Body

A study involving over 5,000 people living with the joint disorder ankylosing spondylitis has identified a series of genetic variants associated with increased susceptibility to the condition as well as providing new clues to how the condition may be treated in the future.

The study, a collaboration between the Australo-Anglo-American Spondyloarthritis Consortium and the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, also provides one of the first confirmed examples of gene-gene interaction seen in humans.

TORONTO, ON – University of Toronto researchers have derived inspiration from the photosynthetic apparatus in plants to engineer a new generation of nanomaterials that control and direct the energy absorbed from light.

Their findings are reported in a forthcoming issue of Nature Nanotechnology, which will be released on July 10, 2011.

The U of T researchers, led by Professors Shana Kelley and Ted Sargent, report the construction of what they term "artificial molecules."

SAN DIEGO, CA – Vitamin D deficiency has been known to cause an assortment of health problems, a recent study being presented at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in San Diego today, suggests that lack of the vitamin might also increase the chance of muscle injuries in athletes, specifically NFL football players.

Arthroscopic treatment of a common hip problem that leads to arthritis is successful in terms of restoring range of motion, according to results from a recent Hospital for Special Surgery study. The study will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, held July 7-11 in San Diego.

Researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery have identified a group of patients who may have increased difficulty for surgical treatment of a snapping psoas, a condition that usually develops because a teenager or young adult has a pelvis that grows faster than their psoas tendon. The study will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM), held July 7-11 in San Diego.

PHILADELPHIA - For the past decade, researchers have tried to reprogram the identity of all kinds of cell types. Heart cells are one of the most sought-after cells in regenerative medicine because researchers anticipate that they may help to repair injured hearts by replacing lost tissue. Now, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are the first to demonstrate the direct conversion of a non-heart cell type into a heart cell by RNA transfer.

Houston - Adding Afinitor® to Herceptin®, the main treatment for HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, helps some women with disease that has been resistant to previous Herceptin-based therapies, according to a study led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

A University of Houston researcher is an author on a landmark multi-institutional genetic study of the most aggressive and common form of ovarian cancer that is published in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature. Ovarian cancer is the fifth-leading cause of cancer death in women in the United States.

Researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery have found that in comparison to open surgery, arthroscopic treatment of a common hip problem that leads to arthritis produces similar outcomes in terms of repairing structural problems in most patients. The study will be published in the July 2011 TK issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

Protease inhibitor drugs are one of the major weapons in the fight against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but their effectiveness is limited as the virus mutates and develops resistance to the drugs over time. Now a new tool has been developed to help predict the location of the mutations that lead to drug resistance.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and in Michigan, North Carolina and Spain have discovered how genetic mutations cause a number of rare human diseases, which include Meckel syndrome, Joubert syndrome and several other disorders.

The work gives doctors new possible targets for designing better diagnostics to detect and drugs to treat these diseases, which together affect perhaps one in 200 people in the United States.

HOUSTON -- (July 8, 2011) -- New research from Rice University and Italy's Eugenio Medea Scientific Institute is yielding clues about hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), a group of inherited neurological disorders that affect about 20,000 people in the United States. A study in the July 5 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers the first detailed account of the biochemical workings of atlastin, a protein produced by one of the genes linked to HSP.

NEW YORK – July 8, 2011 – A study by Columbia Business School's marketing professors Ran Kivetz, Philip H. Geier, Jr. Professor of Marketing, and Oded Netzer, Philip H. Geier Jr. Associate Professor, Marketing, alongside Rom Schrift, Assistant Professor of Marketing, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (he received his Ph.D.

MADISON – An estimated two billion people in the developing world heat and cook with a biomass fuel such as wood, but the practice exposes people – especially women – to large doses of small-particle air pollution, which can cause premature death and lung disease.

In a study just published online in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have associated indoor air pollution with increased blood pressure among older women.

New research from the University of Adelaide has added to the debate about whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded and sluggish or warm-blooded and active.