Clinical Research

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Advanced Cell Technology for the second human trial of human embryonic stem cells (hESC), in people with macular degeneration, a progressive form of blindness. Advanced Cell Technology said it would start testing its stem cell-based treatment on 12 patients with Stargardt’s Macular Dystrophy, which usually impacts children between 10 to 20 years of age, resulting in blindness due to degeneration in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE).  The company has created a technique to turn human embryonic stem cells into RPE cells.   The…

Children have more energy than adults but why is it that when walking children tire first?    Do kids,  and perhaps even shorter adults, walk differently from taller people or do they tire faster for some other reason?  Max Kleiber's work on resting metabolic rates for different sized animals found that the bigger you are the slower each gram of tissue uses energy, but how and why metabolism is regulated that has been a puzzle. A group of researchers decided to measure the metabolic rates of children and adults, ranging from 5 to 32 years old, weighing between 15.9kg and…

In 2006, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer released a state of the art clinical study of a new drug designed to treat high cholesterol, torcetrapid. The results were puzzling. The compound lowered low density lipoprotein, aka LDL or “bad” cholesterol. It also substantially pushed up high density lipoprotein, or HDL, the “good cholesterol.” By all accrued medical wisdom, torcetrapid should have lowered the rate of cardiovascular events—heart attacks, strokes, and, ultimately deaths. But it did not. Instead, it increased both—by 61 percent. Worse: more heart patients died than those in a control…

Surgery of any kind is a drastic step, especially for preventable conditions such as obesity, but a new study on gastric bypass surgery in obese rats also showed a decreased preference for sweet-tasting substances, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.  Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery involves the creation of a small gastric pouch and bypassing a portion of the upper small intestine.  Because it is surgical rather than behavioral, it produces weight loss and therefore significant improvements in obesity-related medical conditions including diabetes.  The new…

Medical evidence is based on what is considered the strongest possible foundation, the placebo-controlled trial but a new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine calls into question this foundation upon which much of medicine rests, by showing that there is no standard behind the standard – that is, there is no standard for the placebo. The thinking behind relying on placebo-controlled trials is that to be sure a treatment is effective, it needs to compare people whose only difference is whether or not they are taking the drug. Both groups must think they are on the drug to protect against…

Alcohol is among the most commonly abused substances and men are almost twice as likely as women to develop alcoholism but there have been no clear reasons for this difference.  A new study in Biological Psychiatry says that it may be biological and that dopamine is an important factor.  Dopamine is a catecholamine, molecules that serve as hormones and neurotransmitters,  and is a precursor of adrenaline.   Dopamine has multiple functions in the brain but the researchers considered it important in their research on a biology of alcoholism because of its pleasurable…

In 1978, Louise Joy Brown was the first child to be Born through In vitro Fertilization (IVF). In 2010, Dr. Robert G. Edwards was awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine for his ground breaking work in the development of IVF. The Problem: 10% of the couples worldwide have problems conceiving.  The Ground work: Dr. Robert G. Edwards did extensive research on the Hormones that induce the maturation of oocytes and their ovulation. He had to overcome the technical challenges in basic and advanced Biochemical techniques to establish IVF. The Procedure:…

This is a story of Drugs, its HisStory. Drug discovery is a result of humans seeking a solution for life threatening diseases that existed in the 19th century. Drug Discovery started as an offset of chemistry and has now become an interdisciplinary science. Paul Ehrlich is regarded as the father of Chemotherapy. He was the first to identify that some dye's selectively stained bacteria but not human cells, and visualized the concept of treatment for bacterial diseases by chemical agents. He coined the term "Magic bullet" for these specific chemical agents. Ehrlich extensively worked on the dye…

Ultrasound can speed the healing of fractures, according to results of a randomized, controlled trial published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders. The researchers found that the use of low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) in patients with tibial fractures which showed inadequate progress toward healing resulted in 34% greater bone mineral density (BMD) in the fracture area after 16 weeks than use of a sham device. Jon E. Block, Ph.D. worked with a team of researchers from University Hospital Marburg and the University of Ulm, Germany, to test LIPUS in 51 patients and 50 controls. The LIPUS…

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010 was awarded to Robert G. Edwards "for the development of in vitro fertilization". Their reasoning seemed to be partly cultural - that Edwards battled societal and establishment resistance to his development of the in vitro fertilization procedure, which has so far led to the birth of around 4 million people. Edwards, now 85 and professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, began working on IVF in the 1950s and developed the technique with British gynecologist Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988 - posthumous prizes are not allowed.  In IVF…