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Stanford chemists have developed an non-invasive technique using lasers and carbon nanotubes to capture an unprecedented look at blood flowing through a living brain.
The new technique was developed for mice but could one day be applied to humans, potentially providing vital information in the study of stroke and migraines, and perhaps even Alzheimers and Parkinsons diseases, the researchers say.
While there has been progress made in the fight against Alzheimer's, our understanding of the dispiriting disease remains somewhat limited, with a definitive cure yet to be found. The latest development comes at the hands of researchers from Yale's School of Medicine, who have discovered a new drug compound shown to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's in mice.
The team's research centers on a protein in the brain called STtriatal-Enriched tyrosine Phosphatase (STEP). While STEP is essential to regulating learning and memory, high levels prevent the strengthening of synapses in the brain. This synaptic strengthening is necessary for people to convert short-term memories into long-term memories, therefore disruption of the process can lead to a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer's.
The scientists studied thousands of molecules in search of one that would inhibit the negative effects of STEP. They identified the compound TC-2153 and proceeded to examine its efficacy in curtailing the impacts of STEP, observing a reversal of deficits in a number of cognitive exercises, including the mouse's ability to remember objects it had seen previously.
“A single dose of the drug results in improved cognitive function in mice," says Dr Paul Lombroso, professor in the Yale Child Study Center and lead author of the study. "Animals treated with TC compound were indistinguishable from a control group in several cognitive tasks.”
A pilot study undertaken by researchers from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Imperial College London has shown promise in rapid treatment of serious strokes. The study, the first of its kind published in the UK, treated patients using stem cells from bone marrow.
Imagine a perfectly ordinary beginning to your day, say burned toast, no matching pair of socks and the usual damp commute to work. Except at some point through the usual minutiae you suffer a massive stroke. If you don’t die outright, you may soon afterwards. Even supposing you survive those first days or weeks, the chance of your life resuming its comforting tedium is impossibly remote. You may need assistance for the rest of your shortened life.
According to the Stroke Association, about 152,000 people suffer a stroke in the UK alone each year. However, the five patients treated in the recent Imperial College pilot study all showed improvements. According to doctors, four of those had suffered the most severe kind of stroke, which leaves only four percent of people alive or able to live independently six months after the event. All four of the patients were alive after six months.
Diabetes could be cured after scientists discovered that toxic clumps of a hormone stop cells producing insulin. Scientists at Manchester University have found that both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes are driven by the same underlying mechanism. The findings suggest that both forms occur when the hormone amylin begins to clump together, surrounding cells, and preventing them from producing insulin.
A scientist honoured by the Vatican for his work in the field of adult stem cell research is close to producing a therapy to treat congestive heart failure – the biggest killer in the industrialised world.
Professor Silviu Itescu, the chief executive of Mesoblast, an Australia-based regenerative medicine company, is pioneering a therapy that requires a single injection of 150 million adult stem cells into the heart – and no surgery.
The scientist last year received the inaugural Key Innovator Award from the Pontifical Council for Culture for his leadership and ingenuity in translational science and clinical medicine in the field of adult stem cell therapy.
His work is identifying huge potential for a wide of therapies without any of the “ethical constraints” incumbent in destructive stem-cell research on human embryos.
Researchers have realized a long-held dream: inspired by an industrial assembly line, they have developed a nanoscale production line for the assembly of biological molecules.
Cars, planes and many electronic products are now built with the help of sophisticated assembly lines. Mobile assembly carriers, on to which the objects are fixed, are an important part of these assembly lines. In the case of a car body, the assembly components are attached in various work stages arranged in a precise spatial and chronological sequence, resulting in a complete vehicle at the end of the line.
The creation of such an assembly line at molecular level has been a long-held dream of many nanoscientists. "It would enable us to assemble new complex substances or materials for specific applications," says Professor Viola Vogel, head of the Laboratory of Applied Mechanobiology at ETH Zurich. Vogel has been working on this ambitious project together with her team and has recently made an important step. In a paper published in the latest issue of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Lab on a Chip journal, the ETH researchers presented a molecular assembly line featuring all the elements of a conventional production line: a mobile assembly carrier, an assembly object, assembly components attached at various assembly stations and a motor (including fuel) for the assembly carrier to transport the object from one assembly station to the next.
Production line three times thinner than a hair
At the nano level, the assembly line takes the form of a microfluid platform into which an aqueous solution is pumped. This platform is essentially a canal system with the main canal just 30 micrometres wide -- three times thinner than a human hair. Several inflows and outflows lead to and from the canal at right angles. The platform was developed by Vogel's PhD student Dirk Steuerwald and the prototype was created in the clean room at the IBM Research Centre in Rüschlikon.
Read MoreAlthough cardiac pacemakers have saved countless lives, they do have at least one shortcoming – like other electronic devices, their batteries wear out. When this happens, of course, surgery is required in order to replace the pacemaker. While some researchers are looking into ideas such as drawing power from blood sugar, Swiss scientists from the University of Bern have taken another approach. They’ve developed a wristwatch-inspired device that can power a pacemaker via the beating of the patient’s own heart.
