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Researchers develop mRNA based flu vaccine(Phys.org)A joint research effort by the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute and pharmaceutical company CureVac, both based in Germany, has resulted in the creation of a new type of flu vaccine. The vaccine, as the team describes in their paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, relies on the use of Messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) instead of the cultivation of cultures in chicken eggs, which means it can be created and manufactured in weeks rather than months.
NEC is working on a suitcase-sized DNA analyzer, which it says will be able to process samples at the scene of a crime or disaster in as little as 25 minutes.
The company said it aims to launch the device globally in 2014, and sell it for around 10 million yen, or US$120,000. It will output samples that can be quickly matched via the growing number of DNA databases worldwide.
“At first we will target investigative organizations, like police,” said spokeswoman Marita Takahashi. “We will also push its use on victims of natural disasters, to quickly match samples from siblings and parents.”
NEC hopes to use research and software from its mature fingerprint and facial matching technology, which have been deployed in everyday devices such as smartphones and ATMs.
25 minutes isn't as fast as the split-second DNA analyzers that you see in Gattaca, of course, but what's significant here is that the technology has improved from an hour to 25 minutes in just a year. It's not hard to imagine that analysis time might be down to about 10 minutes by 2015, and by 2020, it'll be in the seconds range. With analysis price likely to see a corresponding decrease, it's a sure thing that DNA analysis will be a lot more common: the only question is just what, exactly, it'll be used for when it becomes a little too fast, easy, and cheap.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2012) — Pathological changes typical of Alzheimer's disease were significantly reduced in mice by blockade of an immune system transmitter. A research team from Charité -- Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the University of Zurich has just published a new therapeutic approach in fighting Alzheimer's disease in the current issue of Nature Medicine. This approach promises potential in prevention, as well as in cases where the disease has already set in.
A postdoctoral student has developed a technique for implanting thought-controlled robotic arms and their electrodes directly to the bones and nerves of amputees, a move which he is calling “the future of artificial limbs”. The first volunteers will receive their new limbs early in 2013.
“The benefits have no precedent,” Max Ortiz Catalan, who carries out research in biomedicine and artificial intelligence at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, told Wired.co.uk. “They will be able to simultaneously control several joints and motions, as well as to receive direct neural feedback on their actions. These features are today not available for patients outside research labs. Our aim is to change that.”
Ordinary myoelectric prostheses work by placing electrodes over the skin to pick up nerve signals that would ordinarily be sent by the brain to the limb. An algorithm then translates these signals, and sends instructions to motors within the electronic limb. Since the electrodes are applied to the skin surface, however, they will undoubtedly encounter countless issues in maintaining the fluid transferal of information back and forth between the brain and the limb. By implanting those electrodes directly to the patient’s nerves, Catalan is hoping to get one step closer than anyone else to replicating natural movement.
Harvard scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say they have for the first time partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, resulting in new growth of the brain and testes, improved fertility, and the return of a lost cognitive function.
In a report posted online by the journal Nature in advance of print publication, researchers led by Ronald A. DePinho, a Harvard Medical School (HMS) professor of genetics, said they achieved the milestone in aging science by engineering mice with a controllable telomerase gene. The telomerase enzyme maintains the protective caps called telomeres that shield the ends of chromosomes.
As humans age, low levels of telomerase are associated with progressive erosion of telomeres, which may then contribute to tissue degeneration and functional decline in the elderly. By creating mice with a telomerase switch, the researchers were able to generate prematurely aged mice. The switch allowed the scientists to find out whether reactivating telomerase in the animals would restore telomeres and mitigate the signs and symptoms of aging. The work showed a dramatic reversal of many aspects of aging, including reversal of brain disease and infertility.
While human applications remain in the future, the strategy might one day be used to treat conditions such as rare genetic premature aging syndromes in which shortened telomeres play an important role, said DePinho, senior author of the report and the director of Dana-Farber’s Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science. “Whether this would impact on normal aging is a more difficult question,” he added. “But it is notable that telomere loss is associated with age-associated disorders and thus restoration of telomeres could alleviate such decline.” The first author is Mariela Jaskelioff, a research fellow in medicine in DePinho’s laboratory.
Importantly, the animals showed no signs of developing cancer. This remains a concern because cancer cells turn on telomerase to make themselves virtually immortal. DePinho said the risk can be minimized by switching on telomerase only for a matter of days or weeks — which may be brief enough to avoid fueling hidden cancers or cause new ones to develop. Still, he observed, it is an important issue for further study.
In addition, DePinho said these results may provide new avenues for regenerative medicine, because they suggest that quiescent adult stem cells in severely aged tissues remain viable and can be reactivated to repair tissue damage. After four weeks, the scientists observed remarkable signs of rejuvenation in the treated mice. Overall, the mice exhibited increased levels of telomerase and lengthened telomeres, biological changes indicative of cells returning to a growth state with reversal of tissue degeneration, and increase in size of the spleen, testes, and brain. “It was akin to a Ponce de León effect,” noted DePinho, referring to the Spanish explorer who sought the mythical Fountain of Youth.
