#Urine test for early stage pancreatic cancer possible after biomarker discovery A team at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, has shown that the three-protein'signature'can both identify the most common
--and distinguish between this cancer and the inflammatory condition chronic pancreatitis, which can be hard to tell apart.
while patients suffering from chronic pancreatitis had significantly lower levels than cancer patients. When combined, the three proteins formed a robust panel that can detect patients with stages I-II pancreatic cancer with over 90 per cent accuracy.
With few specific symptoms even at a later stage of the disease, more than 80 per cent of people with pancreatic cancer are diagnosed
when the cancer has already spread. This means they are not eligible for surgery to remove the tumour--currently the only potentially curative treatment.
The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer in the UK is the lowest of any common cancer, standing at 3 per cent.
This figure has improved barely in 40 years. There is no early diagnostic test available. Lead researcher, Dr Tatjana Crnogorac-Jurcevic, said:"
people at higher risk of developing the disease include those with a family history of pancreatic cancer, heavy smokers, the obese and people over 50 years with new-onset diabetes.
if the 3-biomarker signature is present during the latency period--the time between the genetic changes that will cause the cancer to develop and the clinical presentation."
"For a cancer with no early stage symptoms, it's a huge challenge to diagnose pancreatic cancer sooner,
"says co-author and Director of Barts Cancer Institute, Professor Nick Lemoine.""With pancreatic cancer, patients are diagnosed usually
when the cancer is already at a terminal stage, but if diagnosed at stage 2,
Early diagnosis is an important part of our overall efforts against this aggressive cancer, alongside developing new treatments to tackle the disease once diagnosis is made.
It underlines the importance of increased research efforts to help improve survival rates.""Many of the urine samples from healthy individuals tested by Tanja's team were donated from the charity's own supporter community,
3-D printed'tissue'to help combat disease A bench-top brain that accurately reflects actual brain tissue would be significant for researching not only the effect of drugs,
but brain disorders like schizophrenia, and degenerative brain disease. Researchers have completed now 3-D printing a six-layered structure similar to brain tissue, in
which cells are placed accurately and remain in their designated layer. Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) have taken a step closer to meeting this challenge,
Pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars testing therapeutic drugs on animals only to discover in human trials that the drug has an altogether different level of effectiveness.
but brain disorders like schizophrenia, and degenerative brain disease. ACES Director and research author Professor Gordon Wallace said that the breakthrough is significant progress in the quest to create a bench-top brain that will enable important insights into brain function,
in addition to providing an experimental test bed for new drugs and electroceuticals.""We are still a long way from printing a brain
Various sight recovery therapies are being developed by companies around the world, offering new hope for people who are blind.
what vision would be like after two different types of sight recovery therapies. Lead author Ione Fine,
if they undergo sight restoration surgery, an invasive and costly procedure.""This is a really difficult decision to make,
"These devices involve long surgeries, and they don't restore anything close to normal vision. The more information patients have, the better."
Loss of rods and cones is the primary cause of vision loss in diseases such as macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa.
But those diseases leave most remaining neurons within the retina relatively intact, and various technologies under development aim to restore vision by targeting the surviving cells.
Fine said better simulations can provide valuable information about how implants need to be improved to produce more natural vision."
we're just shooting in the dark in trying to improve these implants
#Small tilt in magnets makes them viable memory chips University of California, Berkeley, researchers have discovered a new way to switch the polarization of nanomagnets,
not only for a range of neuropsychiatric disorders such as ADHD, eating disorders and anxiety disorders, but also for more common problems involving maladaptive daily decisions about drug or alcohol use, gambling or credit card binges.
Importantly, lesions to other parts of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, known to be involved in certain aspects of decision-making,
and those with brain disease,"said Prof. Yogita Chudasama, of Mcgill's Psychology department and the lead researcher on the paper."
to be a therapeutic target in human patient groups
#Missing piece surfaces in the puzzle of autism A study carried out by the Laboratoire Neurobiologie des Interactions Cellulaires et Neurophysiopathologie (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université),
in collaboration with clinicians from Marseilles Public Hospitals (AP-HM) and scientists from the Salk Institute in San diego (US), has revealed a new gene that plays a crucial role during early development in humans and
whose under-expression may induce certain autistic traits. This work is published on 4 august 2015 in Molecular Psychiatry.
