Category Health/Medical

CD24 expressed by cells of hematopoietic origin and not cells in stromal compartments is required for extramedullary stress erythropoiesis following in vivo CD24 engagement

This could represent a significant step forward in the battle against anemia, benefitting people with diabetes, kidney disease or cancer, and older people for whom anemia can become a chronic problem. While more work needs to be done before the method could be used in people, the possibilities are tantalizing.

Eg it could allow doctors to turn on red blood cell production whenever necessary;
~be used on the battlefield to triage wounded soldiers until they could receive a blood transfusion; and
~be used to treat people who cannot receive blood transfusions because of religious beliefs.

Note: Anemia is the most common bl...

Schematic representation of this research.

These cells – capable of generating all cell types in the body – could be used as the ‘Lego bricks’ to build tissue constructs, larger structures of tissues, and potentially even micro-organs. “It was really exciting to see that we could grow embryoid body in such a controlled manner,” explains Wei Sun. “The grown embryoid body is uniform and homogenous, and serves as a much better starting point for further tissue growth.”

The researchers, based at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, used extrusion-based 3D printing to produce a grid-like 3D structure to grow embryoid body with cell viability and rapid self-renewal for 7 days while maintaining high pluripotentcy.

Images of the printed cellular model with...

Broca’s area , wernicke’s area, and other language-processing areas in the brain

Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have found that loss of speech from a stroke in the left hemisphere of the brain can be recovered on the back, right side of the brain. This contradicts recent notions that the right hemisphere interferes with recovery. While the findings will likely not put an immediate end to the debate, they suggest a new direction in treatment.

This is the first to look at brain structure and grey matter volume when trying to understand how speech is recovered after a stroke...

Samantha Paulsen, a bioengineering graduate student in Jordan Miller’s lab at Rice University, holds a plate on which several of 3-D-printed silicone constructs have been mounted. The constructs, which are each about the size of a small candy gummy bear, have been injected with red dye to better show the network of small vessels inside. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

It may provide a method to overcome one of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine: How to deliver oxygen and nutrients to all cells in an artificial organ or tissue implant that takes days or weeks to grow in the lab prior to surgery. The study showed blood flowed normally through test constructs that were surgically connected to native blood vessels.

Miller said one of the hurdles of engineering large artificial...