Category Biology/Biotechnology

The type and abundance of bacteria found in the mouth may be linked to lung cancer risk in non-smokers, finds the first study of its kind, published online in the journal Thorax.

Fewer species and high numbers of particular types of bacteria seem to be linked to heightened risk, the findings indicate.

Around one in four cases of lung cancer occurs in non-smokers and known risk factors, such as second hand tobacco smoke, background radon exposure, air pollution, and family history of lung cancer don’t fully explain these figures, say the researchers.

The type and volume of bacteria (microbiome), found in the mouth has been associated with a heightened risk of various cancers including those of the gullet, head and neck, and pancreas.

And the researchers wanted to find out i...

With the help of algorithms, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have identified markers that can differentiate between irritant eczema and contact allergy, two skin reactions that look similar but require different treatment. Their findings, which are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), support the further development of an alternative to today’s diagnostic patch tests.

About 20 percent of the population of high-income countries are troubled by contact eczema, a disease often associated with exposure to chemicals in the working environment...

The results of a pre-clinical study led by researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, suggest how a compound derived from the thunder god vine — an herb used in China for centuries to treat joint pain, swelling and fever — is able to kill cancer cells and potentially improve clinical outcomes for patients with pancreatic cancer.

The medicinal plant’s key ingredient, triptolide, is the basis of a water-soluble prodrug called Minnelide, which appears to attack pancreatic cancer cells and the cocoon of stroma surrounding the tumor that shields it from the body’s immune system. Investigators recently published the study results in the journal Oncogenesis.

The study found that the compound’s mechanism of action is the ability of...

Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London have Rebuilt a human Thymus, an essential organ in the Immune system, using human stem cells and a bioengineered scaffold. Their work is an important step towards being able to build artificial thymi which could be used as transplants.

The thymus is an organ in the chest where T lymphocytes, which play a vital role in the immune system, mature. If the thymus does not work properly or does not form during fetal development in the womb, this can lead to diseases such as severe immunodeficiency, where the body cannot fight infectious diseases or cancerous cells, or autoimmunity, where the immune system mistakenly attacks the patient’s own healthy tissue.

In their proof-of-concept study, published in Nature Comm...