Stem cells from bone marrow or fat improve recovery after stroke in rats, finds a study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Stem Cell Research & Therapy. Treatment with stem cells improved the amount of brain and nerve repair and the ability of the animals to complete behavioural...
Hearing loss is a significant public health problem affecting close to 50 million people in the United States alone. Sensorineural hearing loss is the most common form and is caused by the loss of sensory hair cells in the cochlea. Hair cell loss results from a variety of factors including noise...
Researchers from the RIKEN Research Centre for Allergy and Immunology in Japan report today that they have succeeded for the first time in creating cancer-specific, immune system cells called killer T lymphocytes, from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). To create these killer cells, the...
The human body contains immune cells programmed to fight cancer and viral infections, but they often have short lifespans and are not numerous enough to overcome attacks by particularly aggressive malignancies or invasions. Now researchers reporting in two separate papers in the January 4th...
When a young athlete dies unexpectedly on the basketball court or the football field, it's both shocking and tragic. Now Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have, for the first time, identified the molecular basis for a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that is the most...
Julien Diana and Yannick Simoni of the "Immune Mechanisms in Type 1 Diabetes" (Inserm/Universite Paris Descartes), directed by Agnes Lehuen, have just published the results of their work on type 1 diabetes in the Nature Medicine journal. This is a disease characterised by the self-destruction of...
The spread of cancer cells may be slowed by targeting the protein km23-1, according to researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. A motor protein that transports cargo within the cell, km23-1 is also involved in the movement or migration of cells. Migration is necessary for cancer to spread...
Hepatitis C virus has evolved to invade and hijack the basic machinery of the human liver cell to ensure its survival and spread. Researchers at the University of North have discovered how hepatitis C binds with and repurposes a basic component of cellular metabolism known as a microRNA to help...
Behold the power of green veggies! A new study revealed that a compound found in cruciferous veggies, like broccoli, can not only prevent--but kill-- leukemia cells. Published in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers found that a specific compound in vegetables like broccoli--sulforaphane--caused...
Ordinary Heart Cells Become "Biological Pacemakers" With Injection Of A Single Gene
Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute researchers have reprogrammed ordinary heart cells to become exact replicas of highly specialized pacemaker cells by injecting a single gene (Tbx18)-a major step forward in the...
Fighting cancer using the body's own defense system is a promising treatment approach. Immune therapies have even become clinical routine in treating a few cancers such as malignant melanoma and prostate cancer. Natural killer cells (or NK cells) are considered to be particularly suitable...
When you get an acute infection, such as influenza, the body generally responds with a coordinated response of immune-cell proliferation and attack that rapidly clears the pathogen. Then, their mission done, the immune system stands down, leaving a population of sentinel memory cells to rapidly...
Johns Hopkins researchers report concrete steps in the use of human stem cells to test how diseased cells respond to drugs. Their success highlights a pathway toward faster, cheaper drug development for some genetic illnesses, as well as the ability to pre-test a therapy's safety and...
For the first time, Wisconsin researchers have taken skin from patients and, using induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology, turned them into a laboratory model for an inherited type of macular degeneration. Dr. David Gamm, director of the UW's McPherson Eye Research Institute, said that...
A research team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a model* for making quantifiable predictions of how a group of cells will react and change in response to a given environment or stimulus - and how quickly. The NIST model, in principle, makes it possible...
Coaxing a humble skin cell to become a jack-of-all-trades pluripotent stem cell is feat so remarkable it was honored earlier this month with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Stem cell pioneer Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, showed that using a virus to add just four genes to the skin cell...
A new drug created at the University of Minnesota may hold the answer to defeating pancreatic cancer, according to results published in the prestigious journal Science Translational Medicine. The study is based on successful outcomes in a mouse model - results researchers expect to carry over to...
Researchers at Drexel University have identified the physical forces in red blood cells and blood vessels underlying the painful symptoms of sickle cell disease. Their experiment, the first to answer a scientific question about sickle cell disease using microfluidics engineering methods, may...
UC Davis investigators have found new evidence that a promising type of stem cell now being considered for a variety of disease therapies is very similar to the type of cells that give rise to cancer. The findings suggest that although the cells -- known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)...
I'm 13 and bought a blackberry type of phone from tracfone. It's very similar to an actual blackberry but here is the dreaded question... What age should a kid/teen get a phone? I got a really good deal and paid for it with my own money. I'm very responsible and will pay for or borrow money from...