Monthly Archive for November, 2010

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Virus Breakthrough Raises Hope Over Ending Common Cold

Published on November 3, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

November 2010, BBC News

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Scientists say they have made a landmark discovery which could pave the way for new drugs to beat illnesses like the common cold.

Until now experts had thought that antibodies could only tackle viral infections by blocking or attacking viruses outside cells.

But work done by the Medical Research Council shows antibodies can pass into cells and fight viruses from within.

PNAS journal said the finding held promise for a new antiviral drugs.

The Cambridge scientists stressed that it would take years of work and testing to find new therapies, and said that the pathway they had discovered would not work on all viruses.

Fighting Viruses

Some antiviral drugs are already available to help treat certain conditions, like HIV.

But viruses remain mankind’s biggest killer, responsible for twice as many deaths each year as cancer, and are among the hardest of all diseases to treat.

The new discovery by Dr Leo James and colleagues transforms the previous scientific understanding of our immunity to viral diseases like the common cold, ‘winter vomiting’ and gastroenteritis.

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Regenerative Medicine Regenerates Itself

Published on November 1, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

By Christie Rizk, Genome Technology, November 2010

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When Scott Noggle was an undergraduate student watching various PIs present their work to give students an idea of which labs they may want to work in, he saw a video of cardiac muscles developed from mouse embryonic stem cells. The cells were beating in the culture dish — contract, contract, contract — and Noggle’s imagination was hooked. “Most things don’t move around in the dish while you’re looking at them,” says Noggle, now a PI at the New York Stem Cell Foundation. “It was pretty wild.”

Stem cell research has captured the imaginations of many people. Very few fields of scientific research are fraught with such misinformation, controversy, and hope — some spas offer “stem cell facials” to rejuvenate tired skin; stem cell opponents say that research destroys embryos and will lead to human cloning; and families of patients with neurodegenerative diseases wait for the day when their loved ones can be treated with stem cells to repair the damage wrought by ALS or Alzheimer’s disease.

The field has also captured the imagination of many researchers. “Embryonic stem cells are a representation of a person in a dish,” Noggle says. The cells, in their undifferentiated state, can be poked and prodded to become any cell in the human body. A PubMed search for papers from researchers that utilize stem cells or experiment on them returns more than 100,000 results — more than 700 in the last two months alone. That’s quite a bit of interest.

Stem cells generally come in two forms: embryonic stem cells, which come from the inner cell mass of blastocysts and are pluripotent, can differentiate to become all the different tissues of the human body and can be replicated almost indefinitely; and adult stem cells, which come from — and are named after — various parts of the fully developed human body and cannot be changed into other kinds of cells. Adult stem cells are already successfully being used in medicine to treat blood and bone marrow cancers through bone marrow transplants.

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