Category Biology/Biotechnology

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine using MRI scans and computer modeling say they have further pinpointed areas of the human brain that regulate efforts to deal with fatigue.

The findings, they say, could advance the development of behavioral and other strategies that increase physical performance in healthy people, and also illuminate the neural mechanisms that contribute to fatigue in people with depression, multiple sclerosis and stroke.
Results of the research were published online Aug. 12 in Nature Communications.

“We know the physiologic processes involved in fatigue, such as lactic acid build-up in muscles, but we know far less about how feelings of fatigue are processed in the brain and how our brain decides how much and what kind of effort to make t...

Hepatocytes — the chief functional cells of the liver — are natural regenerators, and the lymph nodes serve as a nurturing place where they can multiply. In a new study published online and appearing in a coming issue of the journal Liver Transplantation, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine showed that large animals with ailing livers can grow a new organ in their lymph nodes from their own hepatocytes. A human clinical trial is next.

“It’s all about location, location, location,” said senior author Eric Lagasse, Pharm.D., Ph.D...

Excessive consumption of fructose — a sweetener ubiquitous in the American diet — can result in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which is comparably abundant in the United States. But contrary to previous understanding, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine report that fructose only adversely affects the liver after it reaches the intestines, where the sugar disrupts the epithelial barrier protecting internal organs from bacterial toxins in the gut.

Developing treatments that prevent intestinal barrier disruption, the authors conclude in a study published August 24, 2020 in Nature Metabolism, could protect th...

Researchers with the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases at the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM) have discovered which gut bacteria help our immune system battle cancerous tumours and how they do it. The discovery may provide a new understanding of why immunotherapy, a treatment for cancer that helps amplify the body’s immune response, works in some cases, but not others. The findings, published in Science, show combining immunotherapy with specific microbial therapy boosts the ability of the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells in some melanoma, bladder and colorectal cancers.

Dr...