At least one of the abstracts highlighted at the press briefing of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) on Wednesday threw an involuntary highlight on the problems that can beset cancer treatment even in successful trials.
Gram-negative bacteria are protected from many antibiotics by their outer cell membranes. Studies attempting to understand what allows compounds to rapidly cross that cell membrane have focused on known antibiotics. Now, a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has screened a more chemically diverse set of compounds to identify additional characteristics of compounds that could get across the outer membrane. The results of the analysis were used to design derivatives of the gram-positive antibiotic deoxynybomycin that were effective against gram-negative bacteria as well.
The first large-scale analysis of noncoding genome regions in pancreatic cancer samples has both implicated new players in pancreatic cancer and given insights into how known culprits exert their effects.
Mice have been criticized before as being inadequate models of inflammation. (See BioWorld Today, Feb. 12, 2013.) Now, researchers from the British London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University of Bristol have extended that criticism to the adaptive immune systems of laboratory mice. The researchers compared the immune systems of pathogen-free laboratory mice of the C57BL/6 strain with mice trapped in the wild.
Growth control is critical for individual organs as well as whole organisms. That is certainly true for the brain, where pruning of neurons and of connections between them is critical to its function.
There are plenty of diets that promise the ability to "eat all you want and still lose weight," to the gullible. But the sad reality is that it's the opposite.
Patients with early stage Alzheimer's disease (AD) had epilepsy-like activity in the brain that was too subtle to be picked up with standard EEG recording methods, but could be detected with intracranial electrodes. The findings, which were published in the May 1, 2017, online issue of Nature Medicine, suggest that epilepsy can occur early in AD, and may contribute to both memory problems and neuronal damage without being clinically apparent.
To hear biomedical researchers tell it, chronic inflammation is practically the root of all evil. Now, a team at Washington University School of Medicine has reported using CRISPR/Cas9 to engineer stem cells modified for autonomous regenerative therapy, or SMART cells, that could produce an anti-inflammatory cytokine in response to excess inflammation.
BOSTON – Typically, watching videos of other people's children doing unremarkable things such as sitting unassisted, toddling aimlessly and sticking things into their mouths is an exercise in smiling politely and hoping there is not too, too much footage.
