Cancer Research
MIT researchers have identified a critical link between two proteins found in brain tumors, a discovery that could eventually help treat a form of brain cancer that kills 99 percent of patients.
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most aggressive brain tumor in adults, strikes about 15,000 people in the United States each year. GBM is currently treated with a combination of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but those treatments have proven ineffective. Most patients die within a year.
Now, MIT scientists have uncovered a connection between two proteins found in the tumor cells, and they…
University of Delaware scientists have invented a novel biomaterial with surprising antibacterial properties that can be injected as a low-viscosity gel into a wound where it rigidifies nearly on contact--opening the door to the possibility of delivering a targeted payload of cells and antibiotics to repair the damaged tissue.
Regenerating healthy tissue in a cancer-ridden liver, healing a biopsy site and providing wounded soldiers in battle with pain-killing, infection-fighting medical treatment are among the myriad uses the scientists foresee for the new technology.
The patented invention…
Using innovative physics, researchers have proposed a system that may one day bring proton therapy, a state-of-the-art cancer treatment method currently available only at a handful of centers, to radiation treatment centers and cancer patients everywhere. Thomas R. Mackie, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and co-founder of the radiation therapy company TomoTherapy, will present this new design at next week's annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine in Minneapolis.
Compared to the x rays conventionally used in radiation therapy, protons are potentially…
Pediatrics researchers at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and McGill University in Montreal have identified a gene variant that raises a child’s risk for type 1 diabetes, formerly called juvenile diabetes. As investigators continue to pinpoint genes contributing to diabetes, they have their eyes on providing a scientific basis for designing better treatments and preventive measures for the disease.
The research adds a new gene and new knowledge to the four genes previously discovered for type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system destroys insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas…
A tumor paint developed by researchers will help surgeons see where a tumor begins and ends more precisely by illuminating the cancerous cells.
The study shows that the tumor paint can help surgeons distinguish between cancer cells and normal brain tissue in the operating room. The paint is a scorpion-derived peptide called chlorotoxin that is linked to the molecular beacon Cy5.5.Until now there has been no way to allow surgeons to see tumors “live” during surgery.
Chlorotoxin:Cy5.5 is a fluorescent molecular beacon that emits photons in the near infrared spectrum. This illumination gives…
When a cell is seriously stressed, say by a heart attack, stroke or cancer, a protein called Bak just may set it up for suicide, researchers have found.
In a deadly double whammy, Bak helps chop the finger-like filament shape of the cell’s powerhouse, or mitochondrion, into vulnerable little spheres. Another protein Bax then pokes countless holes in those spheres, spilling their pro-death contents into the cell.
“We found out Bak has a distinct function in regulation of the mitochondrial morphology,” says Dr. Zheng Dong, cell biologist at the Medical College of Georgia and the Veterans…
By bypassing a well-known gene implicated in almost one-third of all cancers and instead focusing on the protein activated by the gene, Dr. Christopher Counter and colleagues at the Duke University Medical Center have identified IL6 as a new target in the battle against Ras-induced cancers.
The ras gene, known as an oncogene when it is in this mutated state, has been implicated in several different cancers, including those of the pancreas and lungs. To date, efforts at blocking or turning off ras have proven ineffective. Pancreatic cancer has been shown to have the strongest link to the ras…
Contrary to textbook models, many genes that should be 'off' in embryonic stem cells and specialized adult cells remain primed to produce master regulatory proteins, leaving those cells vulnerable to identity changes
Biologists have long thought that a simple on/off switch controls most genes in human cells. Flip the switch and a cell starts or stops producing a particular protein. But new evidence suggests that this model is too simple and that our genes are more ready for action than previously thought.
Scientists in the lab of Whitehead Member Richard Young have discovered that many human…
When a strand of DNA breaks in the body's cells, it normally does not take long until it has been repaired. Now researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have discovered a new mechanism that helps to explain how the cell performs these repairs.
The new results examine a phenomenon called 'cohesion', whereby two copies of a chromosome in the cell nucleus are held tightly together by a protein complex called cohesin. Cohesion fulfils an important function during cell division as the newly copied chromosomes, the sister chromatids, have to stay together until the right…
For the first time, it can now be shown what enzyme copies the genetic make-up of cells. The discovery is being published in the journal Science by researchers at Umeå University in Sweden in collaboration with a team in the U.S. led by Thomas A. Kunkel.
The human genome has already been mapped, as have the genomes of several other organisms. On the other hand, little has been known how genes are copied and repaired so efficiently and precisely.
These processes always involve a so-called DNA polymerase, an enzyme that performs the actual new growth of genes. The genes consist of two DNA…