Here’s research that could take the piss out of disease—and it’s no joke. For the first time, scientists reporting in Nature Medicine have created lab-grown kidneys in rats that produce urine after transplantation. Read more
Stem cells hold enormous potential for repairing or regenerating damaged tissue. But delivery of these cells to their target location remains a major obstacle. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California have developed a novel nanoparticle-based system that allows stem cells to be tracked in real time in a living mouse for up to a year after injection. This work, if replicated in humans, could finally allow scientists to verify if these cells are going where they’re intended. Read more
Red blood cell production in the bone marrow is a precarious process. Too few RBCs and you can become anemic; too many and you could be suffering from polycythemia vera, a rare, so-called ‘myeloproliferative’ genetic disorder marked by an abnormally high RBC count. Now, researchers have identified a surprising player in the regulation of RBC production under these disease conditions. Reporting online today in Nature Medicine, two independent teams describe the pivotal role of macrophages—amoeba-like white blood cells responsible for digesting harmful foreign microbes and removing old or dying cells—for generating RBCs in both anemic and over-proliferative conditions. Read more
Omega-3 fatty acids, which have an important role in promoting healthy growth and development, have made headlines in recent years for, among other things, their possible cardiovascular benefits. Found in high levels in fish oil, these fatty acids are the most consumed non-vitamin or non-mineral supplement in the US. Now, researchers have discovered another potential use for these fat building blocks: using them as a treatment for flu. Read more
Prenatal DNA testing has been a fiercely contested market of late. Yet another competitor entered the fray last week when Natera, a startup based in San Carlos, California, announced the 1 March launch date of a commercial test that can detect chromosomal abnormalities in the developing fetus from just a drop of an expectant mother’s blood—and with a sensitivity on par of that of more invasive techniques such as amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling, both of which carry an elevated risk of miscarriage. Read more
In the medical world, the term ‘sequestration’ is usually preceded by the word ‘pulmonary’ or ‘splenic’ and is used to describe rare diseases that are the focus of research grants funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). But sequestration has now taken on a new meaning. Read more
As you read this sentence, on average at least one person in the US will have started to clutch her chest. The blood flow to her heart will become blocked and cardiac muscle cells will start to die off and get replaced with scar tissue. This person has just suffered a heart attack and most likely will go on to develop heart failure, a weakening of the heart’s ability to pump blood and oxygen. In five years time, there’s a 50/50 chance she’ll be dead. Read more
“With any brand new technology, you never know when the world will be ready for it.” So said Paul Boni, an analyst at Punk, Ziegel & Knoll, in 1998 (as quoted by the New York Times), after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved its first gene-silencing ‘antisense therapy’, a drug known as Vitravene (fomivirsen), for the treatment of cytomegalovirus infections in individuals with weakened immune systems. Read more
The distribution of counterfeit drugs represents a significant and ever increasing public health concern. Estimated to generate $70 billion in annual sales worldwide, fake or ineffective medications can harm or kill patients, increase legitimate medicine costs, fund criminal activity and even fuel drug-resistance in diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. Read more
There’s an idea in linguistics known as the Whorfian hypothesis. It proposes that language is inexorably linked with how we perceive and think about the world. The classic argument is this: an Inuit person, possessing different names for snow, has the ability to think about, and even see, subtle differences in snow that speakers of some other languages do not. Read more
