Treatment with intravenous bisphosphonates — drugs used to reduce harm done to bones by cancer or cancer therapy — increases the risk of jaw or facial bone disease or infection, a large-scale comparative study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) has found.
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Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have determined how a substance derived from the bark of the South American lapacho tree kills certain kinds of cancer cells, findings that also suggest a novel treatment for the most common type of lung cancer.
The compound, called beta-lapachone, has shown promising anti-cancer properties and is currently being used in a clinical trial to examine its effectiveness against pancreatic cancer in humans. Until now, however, researchers didn’t know the mechanism of how the compound killed cancer cells.
Constipated? In the early 19th century, the apothecary would most likely have prescribed you calomel, or mercurous chloride, as a purgative, regardless of its toxicity. Because it worked. It was also useful as an insecticide.
This was the sort of thing being concocted at the Apothecaries’ Hall in Blackfriars, then a major center for drug manufacturing in London, says Anna Simmons, a historian of science at the Open University in Milton Keynes. It was also common for patients with chronic skin infections to walk away with a dose of arsenic, she says.
In the first scientific publication from The Genographic Project, a five-year effort to understand the human journey, researchers report their experience of genotyping human mitochondrial DNA during the first 18 months of the project.
Writing in PLoS Genetics, Doron Behar and colleagues describe the procedures used to generate, manage and analyze the genetic data from 78,590 public participants. They also provide the first anthropological insights in this unprecedented effort to map humanity’s genetic journey through the ages.
The first U.S. study to transplant a potent form of purified adult stem cells into the heart muscle of patients with severe angina provided evidence that the procedure is safe and produced a reduction in angina pain as well as improved functioning in patients' daily lives, reports the lead researcher at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
Children suffering from pneumonia could be spared the pain of the doctor’s needle, thanks to new research funded by the British Lung Foundation.
The study, a world-first carried out by researchers at The University of Nottingham, discovered that children given oral treatment recovered as quickly, suffered less pain, required less oxygen therapy in hospital and were able to go home sooner than those given injections.
A search for the molecular clues of longevity has taken Mayo Clinic researchers down another path that could explain why some people who consume excessive calories don’t gain weight. The study, which was done in laboratory mouse models, points to the absence of a gene called CD38. When absent, the gene prevented mice on high-fat diets from gaining weight, but when present, the mice became obese.
The findings were published this month in the online issue of The FASEB Journal, the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
During flowering four different types of floral organs need to be formed:
- Sepals, which protect the inner organs;
- The frequently ornamental petals;
- Stamens, which produce pollen and;
- The carpels, the female reproductive unit.
This process is orchestrated by a large number of genes. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Köln (Germany) found, in cooperation with colleagues in Nijmegen (Netherlands) that a small molecule, a so-called microRNA, is crucial for the control of floral organs identity.
Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have determined how a substance derived from the bark of the South American lapacho tree kills certain kinds of cancer cells, findings that also suggest a novel treatment for the most common type of lung cancer.
The compound, called beta-lapachone, has shown promising anti-cancer properties and is currently being used in a clinical trial to examine its effectiveness against pancreatic cancer in humans. Until now, however, researchers didn’t know the mechanism of how the compound killed cancer cells.
For more than 100 years, scientists have known that humans carry a rich ecosystem within their intestines. An astonishing number and variety of microbes, including as many as 400 species of bacteria, help humans digest food, mitigate disease, regulate fat storage, and even promote the formation of blood vessels.
By applying sophisticated genetic analysis to samples of a year’s worth baby poop, Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have now developed a detailed picture of how these bacteria come and go in the intestinal tract during a child’s first year of life.
Topotecan, a cancer inhibitor, interacts with an important protein (TopoIB), causing a (cancer) cell to malfunction. The TopoIB protein is responsible for the removal of loops from DNA, which arise amongst other things during cell division.
The TopoIB protein binds to the DNA molecule, clamps around it and cuts one of the two DNA strands, after which it allows it to unwind and finally joins the broken ends together.
New Test Determines if Osteoporosis Treatment Drug May Cause Jawbone to Die.
Breast cancer patients, individuals at risk for osteoporosis, and individuals undergoing certain types of bone cancer therapies often take drugs that contain bisphosphonates. Bisphosphonates may place patients at risk for developing osteonecrosis of the jaws, which is irreversible damage in which the jaw bone rots away.
The future of biolectronics - being able to diagnose diseases, detect poisons and monitor health instantly - may still seem far away, but it may be closer than you think.
Researchers understand what biochemical reactors they need to monitor and they know which microelectronics they would need to use. They have just been unable to combine them because measuring the ions in receptors within cell membranes destroyed the cells being measured.
Physicians have recognized scoliosis, the abnormal curvature of the spine, since the time of Hippocrates, but its causes have remained a mystery -- until now. For the first time, researchers have discovered a gene that underlies the condition, which affects about 3 percent of all children.
The new finding lays the groundwork for determining how a defect in the gene -- known as CHD7 -- leads to the C- and S-shaped curves that characterize scoliosis.
Giant prehistoric penguins? In Peru? It sounds more like something out of Hollywood than science, but a researcher from North Carolina State University along with U.S., Peruvian and Argentine collaborators has shown that two heretofore undiscovered penguin species reached equatorial regions tens of millions of years earlier than expected and during a period when the earth was much warmer than it is now.