Researchers have developed a new method to look at the effects of chemotherapies on cancer stem cells. Through screening cancer drugs in fruit flies, they have demonstrated that a number of chemotherapy drugs, while they kill cancer cells, actually induced normal stem cells to divide more rapidly.
Clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease find themselves with a frustrating conundrum these days. The scientific evidence for what is the root problem of the disease keeps getting better – and clinical trials based on that scientific evidence keeps going nowhere.
In general, there is no doubt that science is in an era of big data. Genomics studies, especially, now routinely look at thousands of patients to understand which genes might underlie certain diseases, and which might make good targets.
Scientists have been able to engineer the T cells of HIV-infected patients to become resistant to the virus, and such cells were subsequently able to control HIV infection when patients were taken off of antiretroviral therapy (ART), including one patient whose blood levels of HIV became undetectable over the course of the phase I trial.
U.S. and British government agencies are moving toward enabling what would be the first clinical trials of what is, in effect, human germline engineering – genetic modifications that would be passed down through the generations. The modifications would not be made to nuclear DNA. Instead, the procedure being considered is oocyte modification – creating an egg cell with the nuclear DNA of one woman and the mitochondrial DNA of another. The goal would be to allow women with mitochondrial diseases to have babies that share their nuclear DNA, but are not at risk of inheriting their mitochondrial disease. The UK...
Scientists have been able to prevent melanoma from metastasizing through increasing levels of a gene that is best known for its role in Alzheimer’s disease: apolipoprotein E (ApoE).
As an FDA advisory committee met over the past two days to discuss what it would take for clinical trials of “oocyte modification in assisted reproduction for the prevention of transmission of mitochondrial disease or treatment of infertility” to go forward, the committee was trying walk the line between sticking to their part of the issue – the science that would inform such trials – and acknowledging that the science was not the only, and not even the most important, issue about whether such trials would be a good idea.
Scientists have developed a nanoparticle that was able to specifically inhibit neutrophils – a type of white blood cell that plays important roles in infection and inflammation – from exiting out of blood vessels and into tissues to cause inflammatory damage. In animals with an experimentally induced version of sepsis, they found that treatment with the particles reduced injury to the lungs.
By applying modern science principles to evaluating traditional Chinese medicine, researchers have gained new insights into how acupuncture works. And just as importantly from a scientific perspective, they have been able to understand why, sometimes, it doesn’t.
