In the treatment of large tumors, how effective is adoptive T cell therapy in comparison to drug-based cancer treatment? To answer this question, Dr. Kathleen Anders and Professor Thomas Blankenstein of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch and researchers of the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, California, USA designed and carried out a study comparing the two methods. Based on a mouse cancer model, the researchers elucidated the mechanisms of the two different treatments.
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Wheelchair basketball: It's a fast, skillful game, dazzling to watch, gruelling to play. It's also a sport that in Canada has become one of the most inclusive, welcoming athletes with disability and able-bodied athletes alike to its leagues and teams. And athletes like it that way.
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Imagine if doctors could spot Parkinson's disease at its inception and treat the protein that triggers it before the disease can sicken the patient.
A team of researchers led by Basir Ahmad, a postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University, has demonstrated that slow-wriggling alpha-synuclein proteins are the cause of aggregation, or clumping together, which is the first step of Parkinson's. The results are published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Antibiotics in pig feed increased the number of antibiotic resistant genes in gastrointestinal microbes in pigs, according to a study conducted by Michigan State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.
Published in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the comprehensive study focused on understanding the effects of conventional, in-feed antibiotics in U.S. farms.
Hopes of at last controlling malaria in Africa could be dashed by the emergence of poor quality and fraudulent anti-malarial medicines, warn experts writing in the Malaria Journal. Unless urgent action is taken both within Africa and internationally, they argue, millions of lives could be put at risk.
Two-timing is nothing out of the ordinary for them: for about 100 million years, grass smut fungi have been breeding in a three-gender system. This was discovered by Dr. Ronny Kellner and Prof. Dr. Dominik Begerow of the RUB Geobotany Laboratory in cooperation with colleagues from the Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf. Using genetic analysis, they showed that the structure of the responsible regions in the genome has hardly changed since then.
Scientists from the University of Helsinki and from UCSF have exposed a cell pathway that breast tumor cells use to destruct local tissue neighborhood. Cancer cells may use this pathway to free themselves from mammary epithelial tissue architecture, to spread to surrounding tissues. The cell pathway, the researchers found, is a biochemical chain of events leading to activation of a protein-cleaving enzyme on the surface of the tumor cells.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A natural enzyme derived from human blood plasma showed potential in significantly reducing the effects of graft-vs.-host disease, a common and deadly side effect of lifesaving bone marrow transplants.
If organisations want to retain qualified nurses they need to tackle the different work factors that are important to the three key age groups and build on the strong attachment that many nurses feel to the profession. Those are the key messages to emerge from a large-scale survey of nurses published in the January issue of the Journal of Advanced Nursing.
Australian researchers surveyed 900 nurses from seven private hospitals in four states, breaking them down into Baby Boomers (44 to 46 years), Generation X (29 to 43 years) and Generation Y (under 29).
Åke Lindström is Professor of Animal Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. Together with other European researchers he has looked at 20 years' worth of data on birds, butterflies and summer temperatures. During this period, Europe has become warmer and set temperatures have shifted northwards by 250 km. Bird and butterfly communities have not moved at the same rate.
"Both butterflies and birds respond to climate change, but not fast enough to keep up with an increasingly warm climate. We don't know what the long-term ecological effects of this will be", says Åke Lindström.
Different formats are available for reporting the results of clinical trials. In an article just published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), employees at the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) investigated to what extent journal publications, reports posted in trial results registries (registry reports), and clinical study reports submitted to regulatory authorities provide sufficient information to evaluate clinical trials.
A devastating neurodegenerative disease that first appears in toddlers just as they are beginning to walk has been traced to defects in mitochondria, the 'batteries' or energy-producing power plants of cells.
This finding by researchers at Queen Mary, University of London and Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital - The Neuro - at McGill University, is published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
AUGUSTA, Ga. – Tiny zebrafish just may give scientists one solution to information overload in the search for new drugs therapies.
High throughput screening, which uses robotics and computers to rapidly screen drugs, genes or proteins, to identify, for example, compounds that are best at destroying cancer or restoring insulin-producing cells. The technology has both revolutionized and stymied research, said Dr. Jeffrey Mumm, biologist in the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Health Sciences University.
Cancers rarely are deadly unless they evolve the ability to grow beyond the tissues in which they first arise. Normally, cells -- even early-stage tumor cells -- are tethered to scaffolding that helps to restrain any destructive tendencies. But scientists from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and from UCSF have identified a cleaver-wielding protein that frees some tumor cells, allowing them to further misbehave.
STANFORD, Calif. — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have used an innovative mathematical technique to find markers that effectively predict how deadly a cancer will be. The discovery, which in this case concerned bladder cancer, could lead to faster, less expensive and more accurate analysis of cancer risk and better treatment of the disease.