Understanding the mechanisms that underlie autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which affect 7. 6 million people according to the World health organization,
is a major challenge. Characterized by heterogeneous symptoms and a multifactorial origin, this complex condition evolves during brain development.
in order to determine new genes involved in this disease. Easily accessible from nasal biopsies, these cells--which belong to nerve tissues
and can differentiate into neurons--constitute an interesting model to identify the genes and proteins whose expression is deregulated in patients with ASD.
Through its involvement in this chemical pathway, MOCOS is thought to be active in the processes of immunity and inflammation,
In these different organisms, under-expression of the enzyme induced hypersensitivity to oxidative stress (i e. to the toxicity of free radicals), a smaller number of synapses and abnormal neurotransmission due to a reduction in the number of vesicles carrying neurotransmitters.
The involvement of this enzyme in susceptibility to oxidative stress, which has frequently been observed in autistic children, its association with gastrointestinal diseases
--which often accompany autistic disorders --and its role in nerve development and neurotransmission mean it is an ideal candidate for deregulation of its expression to lead to the abnormal brain development observed in ASD.
in the longer term, lead to the development of therapeutic tools and new diagnostic methods d
Obtained in collaboration with Juanma Vaquerizas from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine (Münster, Germany),
"This expansion and contraction of aluminum particles generates great mechanical stress, which can cause electrical contacts to disconnect.
and give rise to mature cells, even in the absence of injury or disease.""Nusse and his colleagues reported their findings August 5, 2015, in the journal Nature.
The lab is now investigating how the newly identified stem cells might contribute to regeneration of liver tissue after injury.
whether liver cancers tend to originate in these replicating cells, as opposed to more mature hepatocytes,
This deeper understanding of how cells become differentiated is extremely important when considering therapeutic potentials.
#Super-small needle technology for the brain However, one challenge is reducing the tissue/neuron damage associated with needle penetration, particularly for chronic insert experiment and future medical applications.
In addition, as an actual needle application, we demonstrated fluorescenctce particle depth injection into the brain in vivo,
as well as in nine renowned academic hospitals s
#Scientists determine how antibiotic gains cancer-killing sulfur atoms In a discovery with implications for future drug design,
scientists have shown an unprecedented mechanism for how a natural antibiotic with antitumor properties incorporates sulfur into its molecular structure, an essential ingredient of its antitumor activity.
This new discovery could open the way to incorporating sulfur into other natural products, potentially advancing new therapies for indications beyond cancer."
A number of compounds that contain sulfur have proven useful in the treatment of conditions ranging from acne and eczema to arthritis and cancer."
"With many other natural products, sulfur could add other therapeutic properties. This is the beauty of fundamental research--it lays the foundation to create novel technologies that enable innovative translational research with implications far beyond the original discovery."
#Engineering a permanent solution to genetic diseases In his mind, Basil Hubbard can already picture a new world of therapeutic treatments for millions of patients just over the horizon.
It's a future in which diseases like muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and many others are treated permanently through the science of genome engineering.
Thanks to his latest work, Hubbard is bringing that future closer to reality. Hubbard's research, published in the journal Nature Methods, demonstrates a new technology advancing the field of genome engineering.
"There is a trend in the scientific community to develop therapeutics in a more rational fashion,
"We're moving towards a very logical type of treatment for genetic diseases, where we can actually say,
'Your disease is caused by a mutation in gene X, and we're going to correct this mutation to treat it'."
'"In theory, genome engineering will eventually allow us to permanently cure genetic diseases by editing the specific faulty gene (s)."Genome engineering involves the targeted, specific modification of an organism's genetic information.
and may one day revolutionize medical care. One of the obstacles still to be addressed in the field before it can see widespread use in humans is how to ensure the proteins only affect the specific target genes in need of repair.
but more improvements are needed to ensure off-target genes aren't modified--a result that could potentially cause serious health problems itself.
"Currently much of the research in the field of genome engineering is focused on treating monogenic diseases--diseases that involve a single gene--as they're much easier for researchers to successfully target.
