Body

A study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet has shown that the body's ability to break down medicines may be closely related to exposure to sunlight, and thus may vary with the seasons. The findings offer a completely new model to explain individual differences in the effects of drugs, and how the surroundings can influence the body's ability to deal with toxins.

MINNEAPOLS / ST. PAUL (March 9, 2011) – University of Minnesota researchers are using salmonella – the bacteria commonly transmitted through food that sickens thousands of U.S. residents each year – to do what was once unthinkable: help people.

U of M Masonic Cancer Center researchers believe salmonella may be a valuable tool in the fight against cancer in organs surrounding the gut – such as the liver, spleen, and colon – since that's where salmonella naturally infects the body.

A history of alcohol abuse significantly impacts quality of life for patients after liver transplant, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital.

"Transplant recipients with alcoholic cirrhosis experienced less improvement in physical quality of life and reported greater pain and physical limitations than non-alcoholics after transplant surgery," says Anne Eshelman, Ph.D., Henry Ford Behavioral Health Services, lead author of the study.

MESA, Ariz. — March 8, 2011 — Predictive Biomarker Sciences (PBS-Bio) has uncovered how the experimental drug UNBS1450, produced by Unibioscreen, kills cancer cells.

Previous studies have shown that over-activity of a gene known as MCL1 can cause cancer cells to grow out of control. PBS-Bio, which is owned in part by the non-profit, Phoenix-based Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), co-discovered that UNBS1450 effectively shuts off the gene and induces apoptosis, the cancer cell's normal process of cellular death.

Smut fungi are agents of disease responsible for significant crop losses worldwide. Principal Investigator, Dr. Thomas Smith and Research Associate Member, Dr. Dilip Shah at The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center collaborated on a project to develop a variety of corn that is highly resistant to corn smut caused by the fungus, Ustilago maydis. The results of this research are published in the recent article, "Transgenic maize plants expressing the Totivirus antifungal protein, KP4, are highly resistant to corn smut," in Plant Biotechnology Journal .

Scientists have shed light on why some people are apple-shaped and others are pear-shaped.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have pinpointed a protein that plays a part in how fat is stored in the body.

The latest findings give greater understanding of how the protein works, which could help development of medicines to treat obesity.

Levels of the protein – known as 11BetaHSD1 – tend to be higher in the presence of an unhealthy type of body fat which tends to be stored around the torso – typical of "apple-shapes".

Researchers announced today in the American Journal of Epidemiology that despite the high level of spending on healthcare in the United States compared to England, Americans experience higher rates of chronic disease and markers of disease than their English counterparts at all ages.. Why health status differs so dramatically in these two countries, which share much in terms of history and culture, is a mystery.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 8 2011) -- Researchers at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Lisbon, Portugal and the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, are making major strides toward understanding the life cycle of flaviviruses, which include some of the most virulent human pathogens: yellow fever virus, Dengue virus, and the West Nile Virus, among others.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 8 2011) -- Viruses can penetrate every part of the body, making them potentially good tools for gene therapy or drug delivery. But with our immune system primed to seek and destroy these foreign invaders, delivering therapies with viruses is currently inefficient and can pose a significant danger to patients.

Now scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have engineered a virus with potential to solve this problem. They describe the new virus today at the 55th Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in Baltimore, MD.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 8, 2011) -- Scientists in Israel and California have developed an instrument for rapidly analyzing molecular interactions that take place viruses and the cells they infect. By helping to identify interactions between proteins made by viruses like HIV and hepatitis and proteins made by the human cells these viruses infect, the device may help scientists develop new ways of disrupting these interactions and find new drugs for treating those infections.

It's all too familiar: researchers announce the discovery of a new drug that eradicates disease in animals. Then, a few years later, the drug bombs in human trials. In the latest issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, ethics experts Jonathan Kimmelman, associate professor at McGill's Biomedical Ethics Unit and Department of Social Studies of Medicine, and Alex John London, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, argue that this pattern of boom and bust may be related to the way researchers predict outcomes of their work in early stages of drug development.

Economic growth in India has no automatic connection to reducing undernutrition in Indian children and so further reductions in the prevalence of childhood undernutrition are likely to depend on direct investments in health and health-related programs. These are the conclusions of a large study by researchers at the Schools of Public Health at University of Michigan and Harvard University, that is published in this week's PLoS Medicine.

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Jonathan Kimmelman from McGill University in Montreal, Canada and Alex London from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA argue that ethical reviewers and decision-makers pay insufficient attention to threats to validity in pre-clinical studies and consult too narrow a set of evidence.

WASHINGTON, DC, March 3, 2011 — Communication technologies that help people stay connected to the workplace are often seen as solutions to balancing work and family life. However, a new study in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior suggests there may be a "dark side" to the use of these technologies for workers' health—and these effects seem to differ for women and men.

Hidden financial conflicts-of-interest are sneaking into published drug research through the back door, warns an international team of investigators, led by researchers from the Jewish General Hospital's Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and McGill University in Montreal.

More and more, policy decisions and what medications doctors prescribe for their patients are being driven by large "studies of studies," called meta-analyses, which statistically combine results from many individual drug trials.