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The research team has studied an important protein, called C3, from the part of the innate immune system known as the complement system. Upon recognition of pathogenic organisms or dying cells from our own body, C3 is cleaved by blood enzymes as part of a defence mechanism. These enzymes are […]

It’s every over-achiever’s dream: a gene mutation that allows them to function normally with just four to six hours of sleep a night instead of the normal eight. In 2009, UC San Francisco neurology professor Ying-Hui Fu, PhD, discovered a mutation in the gene DEC2 in a family of natural short […]

Tumor cells circulating throughout the body in blood vessels have long been feared as harbingers of metastasizing cancer — even though most free-floating cancer cells will not go on to establish a new tumor. But if these cast-offs could be accurately counted, they could provide an additional way to track […]

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE and funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), discovered that a weak grip can be associated with changes in the heart’s structure and function, and could be used as a broad measure of someone’s heart health. By asking people to grip a device called a dynamometer […]

While in previous experiments, artificial materials were made to interact with a variety of individual parts of biological cells, such as enzymes crucial for chemical reactions, a team of researchers from the new FABRICELL centre at the Imperial College London (ICL) had recently gone a step further. In a new […]

Approximately 10–15 per cent of breast cancer patients have so-called basal breast cancer that do not respond to treatment with hormone therapy, which means that they are more aggressive and often recur. Recent studies emphasise the importance of the communication of cancer cells with other cell types in the surrounding […]

Fifteen years ago, Michael Jung was already an eminent scientist when his wife asked him a question that would change his career, and extend the lives of many men with a particularly lethal form of prostate cancer. “When I turned 55 — I’m now 70 — my wife, Alice, said […]

After being stung by a parasitic wasp, the American cockroach loses control of its behavior, becoming host to the wasp’s egg. Days later, the hatchling consumes the cockroach alive. While this is a gruesome process for the cockroach, scientists report in ACS’ journal Biochemistry the discovery of a new family of peptides […]

MIT engineers have developed new technology that could be used to evaluate new drugs and detect possible side effects before the drugs are tested in humans. Using a microfluidic platform that connects engineered tissues from up to 10 organs, the researchers can accurately replicate human organ interactions for weeks at […]

Cancer treatment innovations are of continued interest to medical professionals, people diagnosed with cancer and their caregivers. Recently, with support from the National Institutes of Health, a team of scientists created a kind of synthetic protein called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that could increase the effectiveness of immunotherapies that […]

A progressive decline in physical function, commonly referred to as functional decline, is a strong health determinant in older people. The accumulation of chronic diseases, multimorbidity, plays a major role in functional decline and has a negative impact on quality of life. Cardiovascular and neuropsychiatric diseases are common in older […]

When it comes to colorectal cancer, many people would benefit from individually tailored screening rather than standardized population guidelines. A new risk-prediction model, built by researchers at the University of Michigan and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Fred Hutch) in Seattle and colleagues, assesses the impact of environment and […]

A discovery sheds light on how cancerous cells differ from healthy ones, and could lead to the development of new strategies for therapeutic intervention for difficult-to-treat cancers in the future. An international team of investigators found a “stop sign”—a modified protein researchers named a PIP-stop—inside cells that are overused by […]

The absence of a protein critical to the control of inflammation may lead to rapid and severe bone loss, according to a new University at Buffalo study. The study found that when the gene needed to produce the protein tristetraprolin (TTP) is removed from healthy mice, the animals developed the […]

Bacteria found in the small intestines of mice and humans can travel to other organs and trigger an autoimmune response, according to a new Yale study. The researchers also found that the autoimmune reaction can be suppressed with an antibiotic or vaccine designed to target the bacteria, they said. The […]

An immunotherapy drug embedded in a slow-release hydrogel invented at Rice University in collaboration with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) appears to be highly effective at killing cancer cells. STINGel combines a new class of immunotherapy drugs called stimulator of interferon gene (STING) agonists with an injectable hydrogel that […]

One of the liveliest debates in neuroscience over the past half century surrounds whether the human brain renews itself by producing new neurons throughout life, and whether it may be possible to rejuvenate the brain by boosting its innate regenerative capacity. Now UC San Francisco scientists have shown that in […]

As we get older, it’s not uncommon to experience “senior moments,” in which we forget where we parked our car or call our children by the wrong names. And we may wonder: Are these memory lapses a normal part of aging, or do they signal the early stages of a […]

After receiving a course of antiretroviral therapy for their HIV-like infection, approximately half of a group of monkeys infused with a broadly neutralizing antibody(link is external) to HIV combined with an immune stimulatory compound suppressed the virus for six months without additional treatment, according to scientists supported in part by the National […]

Death is not a single event. It is a series of events as life fades away. Part of it happens to be rigor mortis – a period of stiffness, which makes body somewhat rigid as muscles contract and joints lose flexibility. For humans it occurs after the main event of […]

Dramatic calorie restriction, diets reduced by 40 percent of a normal calorie total, have long been known to extend health span, the duration of disease-free aging, in animal studies, and even to extend life span in most animal species examined. Further research has shown that animals fed restricted-calorie diets are […]

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have developed a gene therapy that successfully treats a form of macular degeneration in a canine model. The work sets the stage for translating the findings into a human therapy for an inherited disease that results in a progressive loss of central vision and which is […]

Cancer arises when cells acquire errors (mutations) at certain locations in the DNA. These mutations are responsible for the characteristics of the cancer cells, and knowledge about the mutations present in a patient’s cancer is important for the diagnosis and treatment. A subset of these mutations may even be “druggable” […]

Older women residing in the U.S territories are less likely to receive recommended or timely care for breast cancer compared with similar women residing in the continental United States, according to Yale researchers. Their findings were published in the March issue of Health Affairs. Using Medicare claims data from 2008 to […]

In many organs, damaged tissue can be repaired by generating new cells of the type that were lost. However, after an injury to the central nervous system, a special type of scar tissue is formed which inhibits this regeneration. Injuries to the brain and spinal cord therefore often lead to […]

Team engineers protein to enhance T cells for fight against cancer cells UCLA engineers and scientists have engineered a type of synthetic protein — a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, that responds to soluble protein targets. The advance shows great promise for helping the body’s immune system seek out and […]

A new discovery about the immune system may allow doctors to treat harmful inflammation that damages the brain in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. It might also let doctors save patients from the potentially deadly inflammation of sepsis, a full-body infection that kills a quarter-million Americans every year. The finding […]

Improving the trafficking of cellular proteins in brain cells holds possibilities for new treatments and even prevention for Alzheimer's disease, results of a new study suggest. Researchers found that a compound that enhances the shuttling of proteins within cells reduced the production of forerunners of two proteins implicated in brain […]

People with stage III colon cancer who regularly eat nuts are at significantly lower risk of cancer recurrence and mortality than those who don’t, according to a new, large study led by researchers at Yale Cancer Center. The findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The study followed 826 […]

Her two-year study, begun with funding from Women’s Health Research at Yale in 2005, found that long-term treatment with the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone did not improve memory as anticipated. “It was surprising, because we thought for sure we’d see a benefit of at least some of our treatments,” […]