Category Biology/Biotechnology

The research hopes to improve the outcomes of sport injury surgeries. Credit: Pixabay

Top biomedical engineering researcher develops synthetic scaffolds for tendon and ligament regeneration. Australia’s love of sport means it has one of the highest rates of knee anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury and reconstruction in the world.

Worldwide, the costs of tendon and ligament rupture repair and surgery revision represent tens of billions of dollars of the clinical orthopaedic market.

A team of biomedical engineering researchers from the University of Sydney, working with Columbia University’s Regenerative Engineering Laboratory and FAU Erlangen-Nurnberg Institute of Medical Biotechnology (Germany), are hoping to improve the outcomes of tendon and ligament repair by developing a new synthe...

Saliva could be used instead of blood to monitor diabetes in a method proposed in research involving the University of Strathclyde.
The test has been developed as an alternative to the current prevalent practice of monitoring blood glucose, which can be invasive, painful and costly.

Lab tests of the saliva process had an accuracy rate of 95.2%. The research shows promising results for monitoring diabetes, which affects an estimated 425 million people worldwide — around half of them undiagnosed.

The research has been published in the journal PLOS ONE. It also involved partners at the Federal University of Uberlandia in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the University of Vale do Paraíba in Sao Paolo, Brazil and the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

Dr Matthew Baker, a Reader in Strathc...

Gluten is enemy No. 1 for those with celiac disease, and it’s hard to avoid. Episodes of this chronic autoimmune illness can be triggered by ingesting gluten, a key protein in wheat and some other grains. Researchers have been exploring how gut bacteria, especially Bifidobacteria, could be used as a treatment. Now, scientists publishing the results of laboratory experiments in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry report how specific types of Bifidobacteria work.

Humans have many types of bacteria living in their digestive systems, but those with celiac disease have altered levels of “beneficial” and “harmful” gut bacteria...

A substantial fraction of the estimated 15% of Americans carrying the high-risk gene variant of Alzheimer’s are protected to some degree from Alzheimer’s disease by a variant of the other gene. (A gene will often come in a variety of versions, or variants, that can produce different traits.)

The findings also may help drug developers better identify clinical trial participants and treatments for what, despite billions of dollars spent in pursuit of effective therapies, remains a disease without a cure.

About 5 million Americans – including roughly 1 in 10 people age 65 or older and one-third of those age 85 or older – have sy...