Category Health/Medical

Enhanced Cancer Immunotherapy by Microneedle Patch-Assisted Delivery of Anti-PD1 Antibody.

Biomedical engineering researchers have developed a technique that uses a patch embedded with microneedles to deliver cancer immunotherapy treatment directly to the site of melanoma skin cancer. In animal studies, the technique more effectively targeted melanoma than other immunotherapy treatments.

More than 67,000 people in the US were diagnosed with melanoma in 2012 alone – the most recent year for which data are available. If caught early, melanoma patients have a 5yr survival rate of more than 98%. That number dips to 16.6% if the cancer has metastasized before diagnosis and treatment.

Cancer cells can trick T cells...

Japanese Food Guide Spinning Top

Closer adherence to Japanese dietary guidelines is associated with a lower risk of death from all causes and death from cardiovascular disease, particularly stroke, finds a study published by The BMJ today. The findings suggest that balanced consumption of grains, vegetables, fruits and adequate intake of fish and meat, can contribute to longevity in the Japanese population.

In 2005, the Japanese government developed the spinning top – a Japanese food guide – to illustrate the balance and quantity of food in the daily Japanese diet. A team of researchers, led by Kayo Kurotani at the National Centre for Global Health and Medicine in Tokyo, set out to examine the association between adherence to the food guide and total and cause specific mortality.

They used...

The researchers used atomic-level simulations to measure the forces between each atom. Credit: GIF courtesy of Alek Aksimentiev, University of Illinois

Proteins play a large role in DNA regulation, but a new study finds that DNA molecules directly interact with one another in a way that’s dependent on the sequence of the DNA and epigenetic factors. This could have implications for how DNA is organized in the cell and even how genes are regulated in different cell types.

The prevailing hypothesis is that everything that happens inside the nucleus, the way the DNA is organized, is all the work of proteins. What we show is that direct DNA-DNA interactions may play a role in large-scale chromosome organization as well...

Encapsulated IPA-3 in sterically stabilized liposomes (SSL). SSL-IPA-3 averaged 139 nm in diameter, polydispersity index (PDI) of 0.05, and a zeta potential of −28.1, neither of which changed over 14 days; however, the PDI increased to 0.139. Analysis of liposomal IPA-3 levels demonstrated good stability, with 70% of IPA-3 remaining after 7 days. SSL-IPA-3 inhibited prostate cancer cell growth in vitro with comparable efficacy to free IPA-3. Excitingly, only a 2 day/week dose of SSL-IPA-3 was needed to inhibit the growth of prostate xenografts in vivo, while a similar dose of free IPA-3 was ineffective. These data demonstrate the development and clinical utility of a novel liposomal formulation for the treatment of prostate cancer.

Researchers at the University of Georgia have cr...