Read MoreFailing memory is one of the (many) drawbacks of old age, but can also impact younger people suffering stroke, early-stage Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury and cardiac arrest. In a breakthrough that opens up the potential for new treatments for memory impairments in the young and old, researchers at Northwestern University have shown that electrical stimulation of the brain can improve memory, with the benefits lasting long after treatment.
In May, Nextbigfuture reported that DARPA had $70 million in funding a project for brain implants for emotional mind control.
DARPA has a $79.8 million ElectRx project that aims to explore neuromodulation of organ functions to help the human body heal itself.
DARPA is planning to perform human trials of ElectRx in about five years. The initial goal will be improving the quality of life for US soldiers and veterans — though there’s no word on which condition DARPA will focus on.
The body’s peripheral nervous system constantly monitors the status of internal organs and helps regulate biological responses to infection, injury or other imbalances. When this regulatory process goes awry due to injury or illness, peripheral nerve signals can actually exacerbate a condition, causing pain, inflammation or immune dysfunction. A number of difficult-to-treat conditions might be managed more effectively by precise modulation of the peripheral nervous system than by conventional medical devices or medications.
“The technology DARPA plans to develop through the ElectRx program could fundamentally change the manner in which doctors diagnose, monitor and treat injury and illness,” said Doug Weber, DARPA program manager. “Instead of relying only on medication—we envision a closed-loop system that would work in concept like a tiny, intelligent pacemaker. It would continually assess conditions and provide stimulus patterns tailored to help maintain healthy organ function, helping patients get healthy and stay healthy using their body’s own systems.”
While malaria has essentially disappeared in many countries, it still continues to ravage many parts of the world. The places where it survives tend to be poor and remote, and access to clinical laboratories with proper stains and microscopes sparse. Moreover, properly trained technicians that can analyze the slides can also be a rarity. Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) have now developed a new malaria test that doesn’t require any staining and can be used by minimally trained personnel out in the field.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved a new immunotherapy drug to treat advanced melanoma, signaling a paradigm shift in the way the deadly skin cancer is treated.
The drug, Keytruda (pembrolizumab), was tested on more than 600 patients who had melanoma that had spread throughout their bodies. Because so many of the patients in the early testing showed significant long-lasting responses, the study was continued and the FDA granted the drug "breakthrough therapy" status, allowing it to be fast-tracked for approval.
The largest Phase 1 study in the history of oncology, the research was conducted at UCLA and 11 other sites in the U.S., Europe and Australia.
In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers have demonstrated the viability of direct brain-to-brain communication in humans. Recently published in PLOS ONE, the highly novel findings describe the successful transmission of information via the Internet between the intact scalps of two human subjects – located 5,000 miles apart.
"We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," explains co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, PhD, Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. "One such pathway is, of course, the Internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of Internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'"
It turned out the answer was "yes."
In the neuroscientific equivalent of instant messaging, Pascual-Leone and his colleagues successfully transmitted the words "hola" and "ciao" in a computer-mediated brain-to-brain transmission, from a location in India to a location in France, using internet-linked electroencephalogram (EEG) and robot-assisted and image-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technologies.
Scientists have been wondering about what the secrets are for living longer for some time now and while we understand that various lifestyle and environmental factors contribute to our longevity, it is also evident that genetics plays a role. In fact, family studies have indicated that genetic factors account for around 20-30% of the variation in adult lifespan. Now, a new study, published in Aging Cell, may have some answers.
| Lifespan of fruit flies extended by 30 percent Biologists have identified a gene that can slow the aging process throughout the entire body when activated "remotely" in key organ systems. |
| Working with fruit flies, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), activated a gene known as AMPK. This gene is a key energy sensor within cells; it gets activated when cellular energy levels are low. Increasing the amount of AMPK in fruit flies' intestines boosted their lifespans by 30% – to eight weeks from the typical six – and the flies stayed healthier for longer as well. This is equivalent to extending the average human lifespan for OECD countries from 80 to 104. The research, published in the journal Cell Reports, could have important implications for delaying aging and disease in humans, explains David Walker, associate professor of integrative biology and physiology at UCLA and senior author of the study. “We have shown that when we activate the gene in the intestine or the nervous system, we see the aging process is slowed beyond the organ system in which the gene is activated,” Walker said. These findings are important because extending the healthy life of humans would presumably require protecting many of the body’s organ systems from the ravages of aging – but delivering anti-aging treatments to the brain or other key organs could prove technically difficult. This study suggests that activating AMPK in a more accessible organ such as the intestine, for example, could ultimately slow the aging process throughout the entire body, including the brain. Humans have AMPK, but it is usually not activated at a high level, Walker explained: “Instead of studying the diseases of aging – Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, stroke, cardiovascular disease, diabetes – one by one, we believe it may be possible to intervene in the aging process and delay the onset of many of these diseases. We are not there yet, and it could, of course, take many years, but that is our goal and we think it is realistic. The ultimate aim of our research is to promote healthy aging in people.” |
| Lifespan of fruit flies extended by 30 percent [TR][TD] |
