BOSTON – At the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, Monday's symposium on "the next emerging threat" acquired an unexpected timeliness as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials reported the first case of person-to-person transmission of Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in the U.S. – so much so that the session was hastily moved into the grand ballroom to accommodate surging interest.
Last week the NIH released a call to arms of sorts, announcing that it would demand its grantees balance the sex of its model organisms from cell cultures on up through higher animals. In the May 16, 2014, online issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers from Johns Hopkins University published a paper on the use of Viagra in heart failure that showed exactly why such balancing is important.
This year the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) is holding its meeting for the 50th time. At a press conference preceding the release of abstracts yesterday, ASCO president Clifford Hudis took a moment to celebrate some of the more impressive victories that clinical oncology has collectively achieved over the past few decades.
"Sometimes," Paula Hammond told BioWorld Today, in basic research "you learn something that's very important, but then that's hard to replicate in patients."
Last Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the first U.S. case of Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection. The patient had returned from Saudi Arabia on April 24, first fell ill in Indiana on April 27 and was hospitalized on April 28.
In what is surely the best use of pig bladders since the invention of the football, researchers have used a scaffold derived from pig bladder extracellular matrix to mobilize muscle stem cells and regrow large amounts of muscles that had been lost in wounds.
Researchers from the New York Stem Cell Foundation have used somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to create patient-specific stem cells, which were subsequently differentiated into insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells, from an adult diabetic woman. Study lead Dieter Egli said the findings mark "the first report describing diploid patient-specific stem cell lines after somatic cell nuclear transfer."
