Category Health/Medical

Researcher at K. G. Jebsen — Center for Exercise in Medicine (CERG), and first author of the study, Anja Bye. Credit: Andrea Hegdahl Tiltnes/NTNU

New Biomarkers can help ID a person’s risk of getting cardiac disease with greater precision than traditional risk factors alone. When you visit your GP you can get your blood analyzed for cholesterol and triglycerides, to get an idea of your risk for cardiovascular disease. With additional information about BMI, smoking habits and blood pressure, this can be used to calculate your 10-yr risk for cardiovascular disease. However, the use of risk prediction calculators has declined in the primary care setting because the currently available calculators only explain a modest proportion of the incidence...

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are using a locust’s sense of smell to develop new biorobotic sensing devices.

Washington Uni engineers in St. Louis are looking to capitalize on the sense of smell in locusts to create new biorobotic sensing systems that could be used in homeland security applications. A/Prof B. Raman et al are using the sensitive locust olfactory system to develop a bio-hybrid nose. Biological sensing systems are far more complex than their engineered counterparts, including the chemical sensing system responsible for our sense of smell. Although the sense of smell is a primitive sense, it is conserved across many vertebrate and invertebrate species.

For several years and with prior funding from ONR, Raman has been studying how sensory signals are receive...

Cancerous tumor cells.

New treatment, requiring only a single dose and a beam of light, can kill up to 95% of cancer cells in 2 hours. A/Prof Matthew Gdovin, UTSA Department of Biology, has developed a newly patented method to kill cancer cells. It may tremendously help people with inoperable or hard-to-reach tumors, as well as young children stricken with cancer.

Gdovin’s top-tier research involves injecting a chemical compound, nitrobenzaldehyde, into the tumor and allowing it to diffuse into the tissue. He then aims a beam of light at the tissue, causing the cells to become very acidic inside and, essentially, commit suicide. Gdovin tested his method against triple negative breast cancer, one of the most aggressive types of cancer and one of the hardest to treat...

Clumps of the protein a-synuclein in a Parkinsonian brain. Credit: Donghoon Kim/Johns Hopkins Medicine

Researchers at Johns Hopkins say they have gleaned 2 important new clues in the fight against Parkinson’s disease: that blocking an enzyme called c-Abl prevents the disease in specially bred mice, and that a chemical tag on a second protein may signal the disorder’s presence and progression. Their work, suggests a promising target for drug research and a tool that could speed Parkinson’s disease research more broadly.

“There were indications that c-Abl activity leads to Parkinson’s disease, and our experiments show there is indeed a connection,” says Prof. Ted Dawson, M.D., Ph.D...