“When we flipped the telomerase switch on and looked a month later, the brains had largely returned to normal,” said DePinho. More newborn nerve cells were observed, and the fatty myelin sheaths around nerve cells — which had become thinned in the aged animals — increased in diameter. In addition, the increase in telomerase revitalized slumbering brain stem cells so they could produce new neurons.
0 0 i For those of you waiting for the real-deal collection of Star Trek gadgets and gizmos, you’ll find that today is a great day – the tricorder has arrived. The folks at Scanadu have been developing a handheld device that, while not exactly service the same function as the 60′s series tech, is certainly Star Trek-worthy in its abilities. This device has been in development for less than a year and will be prototype ready by the end of 2012 – so says the NASA-Ames Research Center-based startup team themselves.
This unit goes by the name SCOUT and is ready to connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth in a snap. Once you’re synced up, you’ve only to press the SCOUT device up to your temple and let it sit for 10 seconds. In those 10 seconds you’ll find that your vital signs will be scanned with great accuracy, this including your temperature, heart rate, breathing rate, ECG, and SPO2.
Though they've never actually seen it with their own eyes, scientists know that DNA's structure is composed of a spiraling corkscrew. They know this thanks to molecular theory and and an old-time technique called X-ray crystallography, where patterns of dots are converted into an overarching image using mathematics. But now, for the first time ever, scientists have actually snapped a real image of DNA using an electron microscope — spiraling corkscrew and all.
People usually find out that they have cancer after developing symptoms or through a screening test such as a mammogram—signs that may appear only after the cancer has grown or spread so much that it can't be cured. But what if you could find out from a simple, highly accurate blood test that you had an incipient tumor? By sequencing the abnormal DNA that a tumor releases into a person's bloodstream, researchers are now one step closer to a universal cancer test. Although the technique is now only sensitive enough to detect advanced cancers, that may be a matter of money: As sequencing costs decrease, the developers of the method say, the test could eventually pick up early tumors as well.
The new work is part of a wave of research on using either cells shed into the blood by tumors or free-floating tumor DNA in blood to track the growth and spread of tumors and tailor treatments. The free tumor DNA tests generally rely on looking for known alterations in cancer genes to distinguish cancerous DNA from normal DNA. Seeking a way to detect tumor DNA without knowing its genetic makeup beforehand, postdoctoral researcher Rebecca Leary and others in the labs of Victor Velculescu and Luis Diaz at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and collaborators at other institutions took advantage of an observation they and others have made: No matter the type of cancer, tumor cells almost invariably have substantially altered chromosomes, such as swapped pieces and extra copies of certain genes. This suggests that a test that could detect any chromosomal abnormalities in a person's blood could serve as a general test for cancer.
Scientists – funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Medical Research Council (MRC) and Wellcome Trust – have today published a patient-friendly and efficient way to make stem cells out of blood, increasing the hope that scientists could one day use stem cells made from patients' own cells to treat cardiovascular disease (1).
The study, in the journal Stem Cells: Translational Medicine (2), outlines a way for scientists to get the cells they need to make induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells (3) from a routine blood sample. Previously scientists have struggled to find an appropriate type of cell in the blood that can be turned into a stem cell, and often make iPS cells from skin or other tissues, which can require a surgical procedure, like a biopsy.
Dr Amer Rana and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge grew patients' blood in the lab and isolated what are known as 'late outgrowth endothelial progenitor cells' (L-EPCs) to turn into iPS cells. The iPS cells can then be turned into any other cell in the body, including blood vessel cells or heart cells – using different cocktails of chemicals. Scientists use these cells to study disease, and ultimately hope to grow them into tissue to repair the damage caused by heart and circulatory diseases.
Dr Amer Rana, of the University of Cambridge, said of the research:
(Phys.org)—Researchers at Rice University have found a way to kill some diseased cells and treat others in the same sample at the same time. The process activated by a pulse of laser light leaves neighboring healthy cells untouched.
The unique use for tunable plasmonic nanobubbles developed in the Rice lab of Dmitri Lapotko shows promise to replace several difficult processes now used to treat cancer patients, among others, with a fast, simple, multifunctional procedure.
The research is the focus of a paper published online this week by the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano and was carried out at Rice by Lapotko, research scientist and lead author Ekaterina Lukianova-Hleb and undergraduate student Martin Matonga, with assistance from the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), Texas Children's Hospital and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Plasmonic nanobubbles that are 10,000 times smaller than a human hair cause tiny explosions. The bubbles form around plasmonic gold nanoparticles that heat up when excited by an outside energy source – in this case, a short laser pulse – and vaporize a thin layer of liquid near the particle's surface. The vapor bubble quickly expands and collapses. Lapotko and his colleagues had already found that plasmonic nanobubbles kill cancer cells by literally exploding them without damage to healthy neighbors, a process that showed much higher precision and selectivity compared with those mediated by gold nanoparticles alone, he said.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota's Center for Drug Design have developed a synthetic compound that, in a mouse model, successfully prevents the neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer's disease.
