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In previous articles, I have focused on vaccines as a highly effective public health tool in the battle against infectious disease. What may be less obvious is that vaccines can also be developed that harness the immune system to control cancer. While anti-cancer vaccines are less advanced than traditional vaccines against infectious disease, recent scientific breakthroughs are offering considerable hope for the future.
Cancer vaccines fall into two major categories. The first category acts against cancers that are caused by infectious agents, such as viruses. One such example is the human papilloma virus, which can sometimes cause cervical cancer. A recently developed vaccine against this virus prevents infection and the subsequent incidence of cervical cancer. Another example is the hepatitis B vaccine, which prevents infection by the hepatitis B virus and reduces the incidence of certain liver cancers. Several other infection-related cancers may also succumb to this strategy. Unfortunately, the cancers that can be controlled by this type of vaccine are relatively few.
A new ray of hope has broken through the clouded outcomes associated with Alzheimer's disease. A new research report published in January 2013 print issue of the FASEB Journal by scientists from the National Institutes of Health shows that when a molecule called TFP5 is injected into mice with disease that is the equivalent of human Alzheimer's, symptoms are reversed and memory is restored -- without obvious toxic side effects.
To make this discovery, Pant and colleagues used mice with a disease considered the equivalent of Alzheimer's. One set of these mice were injected with the small molecule TFP5, while the other was injected with saline as placebo. The mice, after a series of intraperitoneal injections of TFP5, displayed a substantial reduction in the various disease symptoms along with restoration of memory loss. In addition, the mice receiving TFP5 injections experienced no weight loss, neurological stress (anxiety) or signs of toxicity. The disease in the placebo mice, however, progressed normally as expected. TFP5 was derived from the regulator of a key brain enzyme, called Cdk5. The over activation of Cdk5 is implicated in the formation of plaques and tangles, the major hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
BBC News - 'Good progress' after first UK hand transplantA former pub landlord from West Yorkshire has become the first person in the UK to have a hand transplant.
Mark Cahill, who is 51, had been unable to use his right hand after it was affected by gout.
Doctors say he is making good progress after an eight-hour operation at Leeds General Infirmary.
It is still very early to assess how much control of the hand will be gained - so far he can wiggle his fingers, but has no sense of touch.
This derivative of a dopamine-receptor gene – called the DRD4 7R allele – appears in significantly higher rates in people more than 90 years old and is linked to lifespan increases in mouse studies.
Robert Moyzis, professor of biological chemistry at UC Irvine, and Dr. Nora Volkow, a psychiatrist who conducts research at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, led a research effort that included data from the UC Irvine-led 90+ Study in Laguna Woods, California. Results appear online in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The variant gene is part of the dopamine system, which facilitates the transmission of signals among neurons and plays a major role in the brain network responsible for attention and reward-driven learning. The DRD4 7R allele blunts dopamine signaling, which enhances individuals' reactivity to their environment.
People who carry this variant gene, Moyzis said, seem to be more motivated to pursue social, intellectual and physical activities. The variant is also linked to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, along with addictive and risky behaviors.
"While the genetic variant may not directly influence longevity," Moyzis said, "it is associated with personality traits that have been shown to be important for living a longer, healthier life. It's been well documented that the more you're involved with social and physical activities, the more likely you'll live longer. It could be as simple as that."
Numerous studies – including a number from the 90+ Study – have confirmed that being active is important for successful aging, and it may deter the advancement of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's.
New pill that 'helps you to stay fit without exercise' - TelegraphResearchers claim to have created the pill, which they claim provides all the same benefits of exercising without the exertion.
They claim that a hormone naturally found in muscle cells that triggers the calorie-burning benefits of exercise, may have potential as an obesity-fighting drug.
The newly identified hormone, called irisin, increases in the body during exercise, boosting energy expenditure and controlling blood glucose levels.
Medical experts from Harvard Medical School said the new hormone could lead to treatments for obesity, diabetes and even cancer as well as other disorders in which exercise may benefit weaker patients.
But doctors warned that the pill should not be used to replace exercising.
BodyMedia CORE 2 hands-on - SlashGearBodyMedia has revealed its latest health-monitoring system, the CORE 2, the company’s attempt to slim down its sensor-strap to help wearers slim-down too. Smaller than Apple’s iPod nano, and yet accommodating four sensors and Bluetooth Smart Ready 4.0, the CORE 2 – previewed in prototype form at CES 2013 this week – can funnel fitness stats directly to your smartphone and tablet.
