Category Health/Medical

Cartilage template formation via engineered extracellular matrix. Credit: Syam Nukavarapu/UConn Photo

A team of UConn Health researchers has designed a novel, hybrid hydrogel system to help address some of the challenges in repairing bone in the event of injury. There are over 200 bones in an adult human skeleton, ranging in size from a couple of millimeters in length to well over a foot. How these bones form and how they are repaired if injured varies, and has posed a challenge for many researchers in the field of regenerative medicine.

Two processes involved with human skeletal development help all the bones in our body form and grow. These processes are called intramembranous and endochondral ossification, IO and EO respectively...

Ultrastructural details exhibited by a single, spherical-shaped, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) virion. Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

Researchers have long known that RNA viruses called coronaviruses cause the common cold and pneumonia. In the last two decades or so, though, researchers have found that these viruses can jump between animal and human hosts. In recent years, coronaviruses have caused lethal outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) that span multiple continents. To date, no retroviral drug has been approved to treat these infections. “These viruses are poised to cause outbreaks,” says molecular virologist Ralph C...

Compared with a normal mouse cochlea (top), cisplatin exposure reduces the number of outer hair cells (middle). But the loss of these cells is prevented by treatment with the CDK2 inhibitor kenpaullone (bottom). Credit: Teitz et al., 2018

Researchers from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have discovered that inhibiting an enzyme called cyclin-dependent kinase 2 (CDK2) protects mice and rats from noise- or drug-induced hearing loss. The study, which will be published March 7 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, suggests that CDK2 inhibitors prevent the death of inner ear cells, which has the potential to save the hearing of millions of people around the world.

According to the World Health Organization, 360 million people worldwide, including 32 million children, suffer from hearin...

Top left: PGC1 deficiency leads to severe muscle damage, evidenced by numerous centralized nuclei (highlighted with arrows), which is likely due to impaired mitochondrial energy metabolism (bottom left: blue staining shows impaired mitochondrial activity). Such muscle damage and mitochondrial impairment is largely rescued by ERR? overexpression (top and bottom right). Credit: Salk Institute

If you’ve ever wondered how strenuous exercise translates into better endurance, researchers at the Salk Institute may have your answer. In a study published in the journal Cell Reports on March 6, 2018, scientists in Ronald Evans’ lab have shown that the protein ERRγ (ERR gamma) helps deliver many of the benefits associated with endurance exercise...