A new cancer vaccine platform works by enhancing the ability of the immune system to recognize cancer by leveraging anti-viral memories it already has - due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst outbreak of the last 70 years.
Bacteria that thrive in oxygen starved environments have been used successfully to target cancer tumors, delivering gene therapy based anti-cancer treatments, according to scientists.
For about half of cancer sufferers traditional treatments such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy are ineffective, so alternative techniques are being developed to target their tumors.
“To target a tumour with gene therapy you need three things. You need to be able to distinguish the tumour from its surrounding healthy tissue. You need to identify a therapeutic gene which will treat the problem. And you need some way of delivering the gene to the tumour”, says Dr Jan Theys of Maastricht University, the Netherlands.
So vital is the p53 tumor suppressor gene in controlling cancer that its dysfunction is linked to more than half of human cancers. At the same time, the gene’s capacity for shutting down cell growth, even causing cells to commit suicide if necessary, is so absolute that it must be tightly regulated to maintain the optimal balance between protecting against cancer and permitting normal growth.
Now, a study by scientists at The Wistar Institute reveals new levels of subtlety in the body’s management of this all-important tumor suppressor gene and the protein it produces.
With the help of genetically engineered mice whose livers turned into glowing light bulbs, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have illuminated the underpinnings of an insidious and growing health concern— type II diabetes.
In the study published in the September 5 advanced online edition of Nature, the researchers report that a protein called TORC2 serves as a key biochemical control point linking feeding, insulin, and elevated blood sugar production in the liver.
According to new research, two key proteins join together at the precise location where energy of motion is turned into electrical impulses. These proteins, cadherin 23 and protocadherin 15, are part of a complex of proteins called “tip links” that are on hair cells in the inner ear. The tip link is believed to have a central function in the conversion of physical cues into electrochemical signals.
“Mutations in [the genes] cadherin 23 and protocadherin 15 can cause deafness as well as Usher syndrome, the leading cause of deaf-blindness in humans,” says Professor Ulrich Mueller, of the Scripps Research Department of Cell Biology and Institute for Childhood and Neglected Diseases.
A new research study at Northwestern University is investigating innovative ways to rehabilitate people with lousy health habits.
Bonnie Spring, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, says the way to improve eating habits is to make change as easy as possible. Her method is based on the Behavioral Economics Theory used by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman.
The study uses high-tech tools, including a specially programmed Palm Pilot to monitor eating and exercise, virtual visits with a personal coach and an accelerometer which straps around the waist to record the intensity of their movements. Participants are assigned to eat more veggies and fruits or cut down on saturated fat and are encouraged to exercise.
Cholera is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium, the bacillus Vibrio cholerae. In 2004 there were 101,383 cases - 95,000 in Africa - resulting in 2,345 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Increases in the frequency of torrential rain, floods and periods of drought, said by some to result from global climate change, has contributed to the spread of cholera.
In studies aiming to understand better the emergence and persistence of cholera in Africa, IRD and CNRS researchers showed the strong correlation that exists between outbreaks and the different parameters linked to climate changes in West Africa.
A recent simulation has shown that thin layers of ice could persist on specially treated diamond coatings at temperatures well above body temperature, which could make ice-coated-diamond films an ideal coating for artificial heart valves, joint replacements, and wear-resistant prosthetics.
Physicists Alexander D. Wissner-Gross and Efthimios Kaxiras of Harvard modeled water ice on top of a diamond surface coated with sodium ions. They found that ice layers should persist on the treated diamond up to temperatures of 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius), and in some circumstances could remain frozen beyond the boiling point of water.
It's hardly surprising that clinically depressed people act differently than healthy people. Quantifying the difference, however, can be difficult. Now a collaboration of physicists and psychiatrists in Japan has found a way to clearly and objectively measure depression.
The researchers outfitted both healthy control subjects and depressed patients with accelerometers to continuously measure their motions over 5-day periods. Although activity levels in all of the subjects followed power-law patterns (a type of distribution that often turns up in physics studies of natural systems) the activity levels of depressed patients were clearly distinguished from healthy subjects by a number known as the scaling parameter.
While we are a long way off from the lightweight, high-performance, magical cloak of Harry Potter, physicists have been busy designing ways to make invisibility possible.
A recent theoretical analysis of a column-shaped invisibility cloak, by a collaboration of researchers from Sweden and China, showed that a cloak made to ideal specifications could render an object (or wizard) hidden inside perfectly invisible. However, even slight deviations from these specifications will cause the invisibility to break down.
The researchers analyzed the properties of a simulated tube of special metamaterials (manmade materials with intricate, microscopic structures) that can force light to follow a specified path.
Several genes with strong associations to schizophrenia have evolved rapidly due to selection during human evolution, according to researchers who found a higher prevalence of the influence of so-called positive selection on genes or gene regions known to be associated with the disorder than a comparable control set of non-associated genes, functioning in similar neuronal processes.
This is consistent with the theory that positive selection may play a role in the persistence of schizophrenia at a frequency of one per cent in human populations around the world, despite its strong effects on reproductive fitness and its high heritability from generation-to-generation.
It also provides genetic evidence consistent with the long-standing theory that schizophrenia represents, in part, a ma
According to new research at the University of Virginia Health System, N-acetylcysteine (NAC), an anti-oxidant commonly used in nutritional and body-building supplements, can form a red blood cell-derived molecule that makes blood vessels think they are not getting enough oxygen. This leads to pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a serious condition characterized by high blood pressure in the arteries that carry blood to the lungs.
“NAC fools the body into thinking that it has an oxygen shortage,” said Dr. Ben Gaston, UVa Children’s Hospital pediatrician and researcher who led the study. “We found that an NAC product formed by red blood cells, know as a nitrosothiol, bypasses the normal regulation of oxygen sensing.
An 80-million-year-old dinosaur fossil unearthed in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia demonstrates that miniaturization, long thought to be a hallmark of bird origins and a necessary precursor of flight, occurred progressively in primitive dinosaurs.
The find, described in the September 7 issue of the journal Science, is made up of the fossilized bones of a new dinosaur the researchers have named Mahakala, and includes portions of its skull, forelimb and hindlimb, as well as much of the vertebral column.
Mahakala is an early evolutionary offshoot of the group of carnivorous dinosaurs known as dromaeosaurids that also includes the agile, sickle-clawed Velociraptor made famous in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park.
A dinosaur foss
