Category Health/Medical

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...

In a new study, published online in the journal American Chemical Society (ACS) Applied Polymer Materials, scientists at Texas A&M University reported they have designed a hydrogel membrane that may be used to house optical glucose sensing materials, toward building a biosensor for monitoring sugar levels in diabetics.

By incorporating dangling, comb-type molecular chains within a type of hydrogel called poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) or poly NIPAAm for short, they showed that the membrane could prevent leakage of small-sized molecules, like the ones for glucose-sensing, while still allowing glucose to freely diffuse in and out.

When ready for clinical use, the researchers s...

Two studies led by UT Southwestern researchers shed new light on how the brain encodes time and place into memories. The findings, published recently in PNAS and Science, not only add to the body of fundamental research on memory, but could eventually provide the basis for new treatments to combat memory loss from conditions such as traumatic brain injury, TBI, or Alzheimer’s disease.

About a decade ago, a group of neurons kno...