Category Health/Medical

Bromodomain-protein inhibition significantly extends survival of DIPG xenograft model.

Northwestern Medicine scientists have found a molecule that stops the growth of an aggressive pediatric brain tumor. Every year, about 300 children < 10 years old in the U.S. develop a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG). “This tumor kills every single kid who gets DIPG within 1 year. No one survives,” said Andrea Piunti, a postdoctoral fellow in Shilatifard’s lab in biochemistry and molecular genetics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Radiation therapy only prolongs patients’ survival by a few months, he noted.

Shilatifard’s lab previously identified the pathway via which a mutation causes cancer in studies with fruit flies, which was published in Science a few years ago...

Credit: NASA JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata sits in the chin rest during an Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) session on ISS.

Many astronauts who come back from space experience poorer vision after flight, some even years after, and researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are working to see why. Brian Samuels, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology, and his fellow collaborators from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University recently received a grant to study computational modeling as a method of determining why astronauts who are in space for extended periods of time are experiencing eye pathologies...

The amount of harmful nerve connections is significantly lower (far right, arrows) when treating with bumetanide after a prolonged convulsive seizure. Credit: Nazin Kourdougli

Prolonged epileptic seizures may cause serious problems that will continue for the rest of a patient’s life. As a result of a seizure, neural connections of the brain may be rewired in an incorrect way. This may result in seizures that are difficult to control with medication. Mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not entirely known, which makes current therapies ineffective in some patients...

Obstructive sleep apnea is caused by a narrowing of the airway that cuts off breathing, and people who are obese are at higher risk for the disorder. MIT researchers have discovered that a dietary supplement called yohimbine reverses the root cause of obstructive sleep apnea in an animal model. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Obstructive sleep apnea, which causes people to briefly stop breathing while asleep, affects an estimated 5% of the population, not including the many more who don’t even realize they suffer from the disorder. MIT researchers have discovered that a dietary supplement, yohimbine reverses the root cause of OSA in an animal model.

Yohimbine, a chemical derived from the bark of the African yohimbe tree, has a long history of use by humans as an aphrodisiac, ...