Category Health/Medical

ERβ-mediated induction of cystatins results in suppression of TGFβ signaling and inhibition of triple-negative breast cancer metastasis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018; 201807751 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1807751115

Mayo Clinic researchers have identified the drug estradiol as a potential new treatment for a subset of women with triple-negative breast cancer. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Triple-negative breast cancer is a form of breast cancer that lacks expression of estrogen receptor alpha, progesterone receptor, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, also known as HER2. And it exhibits high rates of disease recurrence,” says John Hawse, Ph.D., a molecular biologist at Mayo Clinic and senior author...

Rice University researchers have enhanced micron-sized titanium dioxide particles to trap and destroy BPA, a water contaminant with health implications. Cyclodextrin molecules on the surface trap BPA, which is then degraded by reactive oxygen species (ROS) produced by the light-activated particles. Illustration by Danning Zhang

Reusable water-treatment particles effectively eliminate BPA. Rice University scientists have developed something akin to the Venus’ flytrap of particles for water remediation. Micron-sized spheres created in the lab of Rice environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez are built to catch and destroy bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic chemical used to make plastics.

BPA is commonly used to coat the insides of food cans, bottle tops and water supply lines, and was once a componen...

Enzymes, rather than harsh chemical reactions, can be used to reveal the epigenetic code in DNA.
Credit: Rahul Kohli, Univeristy of Pennsylvania

Study improves decades-old method. A new method for sequencing the chemical groups attached to the surface of DNA is paving the way for better detection of cancer and other diseases in the blood, according to research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania published today in Nature Biotechnology. These chemical groups mark one of the four DNA “letters” in the genome, and it is differences in these marks along DNA that control which genes are expressed or silenced.

To detect disease earlier and with increased precision, researchers have a growing interest in analyzing free-floating DNA in settings in which there is a ...

A new tool accurately predicts height.
Credit: © Rido / Fotolia

A new DNA tool created by Michigan State University can accurately predict people’s height, and more importantly, could potentially assess their risk for serious illnesses, such as heart disease and cancer.

For the first time, the tool, or algorithm, builds predictors for human traits such as height, bone density and even the level of education a person might achieve, purely based on one’s genome. But the applications may not stop there.

“While we have validated this tool for these three outcomes, we can now apply this method to predict other complex traits related to health risks such as heart disease, diabetes and breast cancer,” said Stephen Hsu, lead investigator of the study and vice president for research and graduate st...