Examples include diseases such as hemophilia, sickle cell anemia, muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis. While the field is still in its relative infancy,
gene editing could possibly provide a permanent cure for a lot of different diseases, "says Hubbard.""We still have to overcome many hurdles but
I think this technology definitely has the potential to be transformative in medicine
#Mechanism of epidemic bacterial disease identified Through identification of increased toxin production by epidemic forms of group A streptococcus (the"flesh-eating"bacterium),
for the first time scientists are able to pinpoint the molecular events that contribute to large intercontinental epidemics of disease.
The study was based on sequencing almost 5, 000 group A streptococcus genomes collected over decades.
Researchers from Houston Methodist Research Institute, Houston Methodist Hospital, institutions in Finland and Iceland, and the U s. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases report their discoveries and implications for future studies of epidemic diseases in an upcoming Journal of Clinical Investigation (early online).
According to James M. Musser, M d.,Ph d.,principal investigator of the study and chair of the Department of Pathology and Genomic Medicine at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, the collaborative research showed, at the precise nucleotide level,
genetic changes that contributed to large epidemics of group A streptococcus (GAS).""These findings now give us the opportunity to begin to develop new translational medicine tools
and strategies,"said Musser.""We can use this information to develop novel therapeutics, advanced diagnostic techniques and new ways to prevent,
or dampen, epidemics.""According to the World health organization, GAS causes more than 600 million cases of human disease every year.
The majority of cases are group A streptococcus pharyngitis, more commonly known as strep throat. But group A strep is also the major cause of preventable childhood heart disease caused by rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease.
On the far end of the infection severity spectrum, group A streptococcus also causes necrotizing fasciitis("flesh-eating"disease), an infection with a high mortality rate.
The collaborating team of international scientists found that group A streptococcus was an excellent model organism to study the molecular basis of epidemic bacterial infections.
Researchers have known for more than a century that this pathogenic bacterium can cause epidemics but no one has been able to fully address the cause.
Now with next generation sequencing, scientists are able to sequence the entire genome of the bacteria,
just as is done in humans. Group A streptococcus was selected as the model organism for study due to the availability of comprehensive strain samples collected over decades,
and its relatively small genome, which allows the genome of thousands of strains to be sequenced completely relatively rapidly.
was that changes in the genetic make-up of the GAS pathogen had underpinned new epidemics. To address this hypothesis
the collaborating international team sequenced the genome of thousands of disease-causing strains, precisely defining every base pair mutation in the strains."
"The surprise was that the changes involved alterations in the genes encoding two potent toxins that contribute to human infections,
who is director for the Center for Molecular and Translational Human Infectious disease Research at Houston Methodist.
The researchers found that in the epidemic form of group A streptococcus, which can manifest as necrotizing fasciitis,
or"flesh-eating"disease, there were two significant and crucial changes within the regulatory region of the epidemic strains.
and the toxic proteins made. These specific genetic changes result in the creation of single nucleotide polymorphisms
All three of these SNPS contributed to building a pathogenic organism that is a more virulent machine capable of causing epidemics."
Musser and team are hopeful findings from their model study will allow other infectious disease researchers to use analogous strategies that focus on other pathogens, like Staphylococcus aureus (the leading cause of skin and soft-tissue infections),
and antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Klebsiella pneumonia or Escherichia coli i
#Device may detect urinary tract infections faster Sepsis is a major killer and accounts for about half of the hospital deaths in the US by some estimates.
Hospital patients often acquire urinary tract infections via infected catheters and so untreated infections are a huge problem faced by healthcare providers around the world.
Early diagnosis could save lives and reduce healthcare costs. With this motivation in mind, a team of researchers in Germany and Ireland set out to speed up the detection process for bacteria that cause urinary tract infections.
Arraytheir medical diagnostics device is designed to harness centrifugal force--akin to the circular swing of A chair-o-Plane"carnival ride
in which a fast rotation creates a force that causes the seats to drift radially away from the ride's center--to capture the tiny bacteria directly from patients'samples of bodily fluidsn this case, urine.
The work involves extremely small sample sizes, on the scale of a small raindrop, so the device needed to be a microfluidic one."
"Our device works by loading a few microliters of a patient's urine sample into a tiny chip,
"explained Ulrich-Christian Schröder, a Ph d. student at the Jena University Hospital and Leibniz Institute of technology in Germany.
"said Ute Neugebauer, group leader at the Jena University Hospital and Leibniz Institute of technology. What exactly does the team's medical device detect?"
