Body

LA JOLLA, CA— Diseases affecting the kidneys represent a major and unsolved health issue worldwide. The kidneys rarely recover function once they are damaged by disease, highlighting the urgent need for better knowledge of kidney development and physiology.

Now, a team of researchers led by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has developed a novel platform to study kidney diseases, opening new avenues for the future application of regenerative medicine strategies to help restore kidney function.

LOS ANGELES (Nov. 18, 2013) – Many patients diagnosed with prostate cancer have indolent, slow-growing forms of the disease that are not life-threatening. However, more than 30,000 American men will die from aggressive prostate cancer this year alone. This sharp contrast between low-risk and aggressive disease presents a challenge for many researchers and physicians as they diagnose patients and also determine the prognosis of the men with the most aggressive forms of prostate cancer.

The layers of skin that form the first line of defence in the body's fight against infection have revealed a unanticipated secret.

The single cell type that was thought to be behind the skin's immune defence has been found to have a doppelganger, with researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute showing the cells, despite appearing identical, are actually two different types.

In spite of the fact that the first antibiotics were discovered almost a century ago, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, encephalitis and meningitis are still serious diseases for humans in the twenty-first century. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are more than 8 million new cases of tuberculosis per year on a global scale, and that more than 300,000 of these are due to multidrug-resistant strains that are not only difficult to treat, but are also emerging rapidly in regions such as Eastern Europe.

Understanding how and why cancer cells move away from their original location is important to find ways to stop the spread of the disease. New findings, published in the Nature journal Oncogene, reveal how a protein, called 'PRH', is normally able to prevent cells from unnecessary migration. It is likely that this protein is less effective in cancer cells allowing the cells to venture away.

A new method to take the DNA fingerprint of individual cancer cells is uncovering the true extent of cancer's genetic diversity, new research reveals.

The technique can identify the founding mutations from which a tumour evolved and then uses computer software to draw a map of the cancer's family tree.

What began as a summer internship project designed for an undergraduate student evolved into a one-year study of one of the deadliest, but little known viruses. Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have now solved the structure of a key protein in the Nipah virus, which could pave the way for the development of a much-needed antiviral drug.

Exposure to a single pro-smoking media message increases college-aged students' risk of using tobacco for seven days, providing new clues about the influence of media on smoking, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

The novel project is the first to attempt to quantify the persistence that cigarette advertising and other pro-smoking media messages have on consumers. The study is published online by the Journal of Adolescent Health.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois anthropology professor Ripan Malhi looks to DNA to tell the story of how ancient humans first came to the Americas and what happened to them once they were here.

New York, NY, November 18, 2013 – Antibody-mediated rejection of the transplanted heart is a recognized clinical complication and a major limitation to survival of patients who have undergone heart transplantation. Experts have now developed a new working formulation for the pathologic diagnosis, grading, and reporting of cardiac antibody-mediated rejection.

Children with inherited high levels of cholesterol who receive cholesterol-lowering statins in their early years have a lower risk of coronary heart disease than their affected parents, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2013.

Researchers evaluated the effectiveness and safety of statin treatment in 214 children with familial hypercholesterolemia (FH). The children, 8- to 18-years-old, continued to receive statins and were evaluated after 10 years.

Chicago – Jiang He, M.D., Ph.D., of the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, and colleagues examined whether moderate lowering of blood pressure within the first 48 hours after the onset of an acute ischemic stroke would reduce death and major disability at 14 days or hospital discharge.

If we wanted to count the number of people in a crowd, we could make on the fly estimates, very likely to be imprecise, or we could ask each person to pass through a turnstile. The latter resembles the model that EPFL researchers have used for creating a "DNA reader" that is able to detect the passage of individual DNA molecules through a tiny hole: a nanopore with integrated graphene transistor.

By using a new analysis method, researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Sweden have found close to one hundred novel human gene regions that code for proteins. A number of these regions are so-called pseudogenes, which may be linked to cancer. The expectation is now that this recently developed protein analysis method, published in the scientific journal Nature Methods, will open up a whole new field of research.

An international scientific team has discovered a gene associated with a high risk of severe childhood asthma. The specific gene variant may be an actual cause of this form of asthma, a leading cause of hospitalization in young children.