"While most other drugs under development and on the market attempt to slow down or reverse the Alzheimer's processes, our approach strikes at a root cause by enabling the brain itself to fight the disease at a very early stage," said Vince, the study's lead researcher and director of the Center for Drug Design. "As is the case with all drug development, these studies need to be replicated in human patients before coming to any firm conclusions."
After being administered with psi-GSH for 11 weeks, cognitive capabilities such as memory and chemical brain health indicators in Alzheimer's-predisposed mice remained intact.
For example, the treated mice retained complete memory in a standard Alzheimer's maze test while the untreated mice lost significant memory and ability to negotiate the maze, indications consistent with symptoms of advanced Alzheimer's.
Antibodies against amyloid beta (Aβprotein deposits that are thought to play a role in Alzheimer's disease have shown some success in preventing the buildup of deposits in animals, but they have not been effective at removing preexisting deposits. Now researchers reporting in the December issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron show that a modified antibody was able to clear preexisting Aβ deposits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease.
"These findings have important implications for current and future development of antibodies for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease," says first author Ronald DeMattos, PhD, of Eli Lilly and Company.
Researchers in Japan have created a hybrid scaffold which promotes regeneration of skin in live animals while maintaining mechanical strength making it a promising material for future skin tissue engineering. This research was recently published in the Science and Technology of Advanced Materials.
Open skin wounds need to be repaired quickly to prevent infection. Using artificial skin substitutes for repair avoids the difficulties of grafts, but an ideal material for a scaffold that's strong and allows regeneration of skin tissue has yet to be found
Protein Linking Exercise to Bigger, Stronger Muscles Discovered; Finding Might Lead to New Therapies for Muscle-Wasting Diseases
Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have isolated a previously unknown protein in muscles that spurs their growth and increased power following resistance exercise. They suggest that artificially raising the protein's levels might someday help prevent muscle loss caused by cancer, prolonged inactivity in hospital patients, and aging.
BBC News - Pioneering surgery repairs girl's spine with leg boneA five-year old girl has had pioneering surgery to repair a large gap in her spine using bone taken from her legs.
Before the operation, Rosie Davies, from Walsall in the West Midlands, was "basically a timebomb", her family said.
Missing bones in her spine meant her upper body weight was unsupported and her inner organs were being crushed.
The lifesaving surgery came at the cost of her lower legs, which she had always been unable to move.
ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2012) — Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine in November surgically implanted a pacemaker-like device into the brain of a patient in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, the first such operation in the United States. The device, which provides deep brain stimulation and has been used in thousands of people with Parkinson's disease, is seen as a possible means of boosting memory and
Gene Therapy as a New Option for Bone Defects | ZeitNewsGene therapy involving modified stem cells obtained from fatty tissue and bone marrow could represent a new option for the treatment of severe orthopaedic injuries to the extremities. This treatment has been developed by Martina Hauser-Schinhan from the University Department of Orthopaedics at the MedUni Vienna during a research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Orthopedic Studies at the Harvard Medical School. The treatment could in future prevent threatened amputations or massive shortenings of bones.
The new method involves altering the body’s own stem cells, obtained from fat or bone marrow, with BMP-2 genes which are known to promote bone healing. The autologous stem cells that are genetically modified with ad.BMP-2 are embedded in a fibrin gel which is applied between the two broken parts of the bone. The stem cells continuously produce BMP-2, like a power plant. The stem cells and the BMP-2 cause the bones to heal. “Until now, in cases of severe injury that we would be able to treat with this method, amputations or bone shortening surgery were often necessary,” says Hauser-Schinhan.
A new class of drugs reduced the risk of patients contracting a serious and often deadly side effect of lifesaving bone marrow transplant treatments, according to a study from researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. The study, the first to test this treatment in people, combined the drug vorinostat with standard medications given after transplant, resulting in 21 percent of patients developing graft-vs.-host disease compared to 42 percent of patients who typically develop this condition with standard medications alone.
A 3D printer that manufactures new cancer drugs with drag-and-drop DNAResearchers from Parabon NanoLabs have developed a new drug for combating a lethal brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme. But what makes this particular drug unique is that it was printed — molecule by molecule — using a DNA self-assembly technique. And even more remarkable is that the DNA was custom designed with a drag-and-drop computer program. The breakthrough will not only drastically reduce the time it takes to both create and test medications, it will also open the door to completely novel drug designs.
The new technology, which was in part funded by the National Science Foundation, is called the Parabon Essemblix Drug Development Platform, and it combines computer-aided design (CAD) software called inSçquio with nanoscale fabrication technology.