Temperature, heat flux, galvanic skin response, and a 3-axis accelerometer are all squeezed inside a compact dongle that can be worn on an arm strap or elsewhere on the body. Each sensor tracks data at 5,000 records per minute, and the CORE 2 can be paired with an optional heart-rate monitor strap.
Editing the genome: New method allows scientists to insert multiple genes in specific locations, delete defective genesResearchers at MIT, the Broad Institute and Rockefeller University have developed a new technique for precisely altering the genomes of living cells by adding or deleting genes. The researchers say the technology could offer an easy-to-use, less-expensive way to engineer organisms that produce biofuels; to design animal models to study human disease; and to develop new therapies, among other potential applications
3D colour X-Ray imaging radically improved for identifying contraband, corrosion or cancer(Phys.org)—Scientists at The University of Manchester have developed a camera that can be used to take powerful three dimensional colour X-ray images, in near real-time, without the need for a synchrotron X-ray source.
Its ability to identify the composition of the scanned object could radically improve security screening at airports, medical imaging, aircraft maintenance, industrial inspection and geophysical exploration.
The X-Ray system developed by Professor Robert Cernik and colleagues from The School of Materials can identify chemicals and compounds such as cocaine, semtex, precious metals or radioactive materials even when they're contained inside a relatively large object like a suitcase.
A recent NIST patent shows that nanopores, which may one day help doctors perform quick analysis of blood samples, are not harmed by the polymerization process that could help nanopores operate in biochips. Polymerization hardens and stabilizes the membrane surrounding the nanopores, both of which are beneficial effects. Image: Robertson/NIST
Having blood drawn and analyzed to diagnose disease is a process that can take a few days, but what if your doctor could perform this analysis in moments, right before your eyes? That's the promise of "lab-on-a-chip" technology, and researchers are working on a variety of fronts to remove technical roadblocks. A new idea recently patented by NIST and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) addresses the issue of sensor shelf life, showing how some such chips might be made to last for months or more until needed.
NIST's John Kasianowicz has spent decades trying to create technologies that will enable doctors to perform fast, real-time chemical analysis, and one promising approach involves building arrays of tiny pores, each small enough that only one protein or DNA molecule at a time can pass through and be identified. As our bodies respond to infection or other disease states, our cells release different proteins, and measuring the concentrations of these chemicals in a blood sample can provide a quick snapshot of our health. A membrane peppered with large numbers of these “nanopores” might give doctors a way to take that snapshot easily, if it could be mounted on a biochip compatible with electronics and computer technologies.
Simple eye scan can reveal extent of Multiple Sclerosi
BBC ^ | 24 Dec 2012
BBC News - Simple eye scan can reveal extent of Multiple Sclerosis
A simple eye test may offer a fast and easy way to monitor patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), medical experts say in the journal Neurology.
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a scan that measures the thickness of the lining at the back of the eye - the retina.
It takes a few minutes per eye and can be performed in a doctor's surgery.
In a trial involving 164 people with MS, those with thinning of their retina had earlier and more active MS.
The team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine say larger trials with a long follow up are needed to judge how useful the test might be in everyday practice.
The latest study tracked the patients' disease progression over a two-year period...
Hearing loss is a significant public health problem affecting close to 50 million people in the United States alone. Sensorineural hearing loss is the most common form and is caused by the loss of sensory hair cells in the cochlea. Hair cell loss results from a variety of factors including noise exposure, aging, toxins, infections, and certain antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs. Although hearing aids and cochlear implants can ameliorate the symptoms somewhat, there are no known treatments to restore hearing, because auditory hair cells in mammals, unlike those in birds or fish, do not regenerate once lost. Auditory hair cell replacement holds great promise as a treatment that could restore hearing after loss of hair cells.
This table shows hand gestures surgeons might use in the operating room to browse and display medical images of the patient during an operation. Surgeons routinely need to review medical images and records during surgery, but stepping away from the operating table and touching a keyboard and mouse can delay the surgery and increase the risk of spreading infection-causing bacteria.
Doctors may soon be using a system in the operating room that recognizes hand gestures as commands to tell a computer to browse and display medical images of the patient during a surgery.
