Category Health/Medical

The mTOR protein plays a central role in cell growth, proliferation and survival. Its activity varies according to the availability of nutrients and some growth factors, including hormones. This protein is implicated in several diseases, including cancer, where its activity frequently increases...

Researchers at ETH Zurich are planning to use magnetic bacteria to fight cancerous tumours. They have now found a way for these microorganisms to effectively cross blood vessel walls and subsequently colonise a tumour.

Scientists around the world are researching how anti-cancer drugs can most efficiently reach the tumours they target. One possibility is to use modified bacteria as “ferries” to carry the drugs through the bloodstream to the tumours. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now succeeded in controlling certain bacteria so that they can effectively cross the blood vessel wall and infiltrate tumour tissue.

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Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have found a small molecule capable of manipulating an immune process that plays an important role in cancers and autoimmune diseases.

Their discovery is reported in an Angewandte Chemie paper titled “Discovery of the First Selective Nanomolar Inhibitors of ERAP2 by Kinetic Target-Guided Synthesis.”

They discovered the molecule — and enzyme inhibitor — after first studying how the immune system works and why some diseases can be resistant to treatments.

“Tumors have the ability to present cell-surface markers in the form of non-self peptide antigens, or neoantigens, which renders them exquisitely sensitive to recognition and elimination by T-cells, a form of immune cells that kill tumor cells upon recognition of neoantigens,” ...

What role do the stages of sleep play in forming memories? “We’ve known for a long time that useful learning happens during sleep,” says University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Anna Schapiro. “You encode new experiences while you’re awake, you go to sleep, and when you wake up your memory has somehow been transformed.”

Yet precisely how new experiences get processed during sleep has remained mostly a mystery. Using a neural network computational model they built, Schapiro, Penn Ph.D. student Dhairyya Singh, and Princeton University’s Kenneth Norman now have new insight into the process.

In research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they show that as the brain cycles through slow-wave and rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, which happens about five t...