Main speaker — dr. rajiv raman
Category: biotech/medical – Page 553
The method holds great promise for better definition of the potential therapeutic targets present in each cancer.
It crept up slowly, almost imperceptibly. A vague rawness at the back of my throat. A thrumming malaise. On Thanksgiving Day, it lunged.
For two weeks, I was in the grip of an unusually malevolent respiratory illness. But I was in good company: Nationwide, the percentage of health care visits for flulike symptoms ticked up above the baseline at the start of November and has remained elevated ever since, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“All the respiratory viruses are back in full force,” Anne Liu, MD, a Stanford Medicine immunologist and infectious disease specialist confirmed. The main reasons, she said, are fairly straightforward: Social distancing and masking are not popular choices in the wake of the pandemic.
A protein in the immune system can be manipulated to help overcome bowel cancer, according to new research from The Australian National University (ANU). The research is published in Science Advances.
Bowel cancer claims more than 100 lives in Australia each week, yet around 90% of cases can be successfully treated if detected early.
According to lead author Dr. Abhimanu Pandey, from ANU, the protein, known as Ku70, can be activated or “turned on” like a light switch by using a combination of new and existing drugs.
This microchip is the size of a grain of sand, and its job is to track data.
Inspired by nature, the latest microchip can dissolve and fly.
About the size of a grain of sand, the chips might be the smallest artificial flying structures yet built — gadgets that could one-day monitor air pollution and the spread of airborne diseases.
Why it matters: Size matters and sometimes smaller is better. With the microfliers, their small size is advantageous as it allows them to float like pollen or seeds, collecting environmental data on their tiny microchips along the way. Wireless transmitters can send the data to scientists before the chips land.
A University of Massachusetts Amherst team has made a major advance toward modeling and understanding how intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) undergo spontaneous phase separation, an important mechanism of subcellular organization that underlies numerous biological functions and human diseases.
IDPs play crucial roles in cancer, neurodegenerative disorders and infectious diseases. They make up about one-third of proteins that human bodies produce, and two-thirds of cancer-associated proteins contain large, disordered segments or domains. Identifying the hidden features crucial to the functioning and self-assembly of IDPs will help researchers understand what goes awry with these features when diseases occur.
In a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, senior author Jianhan Chen, professor of chemistry, describes a novel way to simulate phase separations mediated by IDPs, an important process that has been difficult to study and describe.
A team of biochemists at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge has developed a new method to incorporate structurally unusual amino acids into proteins by using bacteria. The method is described in the journal Nature.
Prior research has shown that DNA codes for just 20 amino acids, the building blocks for making all the proteins used by living creatures. These are known as alpha amino acids. Prior research has also suggested that beneficial compounds could be created with a method to create proteins using beta amino acids. Researchers have suggested that applications could include the development of new kinds of medicines and possibly novel catalysts for manufacturing processes.
Such proteins have been engineered via syntheses in the lab. but scientists would prefer a more natural approach, which would be both cheaper and more efficient. This means that a technique is required to get a living cell to generate a desired protein using a beta amino acid.
Tisch Cancer Institute researchers have discovered that a certain type of chemotherapy improves the immune system’s ability to fight off bladder cancer, particularly when combined with immunotherapy.
These findings, published in Cell Reports Medicine, may explain why the approach, cisplatin chemotherapy, can lead to a cure in a small subset of patients with metastatic, or advanced, bladder cancer. Researchers also believe that their findings could explain why clinical trials combining another type of chemotherapy, carboplatin-based chemo, with immunotherapy have not been successful but others that use cisplatin with immunotherapy are successful.
“We have known for decades that cisplatin works better than carboplatin in bladder cancer, however, the mechanisms underlying those clinical observations have remained elusive until now,” said the study’s lead author Matthew Galsky, M.D., Co-Director of the Center of Excellence for Bladder Cancer at The Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai.