Researchers at Johns Hopkins have succeeded in making flattened, football-shaped artificial particles that impersonate immune cells. These football-shaped particles seem to be better than the typical basketball-shaped particles at teaching immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells in mice.
Children who undergo transplants of solid organs have a high risk of developing advanced kidney disease, according to a new national study. The findings reinforce the importance of continued screening of kidney function in these children.
An international consortium co-led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia has identified four genetic variants associated with an increased risk of esophageal cancer and its precursor, a condition called Barrett’s esophagus.
A study led by Robert N. Weinreb, chairman and Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, has received a $6.4 million, 5-year grant from the National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, to elucidate the genetics of glaucoma in persons of African descent.
A protein that is increased by endurance exercise has been isolated and given to non-exercising mice, in which it turned on genes that promote brain health and encourage the growth of new nerves involved in learning and memory, report scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” goes the playground rhyme that’s supposed to help children endure taunts. But a new study suggests that there’s more going on inside our brains when someone snubs us – and that the brain may have its own way of easing social pain.
A new paper published in the journal Climate Dynamics suggests that ‘unpredictable climate variability’ behaves in a more predictable way than previously assumed. The paper’s authors, Marcia Wyatt and Judith Curry, point to the so-called ‘stadium-wave’ signal that propagates like the cheer at sporting events whereby sections of sports fans seated in a stadium stand and sit as a ‘wave’ propagates through the audience.
Using the Food and Drug Administration's Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), a hospital electronic health records database, and an animal model, a team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai report that by adding a second drug to the diabetes drug rosiglitazone, adverse events dropped enormously. That suggests that drugs could be repurposed to improve drug safety, including lowering the risk of heart attacks.
Using mice, lab-grown cells and clues from a related disorder, Johns Hopkins researchers have greatly increased understanding of the causes of systemic sclerosis, showing that a critical culprit is a defect in the way certain cells communicate with their structural scaffolding. They say the new insights point the way toward potentially developing drugs for the disease, which affects approximately 100,000 people in the United States.
Researchers at The Johns Hopkins University working in a novel mouse model of Stiff Skin Syndrome have made key discoveries that may have broad implications for future scleroderma therapy.
Johns Hopkins researchers say they have pinpointed a site in a highly developed area of the human brain that plays an important role in the subconscious recognition of which way is straight up and which way is down.
A recently published study suggests that exposure to social stress not only impairs a mother’s ability to care for her children but can also negatively impact her daughter’s ability to provide maternal care to future offspring.
Indiana University School of Medicine emergency medicine faculty hope to improve the way childhood asthma is medically managed in Marion County through an innovative program that incorporates the skills and flexible schedules of specially trained Indianapolis Emergency Medical Services paramedics.
For years scientists have been working to fundamentally understand how nanoparticles move throughout the human body. One big unanswered question is how the shape of nanoparticles affects their entry into cells. Now researchers have discovered that under typical culture conditions, mammalian cells prefer disc-shaped nanoparticles over those shaped like rods.
Ohio State University has been granted a new multi-year, multi-million dollar Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) to continue turning basic science discoveries into life-saving medical advances. Ohio State is part of a national CTSA network of more than 60 academic medical institutions which collaborate to improve human health.
In a stroke of good luck, Drexel's Dr. Tracy Quirk captured detailed measurements of water level and salinity at a range of coastal wetland sites, even as they were overtaken by Hurricane Sandy. After the storm, she began working on an intensive year-long project, funded by the National Science Foundation, to evaluate ecosystem processes in New Jersey’s salt marshes before, during, and for a year following Hurricane Sandy. Quirk is beginning to analyze findings from the study now.
SUNY Downstate Medical Center's Sheryl Smith, PhD, has published new findings demonstrating a reproducible pathology that may help shed light on anxiety and mood volatility in methamphetamine dependence.
On a molecular level, you have more in common with shower curtain mold or the mushrooms on your pizza than you might think. Humans and fungi share similar proteins, a biological bond that makes curing fungal infections difficult and expensive. Now for the first time in 20 years, researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center have discovered a new compound that could be developed as an antifungal drug to treat histoplasmosis and cryptococcosis, two types of fungal infections that are naturally drug-resistant.
A pair of researchers at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey has been awarded nearly $2.5 million dollars from the National Institutes of Health to further study in their respective laboratories. X.F. Steven Zheng, PhD, was awarded $1.65 million to examine an activating mechanism of the mTOR protein, which is a central controller of cell growth and metabolism. Darren R. Carpizo, MD, PhD, was awarded nearly $800,000 to further explore the effects of a compound identified in Dr. Carpizo’s laboratory found to restore tumor suppressor function of a mutated p53 gene in cancer cells.
A global hunt for genes that influence heart disease risk has uncovered 157 changes in human DNA that alter the levels of cholesterol and other blood fats – a discovery that could lead to new medications.
An Indiana University cancer researcher and his colleagues have discovered new therapeutic targets and drugs for certain types of leukemia or blood cancer.
Mitochondria are the power plants of cells, manufacturing fuel so a cell can perform its many tasks. These cellular power plants also are well known for their role in cell suicide. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Padua-Dulbecco Telethon Institute in Italy have shown that mitochondria remarkably also orchestrate events that determine a cell’s future, at least in the embryonic mouse heart. The new study identifies new potential genetic culprits in the origins of some congenital heart defects.
Whitehead Institute researchers have discovered that the protein product of the gene MECP2, which is mutated in about 95% of Rett syndrome patients, is a global activator of neuronal gene expression. Mutations in the protein can cause decreased gene transcription, reduced protein synthesis, and severe defects in the AKT/mTOR signaling pathway.
