Body

Sean Nygaard and colleagues have developed a new technique that may help to overcome one of the largest hurdles in gene therapy--the ability to generate a large pool of gene-corrected cells that would be effective in repairing or correcting injury and disease. What's more, in their method, the genetically corrected cells can repopulate in vivo. To date, efforts to modify and deliver genetically modified cells to treat various disorders have required the delivery of thousands of cells, many of which don't survive.

Rochester, MN, June 8, 2016 - The risk of life-threatening blood infections by Staphylococcus aureus bacteria is more than doubled in users of systemic glucocorticoids compared with non-users. The risk escalates with increasing dose, according to a new Danish population-based case-control study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

NEW YORK (June 8, 2016) - Scientists from the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center have shown that a narrow wavelength of ultraviolet (UV) light safely killed drug-resistant MRSA bacteria in mice, demonstrating a potentially safe and cost-effective way to reduce surgical site infections, a major public health concern.

Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and their international collaborators have shown that Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) is not a single disorder, but at least 11 different diseases, and that genetic changes explain differences in survival among young AML patients. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the ground-breaking study on the genetics of AML could improve clinical trials and the way patients are diagnosed and treated in the future.

A new study led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has identified a mechanism behind the surge in cardiovascular inflammation that takes place after a heart attack. Working with collaborators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the team also developed a potential strategy for suppressing inflammation within atherosclerotic plaques, the first approach that targets the immune system's contribution to cardiovascular disease. Their work in animal models of heart disease is described in a Science Translational Medicine paper.

A new IVF-based technique is likely to lead to normal pregnancies and reduce the risk that babies born will have mitochondrial disease, according to researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Disease at Newcastle University.

Published today in the journal Nature, scientists report the first in-depth analysis of human embryos created using a new technique designed to reduce the risk of mothers passing on mitochondrial disease to their children, which is debilitating and often life-limiting.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Jianyi "Jay" Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., brought his biomedical engineering expertise to the University of Alabama at Birmingham to fix hearts.

His dream -- and the dream of other heart experts at major research universities around the world -- is creating new tissue that can replace or protect damaged muscle after a heart attack.

June 8, 2016 - Recovery-oriented systems of care (ROSC) offer a promising approach to improving care for the millions of individuals who have substance use disorders and, very frequently, co-occurring mental health disorders.

Much of basic cancer research is based on studies with cultured cancer cells. However, the usefulness of these studies greatly depends on how accurately these cancer cells grown in a dish represent human tumors.

An international stroke study found that standard and intensive blood pressure treatments were equally effective in the emergency treatment of acute intracerebral hemorrhage, a type of stroke caused by bleeding into the brain. Patients whose systolic blood pressure was reduced rapidly in emergency rooms to standard levels used to treat acute stroke (140-179 mm Hg) did as well as patients whose pressure was reduced to intensive levels (110-139 mm Hg).

MADISON, Wis. -- If you're made of carbon, precious few things are as important to life as death.

A dead tree may represent a literal windfall of the building blocks necessary for making new plants and animals and the energy to sustain them.

"The recycling of plant carbon is fundamental to the function of our ecosystems," says Cameron Currie, professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We get food, water, air, energy -- almost everything -- through those ecosystem services. It's how our planet operates."

Once inside the human body, infectious microbes like Salmonella face a fluid situation. They live in a watery world, surrounded by liquid continually flowing over and abrading their cell surfaces--a property known as fluid shear.

In new research appearing in the Nature Publishing Group journal npj Microgravity, Cheryl Nickerson, Ph.D., and her colleagues explore the effects of physiological fluid shear on ST313--a particularly dangerous type of Salmonella, which is resistant to multiple antibiotics and currently ravaging regions of sub-Saharan Africa.

In a pair of firsts, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that the drug candidate phenanthriplatin can be more effective than an approved drug in vivo, and that a plant-virus-based carrier successfully delivers a drug in vivo.

Triple-negative breast cancer tumors of mice treated with the phenanthriplatin -carrying nanoparticles were four times smaller than those treated either with cisplatin, a common and related chemotherapy drug, or free phenanthriplatin injected intravenously into circulation.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - When predicting future global population growth, sometimes scientists look to the past. Using a database with historical records that began in 871 A.D., an anthropologist at the University of Missouri was able to show reproductive patterns and shed new light on the "quantity-quality" trade-off, a biological concept used to describe a parent's unconscious decisions to balance between the time and financial investment needed to produce offspring.

PHILADELPHIA - Evidence of DNA "scrunching" may one day lead to a new class of drugs against viruses, according to a research team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Columbia University. The team is led by Stephen C. Harvey, PhD, an adjunct professor in the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Penn.