Cancer Research
Ten genetic variants associated with type 2 diabetes, a disease which impacts more than 170 million people worldwide, have been identified or confirmed by a U.S.-Finnish team led by scientists at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
The discoveries could lead to the development of new drugs for diabetes, permit more effective targeting of drug and behavioral therapies, and help scientists and physicians better predict who will develop diabetes, said Michael Boehnke, the Richard G. Cornell Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics at the U-M School of Public Health.
Boehnke is the…
A generation of children born with HIV are now coming of age and reaching sexual maturity. Girls in this group who are sexually active are experiencing a higher number than expected of cervical abnormalities, a new study finds.
Researchers monitored the rate of first-time pregnancies, genital health and Pap test results of 638 girls, ages13 and over, who became infected with HIV around the time of birth. Nearly 50 percent of the girls had abnormal cervical cells.
“We have already seen this in HIV-infected women,” said lead author, Susan Brogly, Ph.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health…
Scientists at The University of Nottingham have been awarded over £366,000 to help unravel the mystery of a stomach bug which causes gastric ulcers and cancer. Their research could lead to the development of a vaccine for those most at risk.
The bacterium, Helicobacter pylori (Hp), lives in the stomachs of approximately half the world’s population. Dr Karen Robinson, a lecturer at the Centre of Biomolecular Sciences and co-researcher John Atherton, Professor of Gastroenterology and Head of the Wolfson Digestive Diseases Centre, lead a team of scientists that have spent the last three years…
Studies of the enzyme CTP synthetase in the parasite Trypanosoma brucei have brought researchers at Umeå University in Sweden closer to a cure for African sleeping sickness. Their findings are now being published in the April issue of The Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Since the parasite constantly changes its surface, it can avoid the immune defense of humans and invade the central nervous system, which leads to personality disturbances, sleep disruptions, and ultimately death. For patients affected by a severe T brucei infection in the central nervous system, there are no medicines that…
Cell membranes are like two-dimensional fluids whose molecules are distributed evenly through lateral diffusion but many important cellular processes depend on cortical polarity, the locally elevated concentration of specific membrane proteins.
Roland Wedlich-Soldner at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School, Boston, The Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Kansas City, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, have analysed and quantified how cortical polarity develops and how an asymmetric…
A Johns Hopkins team has stopped in its tracks a form of blood cancer in mice by engineering and inactivating an enzyme, telomerase, thereby shortening the ends of chromosomes, called telomeres.
"Normally, when telomeres get critically short, the cell commits suicide as a means of protecting the body," says Carol Greider, Ph.D., the Daniel Nathans chair of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins. Her study, appearing online this month at Cancer Cell, uncovers an alternate response where cells simply - and permanently - stop growing, a process known as senescence.
In an unusual set…
University of Virginia researchers have discovered that microRNAs, a form of genetic material, can function as tumor suppressors in laboratory studies.
In the May 1 issue of Genes&Development, UVa researchers Drs. Yong Sun Lee and Anindya Dutta have shown that microRNAs can suppress the overexpression of a gene called HMGA2. This gene is related to creation of fatty tissue and certain tumors, as well as diet-induced obesity.
MicroRNA is a single-stranded RNA that is typically only 20-25 nucleotides long and is related to regulating the expression of other genes.
"Overexpression of the…
A new hereditary breast cancer gene has been discovered by scientists at the Lundberg Laboratory for Cancer Research and the Plastic Surgery Clinic at the Sahlgrenska Academy in Sweden. The researchers found that women with a certain hereditary deformity syndrome run a nearly twenty times higher risk of contracting breast cancer than expected.
Several research teams around the world have long been searching for new hereditary breast cancer genes, but thus far few have been found.
"Our findings are extremely important, providing new knowledge of hereditary cancer genes and how they can…
Proper formation of the proteins that power heart and skeletal muscle seems to rely on a precise concentration of a "chaperone" protein known as UNC-45, according to a new study.
This basic discovery may have important implications for understanding and eventually treating heart failure and muscle wasting elsewhere in the body resulting from burns, brain trauma, diabetes, cancer and the effects of aging, the senior author of the paper said. The finding resulted from experiments using tiny, genetically engineered worms at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB), and is…
Why do east Asian lung cancer patients respond better to chemotherapy than other ethnic groups? The answer could be useful in tailoring cancer treatments to individual patients.
"Genetic differences may help explain why so many Asian women who never smoked develop lung cancer," said Dr. Adi Gazdar, professor of pathology at UT Southwestern and senior author of a study appearing online today in Public Library of Science Medicine.
The researchers focused on a protein called the epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR, which lies on a cell’s surface and is involved in controlling many…