Category Health/Medical

Multidrug resistance (MDR) — a process in which tumors become resistant to multiple medicines — is the main cause of failure of cancer chemotherapy. Tumor cells often acquire MDR by boosting their production of proteins that pump drugs out of the cell, rendering the chemotherapies ineffective. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Nano Letters have developed nanoparticles that release bursts of calcium inside tumor cells, inhibiting drug pumps and reversing MDR.

A pump protein called P-glycoprotein (P-gp) often plays a key role in MDR. P-gp is in the cell membrane, where it uses energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to pump drugs out of tumor cells...

A new study published in Current Biology identifies the biological triggers that promote quicker nerve regeneration. From their previous studies, the researchers knew that damaged nerves regrow more quickly when “stress granules” in the site of the nerve injury are broken apart. Now they know what causes those stress granules to disassemble through a process called protein phosphorylation.

“The important thing is that we identified the protein that drives that process and showed how that’s regulated,” Jeff Twiss, a UofSC biology professor and co-author on the paper, said.

“It actually opens something new,” Pabitra Sahoo, the paper’s lead author, said...

Individuals with blood type O may have lowest risk of infection; individuals with A and AB may have increased risk of severe clinical outcomes...

Boosting the efficiency of single-cell RNA-sequencing helps reveal subtle differences between healthy and dysfunctional cells. Sequencing RNA from individual cells can reveal a great deal of information about what those cells are doing in the body...