It is well known that Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, involves the accumulation of sticky proteins (plaques and tangles) in the brain. But we still don’t know what the root cause of the disease is. Given that someone, somewhere in the world, is diagnosed with dementia every three seconds, there is an urgent...
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How live vaccines enhance the body’s immune response
Researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin’s university hospital, have discovered a new mechanism by which live vaccines induce immunity. Molecules produced exclusively by live microorganisms are recognized by specialized receptors of the immune system, subsequently triggering a protective immune response. The new findings may help improve the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Results from...
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Cellular Footprints: Tracing How Cells Move
An engineered cell (green) in a fruit fly follicle (red), or egg case, leaves a trail of fluorescent material as it moves across a fruit fly egg chamber, allowing scientists to trace its path and measure how long it took to complete its journey. Credit: David Bilder, University of California, Berkeley. Cells are the basis...
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Biological Bubbles
This fiery-looking image shows animal cells caught in the act of making bubbles, or blebbing. Certain cells regularly pinch off parts of their membranes to produce bubbles filled with a mix of proteins and RNAs. The green and yellow portions of the image show the cell membranes as they separate from the cell’s skeleton and...
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What The Hell Is Blockchain And What Does It Mean For Healthcare
The buzzword of the year award goes to blockchain It would be a big surprise if the buzzword of the year award would not go to blockchain in 2018. Although the technology is indeed a game-changer, the craze and hype around it remind some experts of the dotcom bubble. As Reuters explained in its analysis, the...
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Cell discovery could help with research on genetic diseases
The discovery will enable scientists to study the breadth and depth of cell biology. This has implications for research into autoimmune diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Led by Dr Anastasios Tsaousis from the School of Biosciences, in collaboration with Dr Joel Dacks from the University of Alberta (Canada), a team of researchers discovered a rare...
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Answers to 100-year-old mystery point to potential breast cancer therapies
New insights into how cancer cells fuel their growth are opening novel possibilities for cancer treatment. A team of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center has identified a long sought after the connection between how cancer cells use the sugar glucose to generate energy – the Warburg pathway –...
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Memory training needs to target specific difficulties to be effective, suggests study
When people hear that their memory will worsen as they age, the question on their minds becomes: what can we do to remember better? A recently published Baycrest study suggests that training programs can help, but only if they are tailored towards an individual’s specific memory difficulty, such as trouble remembering faces, voices or recent events....
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Genetic material once considered junk actually could hold key to cancer drug response
A hairpin loop from a pre-mRNA. Highlighted are the nucleobases (green) and the ribose-phosphate backbone (blue). Note that this is a single strand of RNA that folds back upon itself. Material left out of common processes for sequencing genetic material in cancer tumors may actually carry important information about why only some people respond to immunotherapy,...
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Study reveals a way to make prostate cancer cells run out of energy and die
Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have discovered that cells lacking the tumor-suppressor protein PTEN—a feature of many cancers— are particularly vulnerable to drugs that impair their energy-producing mitochondria. Such drugs induce them to literally eat themselves to death, the research shows. Unlike normal cells, cells without PTEN seem driven to preserve their mitochondria at...