Genetics experts from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia are among the leaders of a major international collaboration researching why patients with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome have a higher risk of schizophrenia.
Johns Hopkins researchers, working with mice, say they have identified a chemical compound that reduces the risk of dangerous, potentially stroke-causing blood vessel spasms that often occur after the rupture of a bulging vessel in the brain.
Researchers at NYU and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have identified the mechanism that plays “traffic cop” in meiosis. Their findings shed new light on fertility and may lead to greater understanding of the factors that lead to birth defects.
A new study has found that “waviness” in forests of carbon nanotubes dramatically reduces their stiffness. Instead of being a detriment, the waviness may make the nanotube arrays more useful as thermal interface material for conducting heat away from integrated circuits.
Locust swarms may seem like a distant chapter from history, but these devastating insects still present a major threat in today’s world. A team of scientists from Arizona State, Colorado State, McGill and Yale universities are launching a new collaborative project to learn how human behavior, market forces and ecological systems interact over time to affect the outcomes of locust swarms.
New research shows that humans distinguish the difference between fine textures, such as silk or satin, through vibrations, which are picked up by two separate sets of nerve receptors in the skin and relayed to the brain.
By detailing a process required for repairing DNA breakage, scientists at the Duke Cancer Institute have gained a better understanding of how cells deal with the barrage of damage that can contribute to cancer and other diseases.
Scott Hansen, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Therapeutics on the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute, has won a prestigious New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers say it’s clear that some cases of autism are hereditary, but have struggled to draw direct links between the condition and particular genes. Now a team at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has devised a process for connecting a suspect gene to its function in autism.
A $2 million NSF grant will support development of a unique approach to making extremely compact and highly efficient antennas and electronics. The new technology will use principles derived from origami paper-folding techniques to create complex structures that can reconfigure themselves.
A problem developing more efficient organic LED light bulbs and displays is that much of the light is trapped within the light-emitting diode, or LED. University of Utah physicists believe they have solved the problem by creating a new organic molecule that is shaped like rotelle – wagon-wheel pasta – rather than spaghetti.
People with mental illness smoke at much higher rates than the overall population. But the popular belief that they are self-medicating is most likely wrong, according to researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Instead, they report, research indicates that psychiatric disease makes the brain more susceptible to addiction.
Like the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, telomeres protect — in their case — the interior-gene containing parts of chromosomes that carry a cell’s instructional material. Cancer cells are known to have short telomeres, but just how short they are from cancer cell to cancer cell may be a determining factor in a prostate cancer patient’s prognosis, according to a study led by Johns Hopkins scientists.
Researchers have found that the skeleton, acting through the bone-derived hormone osteocalcin, exerts a powerful influence on prenatal brain development and cognitive functions such as learning, memory, anxiety, and depression in adult mice. Findings from the mouse study could lead to new approaches to the prevention and treatment of neurologic disorders. The study was published today in the online edition of Cell.
Development of open-source software could be improved through understanding how isolated programmers collaborate, according to a research project funded by National Science Foundation.
The number of patients receiving radiation therapy in the United States for cancer treatment is expected to increase by more than 20 percent over the next decade to almost 600,000 per year. But radiation research over the past decade has decreased substantially, making it more difficult to provide oncologists with the best training in the latest techniques, particularly the integration of medical physics, which is now a required aspect in the clinical practice of radiotherapy.
Candida albicans is a double agent: In most of us, it lives peacefully, but for people whose immune systems are compromised by HIV or other severe illnesses, it is frequently deadly. Now a new study from Johns Hopkins and Harvard Medical School shows how targeting a specific fungal component might turn the fungus from a lion back into a kitten.
Pediatric researchers have found race- and ethnicity-based disparities in pain management and length of stay among children who came to hospital emergency departments for treatment of abdominal pain.
Working with mice, Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that weeks of treatment with a repurposed FDA-approved drug halted the growth of — and ultimately left no detectable trace of — brain tumor cells taken from adult human patients.
Scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have uncovered a new mechanism by which influenza can infect cells – a finding that ultimately may have implications for immunity against the flu.
New research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center shows that physical activity and weight loss conducted together for older, overweight and obese adults results in improved body composition, translating into lower cardiovascular disease risk (CVD) and improved mobility.
Water pours into a cup at about the same rate regardless of whether the water bottle is made of glass or plastic. But at nanometer-size scales for water and potentially other fluids, whether the container is made of glass or plastic does make a significant difference.
Microscopic, bottle-like structures with corks that melt at precisely-controlled temperatures could potentially release drugs inside the body or fragrances onto the skin, according to a recently published study.
A blood test developed by researchers at Duke Medicine showed more than 90-percent accuracy in distinguishing between viral and bacterial infections when tested in people with respiratory illnesses.
The National Cancer Institute, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded an $11.3 million, five-year competitive grant renewal to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center for its continued leadership of a multi-center prostate cancer research consortium, which was first funded in 2002.
Now, a team of researchers led by Dr. David N. Levy, Associate Professor of Basic Science and Craniofacial Biology at the New York University College of Dentistry (NYUCD), have discovered a new way that HIV-1 reproduces itself which could advance the search for new ways to combat infection.
With help from National Science Foundation (NSF) funding, Wayne State University will join other universities across the country aiming to improve teaching methods in the STEM disciplines, ultimately supporting those students with an interest in STEM fields and improving their graduation rates.
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