Category Biology/Biotechnology

New Nano Drug candidate kills Aggressive Breast Cancer cells

Chemical structure of multi-functional, anticancer drug candidate. Image provided by Hassan Beyzavi, University of Arkansas.

Researchers at the University of Arkansas have developed a new nano drug candidate that kills triple negative breast cancer cells. Triple negative breast cancer is one of the most aggressive and fatal types of breast cancer. The research will help clinicians target breast cancer cells directly, while avoiding the adverse, toxic side effects of chemotherapy.

Their study was published in June issue of Advanced Therapeutics.

Researchers led by Hassan Beyzavi, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, linked a new class of nanomaterials, called metal-organic frameworks, with the ligands of an already-developed photodynamic therapy dru...

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Could Mini-Neptunes be Irradiated Ocean Planets?

Mini-Neptune

New research suggests that the low density of mini-Neptunes could be explained simply by the presence of a thick layer of water. Many exoplanets known today are ‘super-Earths’, with a radius 1.3 times that of Earth, and ‘mini-Neptunes’, with 2.4 Earth radii. Mini-Neptunes, which are less dense, were long thought to be gas planets, made up of hydrogen and helium.

Now, scientists at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université/Cnes)(1) have examined a new possibility, namely that the low density of mini-Neptunes could be explained simply by the presence of a thick layer of water that experiences an intense greenhouse effect caused by the irradiation from their host star.

These findings, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Let...

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Researchers discover 2 Paths of Aging and new Insights on Promoting Healthspan

Yeast cells with the same DNA under the same environment show different structures of mitochondria (green) and the nucleolus (red), which may underlie the causes of different aging paths. Single and double arrowheads point to two cells with distinct mitochondrial and nucleolar morphologies.

Molecular biologists and bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have unraveled key mechanisms behind the mysteries of aging. They isolated two distinct paths that cells travel during aging and engineered a new way to genetically program these processes to extend lifespan.

Our lifespans as humans are determined by the aging of our individual cells...

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New Antiplatelet Drug shows promise for treating Heart Attack

UIC’s Dr. Xiaoping Du oversees Ph.D. student Yaping Zhanga enter a sample in an aggregometer in his lab at the College of Medicine Research Building (Photo: Joshua Clark/University of Illinois at Chicago)

Peptide-derived nanoparticle shows promise in lab. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a new drug that prevents blood clots without causing an increased risk of bleeding, a common side effect of all antiplatelet medications currently available.

A new study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine describes the drug and its delivery mechanisms and shows that the drug is also an effective treatment for heart attack in animal models.

Xiaoping Du, UIC professor of pharmacology and regenerative medicine at the College of Medicine, led ...

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