Category Health/Medical

The cause of abdominal pain in patients with irritable bowel syndrome has been identified by researchers. As a result, they were able to select a medicine that could reduce or end that pain. This medicine is already used to treat hay fever. IBS patients have extremely sensitive bowels associated with increased pain perception. The exact cause of this hypersensitivity has long been unknown. Researchers already knew that the bowels of patients with IBS contain larger quantities of the substance histamine, but the specific link with hypersensitivity had not yet been made.

KU Leuven professor of gastroenterology Guy Boeckxstaens and his team have now shown that histamine has an impact on the pain receptor TRPV1. In IBS patients, histamine released in the gut makes TRPV1 hypersensitive...

Pinna nobilis. (Image: Biodiversity Heritage Library, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons*)

FAU Materials scientists have shown for the first time that the mother-of-pearl in clam shells does not form in a crystallisation process but is a result of the aggregation of nanoparticles within an organic matrix. This could lead to a better understanding of the structure of biomaterials which may be useful in the development of new high-performance ceramics.

Prof. Wolf’s team used a diamond wire saw to cut a 60cm wedge out of the shell of a large Pinna nobilis – a type of clam found in the Mediterranean – which they then polished using a novel method before examining it under a scanning transmission electron microscope...

Drug-resistant lung cancer cells are in red. Paclitaxel-loaded exosomes (green) swarm the cancer cells and bypass their drug resistance. Credit: UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy

The cancer drug paclitaxel just got more effective. For the first time, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have packaged it in containers derived from a patient’s own immune system, protecting the drug from being destroyed by the body’s own defenses and bringing the entire payload to the tumor. “That means we can use 50 times less of the drug and still get the same results,” said A/Prof Elena Batrakova, Ph.D...

The polymer sphere delivers the microRNA into cells already at the wound site, which turns the cells into bone repairing machines. Credit: Peter Ma

Scientists at the University of Michigan have developed a polymer sphere that delivers a molecule to bone wounds that tells cells already at the injury site to repair the damage. Using the polymer sphere to introduce the microRNA molecule into cells elevates the job of existing cells to that of injury repair by instructing the cells’ healing and bone-building mechanisms to switch on, said Prof Peter Ma.

Using existing cells to repair wounds reduces the need to introduce foreign cells – a very difficult therapy because cells have their own personalities, which can result in the host rejecting the foreign cells, or tumors...