"In our pilot study, we were able to identify Escherichia coli (more commonly known as E coli) and Enterococcus faecalis--two species known to cause urinary tract infections--within 70 minutes,
directly from patients'urine samples,"said Schröder. The speedy diagnosis marks a tremendous reduction in the wait time compared to the lengthy lag--often 24 hours
or more--associated with methods routinely used to identify bacteria and diagnose urinary tract infections today, so the team's device shows great potential for improving the future of medical diagnostics.
The team envisions general practitioners, a k a. family doctors using the device to rapidly --while a patient waits--identify the bacteria causing an infection directly within the patient's bodily fluid
so that they can prescribe the appropriate medication and treatment.""Our pilot study brings us a step closer toward realizing this vision,
"said Neugebauer. The team will continue toward its goal of developing an easy-to-use spectroscopy-based point-of-care medical device for fast and reliable diagnostics."
"The next step will involve implementing antibiotic susceptibility testing and automating the sample pre-treatment steps,
"Neugebauer explained.""Our ultimate vision is to apply the concepts behind our device to enable diagnostics devices for use with other bodily fluids. u
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.
such as antibodies, can make them persist long enough to be useful. Now a team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has devised an improved method for accomplishing this protein-engineering feat.
and its antibody host, selecting the rare ones that allow the inserted protein to fold
and diagnostic compounds that would not have been possible otherwise--including powerful hormone-based therapies.""Unlike prior approaches to this design problem,
Making Leptin Last Longer Lerner's laboratory helped pioneer techniques for generating billions of different antibodies
and screening these large"antibody libraries"to find those that perform a desired function. The new work is an extension of that technology.
the team edited the genetic code of a standard human antibody to replace one of its target-grappling elements--a structure that normally would bind to a virus, for example--with the protein leptin.
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."
if it were part of a larger structure such as an antibody.""The major challenge for Lerner, Peng and their colleagues was to design leptin into an antibody in such a way that it would fold up into a functional structure
despite being bound to its host protein at either end. Designing simple, highly flexible"junction"segments to join leptin to an antibody could work--a recent paper by a group including TSRI's Peter Schultz,
Scripps Family Chair Professor of Chemistry, described such a feat. But Lerner's team reasoned that a selection-based design of these junctions would be a more general approach to making useful protein-in-protein molecules.
The Power of Large Numbers Using their established techniques for generating large libraries of variant antibodies
the team made nearly 30 million versions of the leptin-in-antibody protein, each version having a different amino-acid sequence for its junction segments.
and function properly, the researchers used a selection system that they had developed previously for finding therapeutic antibodies in large antibody libraries.
First they employed viral vectors to insert the leptin-in-antibody DNA into test cells that contain leptin receptors.
When one of the resulting leptin-in-antibody proteins successfully activated a leptin receptor in its test cell,
The cells whose beacon signals rose above a certain threshold were analyzed for the leptin-in-antibody DNA they contained,
until the process yielded the leptin-in-antibody protein that did best at activating the leptin receptor.
As is often the case for antibodies the leptin-in-antibody protein effectively could not cross from the bloodstream into the brain
and thus could not hit all of leptin's neuronal targets --and so its effects at reducing eating
But, in principle, antibodies can be modified to enable them to cross the blood-brain barrier more easily, and the team is working on that now.
the researchers also used it to"selection-design"an antibody that incorporates the growth and reproductive hormone FSH
The resulting FSH-in-antibody protein showed activity against the FSH receptor that was virtually the same as the natural hormone's The team is now working to improve their FSH-and leptin-in-antibody proteins,
and to design entirely new protein-in-antibody molecules s
#Engineers'sandwich'atomic layers to make new materials for energy storage The scientists whose job it is to test the limits of what nature--specifically chemistry--will allow to exist, just set up shop on some new real estate on the Periodic table.
which are toxic and carcinogenic, used in traditional spraying methods. With this process the loss of 18 percent of product damaged by the existence of pathogenic organisms is avoided.
and serve a greater number of silos with the same ozonation system providing great versatility in removing pathogens from stored grain.
or leaving toxic residues, eliminating odors, fungi and sanitizing grains such as corn, beans, wheat, sorghum and rice,"says researcher Llanes Ocaña.
which are toxic and carcinogenic. The physicochemical expert explains that the common spraying method is used in doses of four tablets of phosphine per ton of 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
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