Surgeons routinely need to review medical images and records during surgery, but stepping away from the operating table and touching a keyboard and mouse can delay the procedure and increase the risk of spreading infection-causing bacteria, says Juan Pablo Wachs, an assistant professor of industrial engineering at Purdue University.
"One of the most ubiquitous pieces of equipment in U.S. surgical units is the computer workstation, which allows access to medical images before and during surgery," he says. "However, computers and their peripherals are difficult to sterilize, and keyboards and mice have been found to be a source of contamination. Also, when nurses or assistants operate the keyboard for the surgeon, the process of conveying information accurately has proven cumbersome and inefficient since spoken dialogue can be time-consuming and leads to frustration and delays in the surgery."
Meet the "apparatus for treating obesity by extracting food." That's what Dean Kamen's stomach pump is called in a recently granted U.S. patent, and it looks a lot less fun than Kamen's most famous invention, the Segway.
The good part is you can eat anything you like. The bad part is you have to get a tube put into your stomach and then suck the food out with a gadget called the AspireAssist.
Kamen and a team of physicians developed the pump as an obesity treatment that's reversible and, as they describe it, "minimally invasive."
During a 20-minute procedure, users are fitted with a removable stomach valve and a tube that leads from the top of the stomach to the valve's outside port.
Scientists at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute have, for the first time, demonstrated that baboon embryonic stem cells can totally restore a severely damaged artery. These early results show promise for eventually developing stem cell therapies to restore human tissues or organs damaged by age or disease.
John VandeBerg, Ph.D., Texas Biomed's chief scientific officer: "We first cultured the stem cells in petri dishes under special conditions to make them differentiate into cells that are the precursors of blood vessels, and we saw that we could get them to form tubular and branching structures, similar to blood vessels."
This finding gave VandeBerg and his team the confidence to do more complex experiments, to find out if these cells could actually heal a damaged artery. The results are published in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
The scientists found that cells derived from embryonic stem cells could actually repair experimentally damaged baboon arteries and "are promising therapeutic agents for repairing damaged vasculature of people," according to the authors.
Researchers completely removed the cells that line the inside surface from a segment of artery, and then put cells that had been derived from embryonic stem cells inside the artery. They then connected both ends of the arterial segment to plastic tubing inside a device called a bioreactor which is designed to grow cells and tissues. The scientists then pumped fluid through the artery under pressure as if blood were flowing through it. The outside of the artery was bathed in another fluid to sustain the cells located there.
Three days later, the complex structure of the inner surface was beginning to regenerate, and by 14 days, the inside of the artery had been perfectly restored to its complex natural state. It went from a non-functional tube to a complex fully functional artery.
Doctors have made a pill-sized device that can take detailed microscopic images of inside the gullet.
It is hoped the US technology could become an easier way of screening people for a condition called Barrett's oesophagus, which can lead to cancer.
Unlike current imaging techniques, the device can be used while the patient is conscious and takes only a few minutes.
The device has been tested in a small number of patients so far, Nature Medicine reports.
Although researchers at Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston say the device has potentially wide application, it could be particularly useful for Barrett's oesophagus where many people do not realise they have it, but there is no easy way to screen for it.
Pill-sized scanner images gullet The scanner uses infrared to create images
BBC News - Pill-sized scanner images gullet
A team of researchers from Université Laval, CHU de Québec, and pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has discovered a way to stimulate the brain's natural defence mechanisms in people with Alzheimer's disease.
This major breakthrough – published in the 15th January early edition of PNAS – opens the door to a new treatment for Alzheimer's disease and a vaccine to prevent the illness.
One of the main characteristics of Alzheimer's is the production in the brain of a toxic molecule known as amyloid beta. Microglial cells, the nervous system's defenders, are unable to eliminate this substance, which forms deposits called senile plaques (illustrated above).
The team led by Dr. Serge Rivest identified a molecule that stimulates activity of the brain's immune cells. The molecule, known as MPL (monophosphoryl lipid A), has been used extensively as a vaccine adjuvant by GSK for many years, and its safety is already well established.
In mice with Alzheimer's symptoms, weekly injections of MPL over a 12-week period eliminated up to 80% of senile plaques. In addition, tests measuring the mice's ability to learn new tasks showed significant improvement in cognitive function over the same period.
