Even the Wizard of Oz couldn’t give the Tin Man a heart but the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution laboratory of John Gearhart has taken another small step on the road toward replenishing damaged cardiac tissue with pre-cursor cardiac cells grown from human embryonic stem cells (ES cells). Gearhart and his colleague, Nicolas Christoforou, here reveal preliminary data demonstrating what they say is a highly reproducible system for deriving cardiac progenitor cells from ES cells through controlled di

At the 2004 ASCB Meeting: Visualizing the Kiss of Death

The very idea threw the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson into a funk. “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” Tennyson called the nightmarish idea that life was an unending battle to eat or be eaten. If only Tennyson could have seen the latest self-defense videos made by Daniela Malide and others at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. Using time-lapse confocal laser scanning microscopy, Malide captured human T-cells

In a world where 842 million people suffer from chronic hunger, insect pests consume 20-30 percent of world food crops. Chemical pesticides are increasingly expensive, ineffective and environmentally aggressive, killing beneficial insects and, when transmitted through the food chain, moving in unwanted directions.

The search for eco-friendly bio-insecticides has focused mainly on developing transgenic crops that express natural protein toxins. The most successful, by far, are crops

Protecting microtubule “highways” may lead to novel therapies, study shows

Parkinson’s disease may be caused by an environmental-genetic double whammy on the neurons that produce dopamine, the neurotransmitter that controls body movement, a new study has shown.

Researchers at the University at Buffalo, using cultures of rat neurons, have shown that the presence of mutated parkin genes, combined with the toxic effects of the chemical rotenone, results in a cascade of

People could be exposed to antibiotic-resistant bacteria from breathing the air from concentrated swine feeding facilities, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They detected bacteria resistant to at least two antibiotics in air samples collected from inside a large-scale swine operation in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Until now, little research has been conducted regarding the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the air within

System helps physicians prevent radiation-induced skin injuries to patients

The threading of slender catheters and stents through arteries to deliver treatments to the heart, the brain and elsewhere in the body has produced nothing short of a medical revolution. But these delicate procedures require that patients be exposed to continuous radiation that can last up to an hour or more, sometimes causing skin injuries that, in rare cases, develop necrosis (tissue death), requiring

ASH news tips from M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center offers these news items presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). An oral targeted therapy gentle enough to be used by patients in their 70s or 80s is showing benefit in treating high-risk myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a pre-leukemic disorder that can progress to acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), according to a study presented at the annual meeti

An experimental drug under development by Bristol-Myers Squibb is showing early promise in reversing the signs and symptoms of patients whose chronic myeloid leukemia failed to respond to Gleevec, which is considered the standard of treatment for the disorder.

In a study to be presented today at the 46th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology in San Diego, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleag

Two different novel targeted therapies can produce strong responses in patients who have become resistant to Gleevec(tm), the standard therapy for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center are reporting.

Researchers say the benefits offered by these drugs, BMS-354825 and AMN107, appear to be promising for treatment of relapsed CML and offer an immediate effective option for the minority of patients who do not achieve an op

The 10 percent of children with sickle cell disease who are at risk for a stroke need ongoing blood transfusions to reduce their risk, according to a study at 25 sites in North America.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the $11 million study headquartered at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, issued a clinical alert to coincide with the Dec. 5 announcement of study findings at the American Society of Hematology

HIV-positive women with low blood platelet counts face significantly higher risk of death compared to women with normal counts, according to a study presented today at the 46th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

Findings come from the Women’s Interagency HIV Study, or WIHS, a prospective study of women living with HIV (as well as HIV-negative women for comparison) in six urban areas across the United States. In this portion of the study, researchers looked at 1,

A surgical procedure being pioneered by University College London (UCL) urologists is enabling men born with a very small penis to acquire an average-sized, functioning penis which not only allows them to urinate normally, but for many, to enjoy a full sex life for the first time.

In a talk to be given on Wednesday 8 December at the European Society for Sexual Medicine conference in London, Dr David Ralph will present the results from recent operations performed at UCL to correct t

Using brain waves to control screen cursor movements, rather than moving a mouse by hand, seems like science fiction! Yet such direct control over our environment is an integral part of the development work being undertaken by participants in the Presencia project.

The IST project Presencia is not due for completion until October 2005, yet project researchers have already developed a working brain/computer interface able to provide direct control of computers. The method is primi

Doctors and their patients have puzzled over why certain cholesterol-lowering drugs work better in some people than others. In research results published in the December issue of the journal Nature Genetics, the common minnow helps provide an answer.

Researchers Douglas Crawford and Jennifer Roach of the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) and Marjorie Oleksiak of North Carolina State University studied the genetic make-up of

Scientists at The Wistar Institute, working in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Helsinki, have discovered structural similarities among viruses that infect hosts from all three domains of life. These structural similarities suggest that the viruses, despite their genomic variations and differences in hosts, may have evolved from a common ancestor billions of years ago. The findings will be published in the December 3 issue of Molecular Cell.

Until recently, scie

Finding could lead to new cancer drugs, more effective radiation treatments

One of five known DNA-repair mechanisms in cells has been completely analyzed and reconstituted in a test tube by an international collaboration of researchers led by scientists from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. The team is the first ever to reconstitute this pathway, known as the nonhomologous end joining pathway, or NHEJ, and NHEJ is only the third repair pathway to