Posts tagged breakthrough

As some experts quickly pointed out, the new gel could be used to engineer human tissue. No doubt, that would be huge. We could someday use a version for skin grafts for burn victims, or to grow tissue for other needs, like organ transplants. But I’m more excited about a much more immediate use for the hydrogel one that could benefit the nearly 30 million Americans who suffer from osteoarthritis.

This is a painful condition in which cartilage wears out around the joints such as the knees and elbows. The risk of osteoarthritis onset grows with age, particularly for people over the age of 45.

Not only that, but it can actually heal itself, too. Given time to relax between stretches, the bonds in the compound are able to “re-zip,” self-repairing any cuts or breaks. Think about the major impact this could have on medicine. As I see it, in the very near future, doctors will be able to go in and actually remove the bad or torn cartilage that’s causing you pain. They’ll replace it with a hydrogel that is much stronger and more resilient than the original organic substance with which you were born.

In the Era of Radical Change, we will continue to see a steady stream of advances like this, breakthroughs that will help us live longer and healthier lives.

(Source: futurenow321)

In what scientists call the biggest breakthrough in genetics since the unraveling of the human genome, a massive research effort now shows how the genome works.The human genome contains 3 billion letters of code containing a person’s complete genetic makeup. The biggest surprise is that most of the DNA in the genome which had been called “junk DNA” because it didn’t seem to do anything turns out to play a crucial role. While only 2% of the genome encodes actual genes, at least 80% of the genome contains millions of “switches” that not only turn genes on and off, but also tell them what to do and when to do it.

Eleven years ago, the Human Genome Project discovered the blueprint carried by every cell in the body. The new ENCODE project now has opened the toolbox each cell uses to follow its individual part of the blueprint. The effort is the work of more than 400 researchers who performed more than 1,600 experiments. The genome, with its 3-billion-letter code, reads from beginning to end like a book. But in real life, the genome isn’t read like a book. The ENCODE data shows it’s an intricate dance, with each step carefully choreographed.

(Source: futurenow321)

(Source: futurenow321)

A safe, reversible, chemical form of male contraception is one step closer after researchers successfully utilised a cancer drug to sterilise male mice, who then fathered healthy offspring after the drug was ceased. Importantly, the drug had no serious side-effects, including no effect on testosterone production, sex drive, behaviour or the health of later offspring.

The discovery which was published yesterday in the journal Cell, will eventually provide men with greater ability to share responsibility for contraception, and the long searched for non-surgical option. Let’s face it - who wants people with sharp things interfering with their private parts?

Although this is a major milestone in the search for a male contraceptive pill, there is still a long way to go between mouse studies and a product being approved and available for sale in the US. The reproductive systems in mice and men are very similar, and whilst it is very likely, positive results in a mouse study do not guarantee that the compound will work in exactly the same way in human men. Firstly other animal studies will be required and eventually trials with human couples over several years. Ultimately, we are looking at a 10-15 year wait for the potential end-product to arrive on pharmacy shelves.

(Source: futurenow321)

A number of Caenorhabditis elegans worms were carried aboard a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) and brought back for study.

Researchers found reduced activity of five genes in the worms that, when suppressed in the species on Earth, lead to longer lifetimes.

The work appears in Scientific Reports.

The nematode C. elegans is among the world’s most-studied animals.

They have been routinely taken as cargo on space missions to study in a simple organism the biological changes that future human spacefarers may face; the worms even survived the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.

More recently, the prospects for a self-contained and self-sustaining colony of the worms were described in a 2011 paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

But it was also the first multi-celled organism to have its entire genome sequenced, and researchers are now getting to the bottom of what changes space travel wreaks on the worms’ genomes.

Space age

Nathaniel Szewczyk of the University of Nottingham and researchers from a number of Japanese universities examined worms that were taken for an 11-day trip on the space shuttle to the ISS and then flash-frozen once they returned to Earth.

A “control group” of worms was kept on Earth at the time and frozen at the same time. The lifetime of the worms ranges from two to three weeks, so they were at a fairly advanced age when preserved.

The team found that the muscles of the well-travelled worms exhibited smaller amounts of polyglutamine aggregates, tangles of protein that tended to accumulate in the muscles as animals aged.

But they also found five genes that were more “switched off” than the worms that had stayed on Earth.

The five were involved in signalling in the nervous and metabolic systems, and one that is chemically similar to insulin - the manipulation of which was shown in a 2003 Science paper to enormously increase C. elegans’ lifetime.

“It would appear that these genes are involved in how the worm senses the environment and signals changes in metabolism in order to adapt to the environment,” said Dr Szewczyk.

“Most of us know that muscle tends to shrink in space. These latest results suggest that this is almost certainly an adaptive response rather than a pathological one.

“Counter-intuitively, muscle in space may age better than on Earth. It may also be that spaceflight slows the process of ageing.”

(Source: futurenow321)

Scientists have unraveled the entire genetic code of the tomato, the world’s second-most valuable vegetable after the potato.

From pasta sauce to curry, this South American transplant has found itself at home in cuisines around the world. It is the latest important food crop to yield its genetic secrets, published in Nature.

This breakthrough provides a glimpse at how the genetic revolution is helping keep our favorite foods on the table.

As befits this international vegetable, more than 300 scientists from 14 countries worked on the eight-year project.

