University and biotech company collaboration prepares MetaChip for technology transfer
Recalls of popular prescription drugs are raising public concern about the general safety of new pharmaceuticals. A collaborative group of researchers says that identifying which drug candidates are toxic early in the discovery process can help prevent harmful pharmaceuticals from being placed on the market in the first place, and they have developed a tool to do it.
Researchers at
Offering promise in the battle against cancer, the results from five studies highlighting new advances in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) – a slow-progressing, malignant bone marrow cancer – will be presented at the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology.
“The survival rate for leukemia has improved in the past two decades, thanks to new agents designed to treat patients,” said Brian J. Druker, M.D., Oregon Health and Science University, Port
Working with mice, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have developed the basis for a therapeutic strategy that could provide hope for children afflicted with Krabbe’s disease, a fatal nervous system disorder.
Writing this week (Dec. 12, 2005) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of researchers at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine describes experiments that effectively promoted the ability of defective cells to take up and ut
Chronic pain sufferers may be able to reduce pain levels by studying their own live brain images, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine report in a new study.
With training and the use of high-tech imaging equipment, subjects were able to influence their pain by controlling activity in one of the pain centers of the brain through the use of mental exercises and by visualizing their own brain activity in real time.
Compare it to exercising your musc
The first study of the effects of testosterone on mood, behavior and psychological health in men with mild Alzheimer disease finds significant improvements in quality of life, as assessed by caregivers.
Led by neuroscientists at the UCLA Alzheimer Disease Research Center and detailed in an early online release of the peer-reviewed journal Archives of Neurology, the double blind, placebo-controlled study used caregiver assessments to evaluate quality of life and used a battery o
News from the Cell Biology Meeting in San Francisco
Bushwhacking through the cellular jungle, researchers are always relieved to stumble across a known molecular pathway. Imagine their excitement at finding a major intersection in unmapped territory. Antoine Muchir and Howard Worman at the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in New York and their colleagues in France, have discovered a cellular “crossroads” that links the function of the MAP kinase pathway, lo
News from the Cell Biology Meeting in San Francisco
Invasive bacterial pathogens, the Chlamydiae know us very, very well. The Chlamydiae learned to parasitize eukaryotic cells half a billion years ago by reprogramming cellular functions from within. In humans today, chlamydial infections are responsible for a range of ailments from sexually transmitted infections to atypical pneumonias to chronic severe disorders such as pelvic inflammatory disease and atherosclerosis. The Cent
Bioscience news from the cell biology meeting in San Francisco
Looking through his handmade microscope in 1702, it was Anton van Leeuwenhoek who first described the workings of a nano machine. He observed the rapid contraction of a stalk tethering the cell body of a tiny protozoan, Vorticella convallaria, to the surface of a leaf. Little did van Leeuwenhoek imagine that more than 300 years later, the biological spring that drives Vorticella would set records for speed and power
Clues revealed by the recently sharpened view of the Hubble Space Telescope have allowed astronomers to map the location of invisible “dark matter” in unprecedented detail in two very young galaxy clusters.
A Johns Hopkins University-Space Telescope Science Institute team reports its findings in the December issue of Astrophysical Journal. (Other, less-detailed observations appeared in the January 2005 issue of that publication.)
The team’s results lend credence to
ESA has confirmed the principle of a new space thruster that may ultimately give much more thrust than today’s electric propulsion techniques. The concept is an ingenious one, inspired by the northern and southern aurorae, the glows in the sky that signal increased solar activity.
“Essentially the concept exploits a natural phenomenon we see taking place in space,” says Dr Roger Walker of ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team. “When the solar wind, a ‘plasma’ of electrified gas released by
While botulinum toxin A, or BTXA, is widely known for its use in dermatology and aesthetic medicine, a review article in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology explores the drug’s other successful applications.
BTXA is popularly used to treat hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating) or to diminish wrinkles, but it is also a highly effective natural substance that normalizes muscle activity and can be used to reduce pain and itch.
Benefits of BTXA have been observed in treatment of hand
White dwarfs are important to theories of both stellar and cosmological evolution. New results published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society provide for the first time an accurate measurement of the weight of the nearest white dwarf, Sirius B, companion of the brightest star in the sky. It turns out that Sirius’s companion, despite being smaller than the Earth, has a mass that is 98% that of our own Sun.
For astronomers, it’s always been a source of frustratio
With the amount of shopping days until Christmas fast running out, consumers who would like to make ‘green’ choices are often helpless to change their behaviour, according to research at the University of Surrey. The project, which was funded by ESRC, warns policymakers that eco-taxes and information campaigns have only a limited impact on how people behave. ‘Many people care about the environment but they are stuck in unsustainable patterns of behaviour because they just don’t have access to
Living organisms are dependent on being able to adjust the water content in their cells. This is achieved by regulating the flow of water through the cell membrane. Water is ‘turned on’ and ‘turned off’ by membrane proteins that function as water conduits and are called aquaporins. In the new issue of Nature, Professor Per Kjellbom and Associate Professor Urban Johanson, plant biochemists at Lund University, Sweden, describe how this takes place. The discovery is not only a breakthrough for pure
London is completely blanketed by the black plume of smoke from Europe’s worst peacetime fire in this Envisat image, taken within five hours of the blaze beginning.
This image was acquired at 10:45 GMT on Sunday morning by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS), one of ten instruments aboard Envisat, Europe’s largest satellite for environmental monitoring. This Reduced Resolution mode image has a spatial resolution of 1200 metres, and shows the cloud spread across a span
Experimenting with the idea of municipal provision of sophisticated Internet services, European researchers have come up with some very promising results that were positively received by all municipalities involved in the trials.
When it concludes at the end of the year, the IST-funded VisionAIR project will have successfully completed over six months of trials of Internet services provided by European municipalities. Although the idea of public Internet services might sound
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