The researchers see two potential uses for MPL in humans. It could be administered by intramuscular injection, to slow the progression of the illness. It could also be incorporated into a vaccine designed to stimulate the production of antibodies against amyloid beta.
"The vaccine could be given to people who already have the disease to stimulate their natural immunity," said Dr. Rivest. "It could also be administered as a preventive measure to people with risk factors for Alzheimer's disease."
With an 80% reduction in protein deposits, this method is even more successful than another breakthrough which was reported last year, in which turning off cytokines (immune system signal transmitters) reduced plaques in mice by 65%. How well this translates into humans, of course, remains to be seen.
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A paper being published in the peer-reviewed journal Human Gene Therapy by researchers from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research suggests that genetic therapy, targeting one specific protein in HIV, may impede replication of the virus to the extent that HIV-infected humans will never develop AIDS.
The study is focused on a single protein that HIV depends on to make more of itself, called Tat. Researchers have developed a mutant form of Tat, called Nullbasic, that when introduced into an HIV cell by a retrovirus (purpose-built to sneak into viruses and hack their genetic code) prevents HIV from replicating. You can think of it a little bit like a book of instructions that each HIV cell has, telling it how to replicate: the Tat protein makes up three important pages of that book, but the retrovirus can get into the book without HIV noticing and rewrite those three pages with Nullbasic instead, which screws up the replication process. Testing on cultured human cells suggests that this technique works very, very well; here's the really meaty bit from the abstract:
The majority of human melanomas contain mutations in a gene promoter, suggesting mutations in regulatory regions may spur some cancers.
Human metastatic melanoma cellsWIKIMEDIA, NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE
Mutations in the regulatory, or non-coding, regions of the telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) gene—a cancer-associated gene that encodes a component of telomerase, an enzyme known to help protect the ends of chromosomes and support cell longevity—may be at the root of most melanomas, according to two papers published today (January 24) in Science.
In both studies, researchers identified mutations that created new binding sites in the TERT promoter for particular transcription factors and resulted in increased transcriptional activity at the TERT promoter, which may in turn lead to increased expression of the gene and the endless cell division characteristic of cancer cells. The findings suggest that mutations in regulatory parts of the genome, in addition to those in protein-coding sequences, may be a key mechanism causing the growth of certain types of cancer.
“I am excited by the finding that regulatory mutations can apparently act as drivers of carcinogenesis,” Elaine Mardis, a cancer geneticist and co-director of the Genome Institute at Washington University, Missouri, who was not involved in the research, said in an email. “This is great news for labs like ours that have always emphasized the importance of whole genome sequencing over exome or targeted sequencing.”
Until recently, sequencing efforts focused almost exclusively on the protein encoding regions of cancer genomes, due to the high cost of whole genome sequencing and the fact that it’s easier to identify effects of mutations in protein-coding genes. As a result, scientists have identified many recurrent mutations in protein-coding regions that contribute to cancer development, but very few in non-coding regions.
To see if tumor genomes also harbor mutations in these under-explored regulatory regions, Franklin Huang and Eran Hodis of Harvard Medical School and colleagues took a closer look at whole genome sequences of malignant melanomas published last May. Sure enough, they found two somatic mutations, which they called C228T and C250T, in the TERT promoter region in 71 percent of the tumors they analysed—making them more common than the known melanoma mutations in the coding regions of the genes BRAF and RNAS.
“The fact that these mutations occur so frequently near what is a very important gene in cancer development was unexpected, but it was staring us in the face,” said Hodis.
The first-ever FDA-approved Schwann cell transplantation in a patient with a new spinal cord injury has been performed by doctors from The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. The procedure, performed at the UM/Jackson Memorial Medical Center, is a Phase 1 clinical trial designed to evaluate the safety and feasibility of transplanting the patient’s own Schwann cells.
“This historic clinical trial represents a giant step forward in a field of medicine where each tangible step has tremendous value. This trial, and these first patients in this trial specifically, are extremely important to our mission of curing paralysis,” said neurosurgeon Barth Green, M.D., Co-Founder and Chairman of The Miami Project, and Professor and Chair of Neurological Surgery. “The Miami Project team includes hundreds of scientists, clinicians, and technicians who have joined hands to make the ‘impossible possible,’ for which this trial is a key goal and dream now being realized. This achievement reaffirms that the tens of millions of dollars and the incalculable work hours were well invested in this first of a kind human Schwann cell project.”
