Bio-inspired slow-release system for site 1 sodium channel blockers mimics the anesthetics’ natural receptors in the body. Site 1 sodium channel blockers such as tetrodotoxin and saxitoxin are small-molecule drugs with powerful local anesthetic properties. They provide pain relief without toxic effects on local nerves and muscles, and are an attractive alternative to opioids. But injected by themselves, they can easily float away, causing severe systemic toxicity. Encapsulating these drugs in safe delivery systems has been a challenge: Because they…
… wakes solid tumors to respond to therapy. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, which uses engineered T cells to treat certain types of cancers, has often been a challenging approach to treating solid tumors. CAR T cells need to recognize a specific target on cancer cells to kill them. However, cancer cells do not always have the target, or they find ways to hide the target and stay invisible to CAR T cell attack. A new study from…
Meta-analysis shows contribution of placebo in exercise for muscle and joint pain. Prof. Daniel Belavy from the Hochschule für Gesundheit (University of Applied Sciences) in Bochum, Germany, in collaboration with an Australian research group (Dr. Clint Miller, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) examined how effective exercise is for musculoskeletal pain syndromes. Their findings: in a meta-analysis of 79 studies including 4719 patients, they found exercise training improves chronic pain, but that the effect is similar…
Advanced imaging technique shows how cholesterol regulates production of Alzheimer’s-associated amyloid beta protein in a type of brain cell. A team co-led by scientists at Scripps Research has used advanced imaging methods to reveal how the production of the Alzheimer’s-associated protein amyloid beta (Aβ) in the brain is tightly regulated by cholesterol. Appearing on line Thursday ahead of print in the Aug. 17 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the scientists’ work advances understanding of…
Additional NIH studies underway will build on encouraging early results. One dose of a new monoclonal antibody discovered and developed at the National Institutes of Health safely prevented malaria for up to nine months in people who were exposed to the malaria parasite. The small, carefully monitored clinical trial is the first to demonstrate that a monoclonal antibody can prevent malaria in people. The trial was sponsored and conducted by scientists from the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) of the National…
As the third-most lethal cancer in the United States, with only a 1% five-year survival rate for people with its most aggressive form, pancreatic cancer has long been a target of researchers who search for ways to slow or stop its growth and spread. Now, a team of Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have found that an anti-parasitic drug prevents pancreatic cancer’s initiation, progression and metastasis in genetically engineered mice. In a study published in the journal Oncotarget on July 6,…
JDRF funds creation of implant to automatically regulate blood glucose levels. Rice University bioengineers are using 3D printing and smart biomaterials to create an insulin-producing implant for Type 1 diabetics. The three-year project is a partnership between the laboratories of Omid Veiseh and Jordan Miller that’s supported by a grant from JDRF, the leading global funder of diabetes research. Veiseh and Miller will use insulin-producing beta cells made from human stem cells to create an implant that senses and regulates…
Results show how neurons may be damaged by mutations in tau protein, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Frontotemporal dementias are a group of fatal and debilitating brain disorders for which there are no cures. In an article published July 26 in Cell, Mount Sinai researchers describe how they were able to recreate much of the damage seen in a widely studied form of the disease by growing special types of cerebral organoids in petri dishes. This form of…
Houston Methodist Neurological Institute researchers from the department of neurosurgery shrunk a deadly glioblastoma tumor by more than a third using a helmet generating a noninvasive oscillating magnetic field that the patient wore on his head while administering the therapy in his own home. The 53-year-old patient died from an unrelated injury about a month into the treatment, but during that short time, 31% of the tumor mass disappeared. The autopsy of his brain confirmed the rapid response to the…
Niemann-Pick disease type C, long thought to be tied to cholesterol metabolism, may eventually be treated with immune inhibitors. UT Southwestern researchers have identified an immune protein tied to the rare neurodegenerative condition known as Niemann-Pick disease type C. The finding, made in mouse models and published online in Nature, could offer a powerful new therapeutic target for Niemann-Pick disease type C, a condition that was identified more than a century ago but still lacks effective treatments. “Niemann-Pick disease has…
A new USC study of a common, yet poorly understood type of white blood cell reveals the immune cell’s response to pathogens differs greatly by sex and by age. In this mouse study, males proved much more susceptible to a condition called sepsis than females. However, the scientists also found that the female disease-defense system is hardly perfect; their system changes with age to become nearly as harmful as the males’. Those are the key findings in a study that…
As multicellular life relies on cell-cell interactions, it is not surprising that this is not always peaceful: cells with higher fitness eliminate cells with lower fitness through cell competition. Cell competition has emerged as a quality control mechanism and occurs when cells differ, genetically or otherwise, from each other. In mammals, the process of cell competition has been observed e.g., in cancer, during organ homeostasis, and during development as a process to select the fittest cells in the embryo and…
RUDN University biologists discovered the way how macrophages (the cells of the “first line” immune response) respond to inflammation and identified how the immune response depends on their origin. It turned out that when exposed to an inflammatory stimulus, two opposing mechanisms are activated in macrophages simultaneously — inducing and inhibiting inflammation. These data can potentially be useful in the treatment of cancer, as targeted activation of macrophages will strengthen the immune response of the organism in the fight against…
Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine have produced a stem cell model that demonstrates a potential route of entry of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, into the human brain. The findings are published in the July 9, 2021 online issue of Nature Medicine. “Clinical and epidemiological observations suggest that the brain can become involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection,” said senior author Joseph Gleeson, MD, Rady Professor of Neuroscience at…
According to the World Health Organization, a third wave of COVID infections is now all but inevitable in Europe. A COVID tracker developed by IIASA researcher Asjad Naqvi, aims to identify, collect, and collate various official regional datasets for European countries, while also combining and homogenizing the data to help researchers and policymakers explore how the virus spreads. While many comparisons have been made between the COVID-19 pandemic and similar events in history, one thing sets this pandemic apart from…
USC Stem Cell scientists point to developmental and evolutionary similarities between sensory cells in the inner ear and the skin. The sensory cells in the inner ear and the touch receptors in the skin actually have a lot in common, according to a new study from the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Neil Segil published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS). “There are striking similarities in the development of two types of specialized sensory cells:…
Feedback
