Tech

Rapid treatment with a new anti-inflammatory could have a major impact on recovery from spinal cord injury, University of Queensland researchers have found.

UQ School of Biomedical Sciences' Dr Marc Ruitenberg and PhD student Ms Faith Brennan said they made the discovery during laboratory trials with an experimental drug.

Ms Brennan said that excessive inflammation caused additional damage in spinal cord injuries and hindered recovery.

"We found that a molecule called C5aR exacerbates inflammation and tissue damage after spinal cord injury," she said.

More than 100 drugs have been approved to treat cancer, but predicting which ones will help a particular patient is an inexact science at best.

Generation of fragment screening libraries could enhance the analysis and application of natural products for medicinal chemistry and drug discovery, according to Griffith University's Professor Ronald Quinn.

In a paper entitled Capturing Nature's Diversity and published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, the Director of Griffith's Eskitis Institute for Drug Discovery and his co-authors propose a novel approach to capturing the structural diversity of nature for medical research and implementation.

Much of what we know about cancer and many modern medicines that treat it grow from experiments on cancer cells. However, it is notoriously difficult to maintain the integrity of cell lines - due to contamination or simple mistakes such as mislabeling, later generations of a cell line may bear no resemblance to the original sample, potentially invalidating results of research performed on mistaken cells. For this reason, the National Cancer Institute maintains a library of 60 authenticated human cancer cell lines for the purposes of research, called the NCI-60.

A recent randomized trial that looked at the feasibility of 2013 guidelines issued by the American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Project for trauma resuscitation found that delivering universal donor plasma to massively hemorrhaging patients can be accomplished consistently and rapidly and without excessive wastage in high volume trauma centers. The plasma is given in addition to red blood cell transfusions to optimize treatment.

After performing thousands of unsuccessful experiments in his attempt to perfect the light bulb, Thomas Edison famously remarked: "I have not failed, not once. I've discovered ten thousand ways that don't work." Australian leaders of an ongoing pancreatic cancer clinical trial known as the Individualised Molecular Pancreatic Cancer Therapy or 'IMPaCT' trial, could say exactly the same thing as Edison.

A Phase IIa placebo-controlled clinical trial of TOPOFEN, a topical anti-migraine therapy for moderate and severe migraine sufferers, showed that the application of a well-known non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), using the company's proprietary formulation on the skin, over the trigeminal nerve branches, can be a safe and effective alternative treatment for patients suffering from acute migraine.

Cancer DNA circulating in the bloodstream of lung cancer patients can provide doctors with vital mutation information that can help optimise treatment when tumour tissue is not available, an international group of researchers has reported at the European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The results have important implications for the use of cancer therapies that target specific cancer mutations, explains Dr Martin Reck from the Department of Thoracic Oncology at Lung Clinic Grosshansdorf, Germany, who presented the findings at the conference.

The levels of chemicals used to flavour some brands of e-cigarette fluid exceed recommended exposure limits and could be respiratory irritants, in some cases, suggests research published online in the journal Tobacco Control.

The electronic cigarette market has developed rapidly in recent years, with global sales in 2014 estimated to be in the region of US$7 billion, but the health implications of vaping remain hotly contested.

The Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology (acib) uses the positive aspects of synthetic biology for the ecofriendly production of a natural compound. The challenge of the biotechnologists Tamara Wriessnegger and Harald Pichler in Graz was to produce Nootkatone in large quantities. The substance is expensive (more than 4000 USD per kilo) and can be found only in minute quantities in grapefruits.

Technological advances are enabling scientists to sequence the genomes of cancer tumors, revealing a detailed portrait of genetic mutations that drive these diseases. But genomic studies are only one piece of the puzzle that is precision medicine, a Weill Cornell Medical College researcher writes in Nature. In order to realize the promise of this field, there needs to be an increased focus on creating robust clinical databases that include medical histories from patients around the country, which physicians can then use along with genomic data to tailor individual treatments.

A research team has invented a prototype video camera that is the first to be fully self-powered--it can produce an image each second, indefinitely, of a well-lit indoor scene. They designed a pixel that can not only measure incident light but also convert the incident light into electric power.

Nearly anyone touched by ovarian cancer will tell you: it's devastating. It's bad enough that cancer in almost 80 percent of patients reaches advanced stages before diagnosis, and that most patients are expected to die within five years. But just as painfully, roughly one quarter of women diagnosed have no warning that they are resistant to platinum-based chemotherapy, the main line of defense, nor that they will likely have 18 months to live.

The winner of the 2015 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences, sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) association for analytics professionals, has been announced, and it is something of a surprise since an award for outstanding operations research would typically be assumed to be a defense contractor or a computer company.

Malaria is a critical health problem in West Africa, where traditional medicine is commonly used alongside modern health care practices. An herbal remedy derived from the roots of a weed, which was traditionally used to alleviate malarial symptoms, was combined with leaves and aerial portions from two other plants with antimalarial activity, formulated as a tea, and eventually licensed and sold as an antimalarial phytomedicine.

The story and challenges behind the development of this plant-based treatment are presented in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.