Having a genetic map will provide a valuable starting point for breeders looking to make a better, hardier, more nutritious or simply tastier tomato.  

“This will be facilitated now by the fact that we now know not only what genes are there, but their order,” says Giovanni Giuliano with the Tomato Genome Consortium and a researcher at the Italian national energy agency, which also does crop breeding.

Though it is the first tomato to have its DNA sequence decoded, Giuliano says there’s nothing particularly special about the variety chosen for the project, known simply as Heinz 1706.

“It so happens that the day the person that made the first DNA library to be sequenced, they had Heinz 1706 seeds, and they started from that one. It is as simple as that.”

(Source: futurenow321)

Ateam of researchers at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is the first in Africa to establish groundbreaking biomedical stem cell technology, which could hold the key to finding cures for some of Africa’s most prevalent diseases.

The CSIR Department of Biological Sciences’ Gene Expression and Biophysics Group, led by Dr Musa Mhlanga, success- fully generated the first induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells in Africa, in December last year.

The iPS cell technology involves inducing adult cells (like skin cells) to revert back to stem cells that can differentiate into specialised cell types. This means that the early stem cells can be programmed to become any type of adult cell, such as skin, heart, brain and blood cells.

Dr Janine Scholefield, one of the key researchers involved in generating iPS cells at the CSIR, was the first biologist in South Africa to record video footage of cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells, generated from adult skin cells.

Scholefield was recently recruited to join Mhlanga’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow, and started with the experimental protocol at the end of October. By early December, the team had generated iPS cell lines, each line indicating a single genetic background. “It was remarkable and completely took my breath away,” says Scholefield, describing the moment she saw evidence of the first cardiomyocytes.

(Source: futurenow321)

The FDA should approve the first HIV test for at-home use and over-the-counter sale, the agency’s advisory committee said today in a unanimous 17-0 vote. The test is OraQuick from OraSure. It’s a home version of a rapid HIV test already being used by health care professionals in community settings. The committee’s opinion was summed up by panel member Steven W. Pipe, MD, of the University of Michigan.

“I can’t get past the quarter of a million people in the U.S. who have HIV and are not tested,” Pipe said at the meeting. “If we make any dent in that, the answer is yes, we realize the [OraQuick At-Home] benefit outweighs its risks.” The price tag of the at-home test has not yet been set but will be a good bit more than the $20 cost of the professional version. That’s partly because it will come with a detailed instruction booklet, and because OraSure will set up a call center with trained counselors available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “The price will be substantially lower than $60,” Stephen R. Lee, PhD, OraSure executive vice president and chief science officer, told the committee.

Now anybody concerned about whether they have the AIDS virus and who can afford OraQuick may be able to take the test at home. But there’s a catch. In clinical trials enrolling regular people at risk of HIV infection, some 7% of people with HIV infection are wrongly told they don’t have HIV. With a professional test, that happens only 2% of the time.

According to FDA calculations, this means that in the first year after approval, the test will wrongly tell about 3,800 people with HIV infection that they are not infected.

The FDA calculates that in the first year after OraQuick is approved for home use, an extra 45,000 people will correctly learn they have HIV. That’s a big deal. The CDC estimates that there are 50,000 new HIV infections every year. About 1.2 million Americans are HIV-infected, and about 1 out of 5 don’t know they carry the AIDS virus. Such people may be more likely to spread the virus than those who know they are infected.

Panel member Susan Buchbinder, MD, director of HIV research at San Francisco’s health department and a long-time AIDS researcher, noted that while some people may get inaccurate results, the test likely will alter people’s HIV risk behavior.

“A positive HIV test does reduce risk behavior. A negative test doesn’t have much of an influence,” Buchbinder said. “We must assume there will be some incorrect results. The question is how do we help people understand a negative result might not truly mean a person is negative for HIV.”

There’s another catch to the OraQuick in-home test: the “window period.” The test detects anti-HIV antibodies, but these antibodies appear many weeks after infection.

A recent study suggests that rapid HIV tests such as OraQuick will be accurate two months after infection. OraSure says that to be safe, people should assume the OraQuick test will miss any new HIV infection contracted in the past three months. This means that people with any HIV risk behavior such as unprotected sex or needle sharing will need regular retesting, as is true with any HIV test. And confirmatory testing at a doctor’s office or free clinic is strongly advised for those who test positive but also for those who test negative despite high-risk behavior.

(Source: futurenow321)

A man who had been paralyzed from the waist down and had lost all function in both his hands can move his fingers after doctors rewired his nerves to bypass the damaged ones in a pioneering surgical procedure, according to a case study published on Tuesday.

The 71-year-old man, who had become paralyzed after he was injured in a car accident in 2008, still had limited arm, elbow and shoulder movement, but because the C7 vertebrae in his spinal cord had been crushed, the nerve circuits responsible for sending signals from the brain to the muscles in his hands were severed and all control was lost.

However, the nearby nerves had not been injured in the accident and surgeons were able to cut an undamaged nerve in the man’s elbow and connect it to the damaged nerve responsible for activating muscles in the hand responsible for grasping objects. 

“The circuit [in the hand] is intact, but no longer connected to the brain,” Surgeon Ida Fox, an assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Washington University, explained to the BBC. “What we do is take that circuit and restore the connection to the brain.”

(Source: futurenow321)