Body

Researchers from the University of Liverpool working with colleagues from around the globe have found an explanation for how pancreatic cancer spreads to the liver. These findings potentially hold the key to stopping this disease from spreading.

Metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a very aggressive type of pancreatic cancer that kills around 8000 people every year in the UK and 330,000 worldwide. Current treatments are not very effective, thus new treatment strategies are urgently needed.

Cancer patients who receive a particular type of chemotherapy called doxorubicin run a risk of sustaining severe, lasting heart damage. But it is not possible to predict who is likely to experience this serious side effect. It is also unknown exactly how the drug damages heart muscle.

Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that heart muscle cells made from the skin cells of breast cancer patients who suffered cardiac side effects after receiving doxorubicin respond more adversely to the drug than cells made from patients who did not.

If genes form the body's blueprint, then the layer of epigenetics decides which parts of the plan get built. Unfortunately, many cancers hijack epigenetics to modulate the expression of genes, thus promoting cancer growth and survival.

Bacteria that cause tuberculosis trick immune cells meant to destroy them into hiding and feeding them instead. This is the result of a study led by researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center and published online April 18 in Nature Immunology.

CINCINNATI - Scientists report in Nature Neuroscience they have identified an underlying cause of dangerous immune suppression in people with high level spinal cord injuries and they propose a possible treatment.

BOSTON - Cancer cells often devise ways to survive even in the presence of toxic chemotherapy. Now, a research team led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has found a way to attack a process that tumor cells use to escape the effects of standard cancer drugs. The discovery is published online today in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

CHAPEL HILL - Scientists at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have developed a way to embed light-responsive switches into proteins so that researchers can use lasers to manipulate protein movement and activity within living cells and animals.

At a time when the need to understand how declining bee populations influence the environment has never been more urgent, University of Stirling scientists have discovered that wild bumblebees are born with the ability to remove pollen from nectarless flowers using high-frequency vibrations.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Between now and the presidential election in November, political pundits of all stripes will be trumpeting the importance of voter turnout for both political parties. But according to a new paper from a University of Illinois labor expert who studies unions and politics, repeated voter contact across multiple election cycles can yield diminishing returns and eventually lead to "mobilization fatigue" if voters are contacted too often.

New clinical trial results show that transplantation of pancreatic islets--cell clusters that contain insulin-producing cells--prevents severe, potentially life-threatening drops in blood sugar in people with type 1 diabetes. Researchers found that the treatment was effective for people who experienced episodes of severe hypoglycemia--low blood sugar levels that can lead to seizures, loss of consciousness and death--despite receiving expert care.

Using unique demographic records on 140,600 reproducing individuals from the Utah Population Database, a research team led from Uppsala University has come to the conclusion that lowered birth rates are one reason why women outlive men in today's societies. The study is published in Scientific Reports.

The causes underpinning sex differences in lifespan are hotly debated. While women commonly outlive men, this is generally less pronounced in societies before the demographic transition to low mortality and fertility rates.

Living cells must alter their external form actively, otherwise functions like cell division would not be possible. At the Technical University of Munich (TUM) the biophysicist Professor Andreas Bausch and his team have developed a synthetic cell model to investigate the fundamental principles of the underlying cellular mechanics.

NEW ORLEANS -- Results from the I-SPY 2 trial show that giving patients with HER2-positive invasive breast cancer a combination of the drugs trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) and pertuzumab before surgery was more beneficial than the combination of paclitaxel plus trastuzumab. Previous studies have shown that a combination of T-DM1 and pertuzumab is safe and effective against advanced, metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer, but in the new results, investigators tested whether the combination would also be effective if given earlier in the course of treatment.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) have invented a new way to deliver cancer drugs deep into tumour cells.

The NTU scientists create micro-sized gas bubbles coated with cancer drug particles and iron oxide nanoparticles, and then use magnets to direct these bubbles to gather around a specific tumour.

Ultrasound is then used to vibrate the microbubbles, providing the energy to direct the drug particles into a targeted area.

You are an animator (a specialist who creates cartoons) who works in stop-motion. This technique involves patiently lining up many pictures of a subject that changes slightly position in each picture, so as to have a coherent and continuous sequence of frames. For those who know him, Pingu, the mischievous and adventurous penguin, is an example of stop-motion. In the case of RNA, though, rather than plasticine figures you have a huge database of general images, something like Flickr.