Category Health/Medical

“Tissue Papers” from Organ-Specific Decellularized Extracellular Matrices. Advanced Functional Materials, 2017; 1700992 DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201700992 Credit: Image courtesy of Northwestern University

Bioactive tissue paper made from organs is pliable enough to fold into origami structures. Northwestern Medicine scientists and engineers have invented a range of bioactive “tissue papers” made of materials derived from organs which potentially can be used to support natural hormone production in young cancer patients and aid wound healing. The tissue papers are made from structural proteins excreted by cells that give organs their form and structure. The proteins are combined with a polymer to make the material pliable.

In the study, individual types of tissue papers were made from ovarian,...

Map of dark matter made from gravitational lensing measurements of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey. The map covers about 1/30th of the entire sky and spans several billion light-years in extent. Red regions have more dark matter than average, blue regions less dark matter. Credit: Chihway Chang of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and the DES collaboration.

Imagine planting a single seed and, with great precision, being able to predict the exact height of the tree that grows from it. Now imagine traveling to the future and snapping photographic proof that you were right...

ITK is required for parasitic/viral infection-induced Tr1 cell development in vivo

By learning how a recently discovered immune cell works in the body, researchers hope to one day harness the cells to better treat allergies and infections, according to new Cornell University research. Type 1 regulatory (Tr1) cells are a type of regulatory immune cell that help suppress immune responses, including inflammation and tissue damage, but very few details were known about their development and function.

A new study with mice and humans, published in the journal Nature Communications, describes how an enzyme called ITK plays a crucial role in the development of Tr1 cells during an immune response...

Scan of a heart.
Credit: The University of Manchester

Pioneering study is set to help surgeons repair hearts without damaging precious tissue. A team of scientists from Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), The University of Manchester, Aarhus University and Newcastle University, have developed a way of producing 3D data to show the cardiac conduction system in unprecedented detail.

The new data in this study gives them a much more accurate framework than previously available for computer models of the heartbeat and should improve our ability to make sense of troublesome heart rhythms like atrial fibrillation that affects 1.4 million people in the UK. The data reveals exactly where the cardiac conduction system is in a normal heart...