Men whose blood cells had lost the Y chromosome were at higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease in three independent case-control and prospective studies. Most genetic risk studies focus on specific mutations or structural variations in the genome, but men can develop a far more wholesale genomic change – loss of the Y chromosome in specific cells. Recent studies have shown that roughly 15 percent of men over the age of 70 have lost the Y chromosome in at least 10 percent of their blood cells.
Researchers have identified the signals that breast cancer cells use to get into the bone marrow, as well as the separate signals that keep them there. Disrupting those signals may offer a way to prevent late relapses of hormone-driven breast cancers.
A single injection of the peptide hormone fibroblast growth factor 1 (FGF1) directly into the brain induced long-term remission from type 2 diabetes in rats and mice.
T cells from healthy blood donors could recognize cancer antigens that were not recognized by the patients' own T cells, and gene transfer of the T-cell receptor back to the patients' T cells allowed them to also recognize the cancer antigens, suggesting that outsourcing antigen recognition might be one path to cancer immunotherapy.
Vaccination with a heat-killed soil bacterium both protected mice from colitis and protected them from the behavioral consequences of chronic stress, a team from the University of Colorado has found. The work potentially suggests “a way to lower risk for a number of diseases related to inappropriate inflammation,” Christopher Lowry told BioWorld Today.
Nuclear DNA from one individual is compatible with mitochondrial DNA from another, and the procedure can be successfully performed with eggs that have been previously frozen. But even very low levels of contamination with donor mitochondrial DNA could cause the resulting stem cells to ultimately revert to having the mitochondrial type the transplant procedure is supposed to prevent, suggesting a need for procedures that can eliminate mitochondrial contamination during nuclear transplant.
Findings that precision medicine benefits patients even in phase I trials, and patients treated with Keytruda (pembrolizumab, Merck & Co. Inc.) had a three-year survival rate of about 40 percent, were among the highlights of the sprawling treasure trove that is the American Society of Clinical Oncology's (ASCO) annual meeting abstracts. Abstracts for the 2016 annual meeting, which will be held in Chicago June 3-7, were publicly released yesterday.
