BOSTON – Cross-disciplinary research is all the rage these days, for good reason. "It's widely agreed that creativity and innovation are combinatorial processes," Sarah Kaplan of the University of Toronto told the audience at the panel on "Confluence of Streams of Knowledge: Biotechnology and Nanotechnology" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in February. "Ideas ignore boundaries," including the boundaries of academic disciplines.
BOSTON – The parable of the blind men and the elephant is sometimes applied to whole genome sequencing. But at a lively session on "The Science of Uncertainty in Genomic Medicine" James Evans of the University of North Carolina told his audience that there is also a personal finance rule about elephants that is apt when considering the clinical use of genomic information.
Memory T cells, because of the sheer speed with which they can respond to an infection, are "the best thing you can have" to protect against a disease, Mark Davis told BioWorld Today. But memory appears to be a misnomer: Davis and his team have shown that every one of more than 20 individuals had memory T cells to viruses they had never been exposed to.
Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have discovered that by targeting a bacterial transporter Staphylococcus aureus uses to export its toxins, they were able to not only reduce S. aureus virulence, but to kill the bacterium outright.
At least with mouse models of inflammation, there's apparently no concern about what conclusions are legitimate to draw from a correlation between those models and inflammation in humans.
The current thinking about mutations in cancer cells holds that there are two types – driver mutations that are behind cancer growth because they give tumor cells a growth advantage, and passenger mutations that are along for the ride. "Historically, passenger mutations have been largely ignored," Leonid Mirny told BioWorld Today, because cancer development is seen largely as "a series of unfortunate events" in the form of accumulating driver mutations.
Fibrosis is a silent killer in more ways than one. There is the typical way in which diseases can sneak up on their victims. The scarring that is the hallmark of fibrosis can go undetected for years before patients show any symptoms.
Studying cancer cells that survive chemotherapy treatment, scientists from Roche AG subsidiary Genentech Inc. have implicated a member of the human epidermal growth factor receptor, or HER, family in such treatment resistance.
Stem cells are supposed to be the fountain of youth for other tissues. But stem cells themselves age, too, meaning that sooner or later, the fountain of youth could use some rejuvenation itself.
"For much of the 1900s, we studied neurons" to understand brain function, Philip Haydon told BioWorld Today. "And the reasons were purely technical. . . . We could listen to neurons, and we could talk to them." Neurons communicate electrically, and electrical recording and stimulation techniques made them amenable to studying. But in terms of what goes on in the brain, looking only at neurons is bound to deliver a minority report.
