarrhea, fatigue and in many cases can result in a reduction of quality of life, time off work, hospitalisations and surgery.
In this new research, the authors aimed to determine changes in gut barrier function (as determined by intestinal permeability and antimicrobial peptide concentrations) as well as disease markers in CD, in response to Vitamin d supplementation.
UEG's inflammatory bowel disease expert, Dr Charles Murray of the Royal Free Hospital, London, UK comments;"
"This is an exciting development in the treatment of Crohn's disease and we welcome anything new that could potentially help patients with this debilitating condition
improve manufacturing and help develop therapies for disease. The need for this optics technology will grow with the construction of the next-generation of light sources
and localize proteins in tissues is essential for understanding disease mechanisms and for diagnostics. However, today very advanced instruments are needed often to study proteins
#New mechanism that attacks viral infections discovered An innovative mechanism that the innate immune system uses to control viral infections has been uncovered by researchers at the University Medical centers in Mainz and Freiburg.
but related elements of the immune system can act together in concert to fight, for example, rotavirus infections.
Infection with rotavirus is the most common cause of diarrhea in children around the world.
The innate immune system is able to combat infective pathogens such as viruses bacteria, and parasites on several levels.
which are released quickly in response to a viral infection and which can trigger a relevant immune response against the cells under attack.
and thus participate in an early stage of the immune response to infection by viruses, bacteria, and parasites.
The researchers were able to use the example of the rotavirus to demonstrate how such an infection could be battled very effectively.
Rotaviruses are highly contagious pathogens which cause vomiting and diarrhea. Rotavirus infection is the most frequent cause of diarrhea in children
and is responsible for more than 500,000 deaths around the world each year. It attacks the epithelial cells that coat the intestine and damages them."
"We were able to show that interferon-lambda (IFN? -although a required factor, is not capable by itself to control rotavirus infection
but that the presence of interleukin-22 (IL-22) is also necessary to effectively combat rotavirus,
such as, for example, defending the intestines and lungs against bacterial infections. In addition, interleukin-22 makes an important contribution to tissue repair processes in the intestines following damage to the intestinal epithelium following exposure to radiation."
Interferons are used, for example, in the immunotherapy of often refractory chronic viral infections such as hepatitis. The researchers postulate that the innovative mechanism in which two components of the innate immune system collaborate effectively in the epithelial cells may have developed in the course of evolution as a secondary line of immune defense in an environment in
#Scientists find genetic variants key to understanding origins of ovarian cancer New research by an international team including Keck Medicine of USC scientists is bringing the origins of ovarian cancer into sharper focus.
It remains a mystery where these cancers come from, 'said Simon Gayther, Ph d.,professor in preventive medicine, Keck School of medicine of USC, corresponding author of the international genome-wide association study (GWAS).'
we begin to understand more about the biology of the disease itself. This study tells us more about the biology of ovarian cancer from the early development stage than most research has.'
'Ovarian cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer in American women and seventh most common cancer in women throughout the world (World health organization.
In 2015, more than 14,000 American women will die of ovarian cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.
Most ovarian cancers have low survival rates, typically because of the misunderstanding of symptoms and discovery of the cancer in later, less treatable stages.'
'Although MOCS are a less common type of ovarian cancer with generally good prognosis when diagnosed in early stages,
they are twice as likely to be resistant to treatment at later stages, 'said Andrew Berchuck, M d.,director of gynecologic oncology at Duke university Cancer Institute,
and senior author of the study.''Our results will contribute to the identification of women at greatest risk of developing the disease with the long-term goal of prevention.'
'The association analysis was based on 1, 644 women diagnosed with MOC and more than 21,000 women without ovarian cancer.
The research was conducted as part of the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS), launched in 2009 with the goal of determining risks of breast, ovarian and prostate cancer.'
'A major strength of this study is the large number of women with MOCS, which was made possible by pooling data contributed by investigators from over 40 international studies of ovarian cancer within the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium,
'said Linda Kelemen, Sc. D.,associate professor and researcher at the Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South carolina,
and co-first author.''By using a genome-wide scan, we could identify genetic variants that were significantly more common in women with MOC compared to those without ovarian cancer.'
'Co-first author Kate Lawrenson, Ph d. of Keck Medicine of USC believes the research will lead the way to the development of risk prediction strategies followed by clinical interventions with the potential to prevent ovarian cancer altogether,
rather than treating the disease once it has taken already hold.''The five year survival rates for ovarian cancer have not changed much in the past 30 years
and is partly from viewing ovarian cancer as a single disease, 'she said.''Our results shed light on differences in genetic risk factors for the different ovarian cancers such as MOCS.
I'm hanging my hopes on prevention. My bet is that prevention approaches will be better than finding a cure for a disease that is often diagnosed late
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011