Researchers at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson have invented a new respiratory-assist device that provides fast, safe relief to those who experience difficulty breathing. One of the major complications of COVID-19 is that it causes inflammation in the respiratory tract and lungs that can lead to life-threatening pneumonia. In such cases,...
When a mosquito infected with Zika virus bites, skin is the first line of defense against infection, a new study shows. Now, using a mouse model, researchers have pinpointed exactly how the skin responds to the invader. Researchers showed that a messenger molecule called IL-27 acts as a security guard for the skin, signaling skin...
An idea that has been doing the rounds on social media suggests that certain heart and kidney medications make people more susceptible to COVID-19. A new commentary strongly disputes this. People who doctors have prescribed hypertension medication should continue to take it, experts warn. The commentary warns that discontinuing these hypertension and kidney medications would...
BY KATHRYN CALKINS This heart-shaped image shows two mouse skin cancer cells connected to each other with actin, a protein that is part of the cellular skeleton. Researchers use mouse cells like these to tease out the molecular methods that cancer uses to invade new tissues in the body. It turns out that actin plays...
As the current COVID-19 situation shows, viruses are a major health risk. But what if we could fight them using other viruses? Scientists in Berlin have created virus shells that mimic the target cells that the flu virus latches onto in the body, preventing them from taking hold and causing infection. Bacteriophages (or just phages)...
by Thandi Fletcher, University of British Columbia An international team led by University of British Columbia researcher Dr. Josef Penninger has found a trial drug that effectively blocks the cellular door SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect its hosts. The findings, published today in Cell, hold promise as a treatment capable of stopping early infection of the...
by Columbia University Irving Medical Center A new study from Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center suggests a compound in development for a rare kidney stone disease may have potential against pancreatic cancer. The compound starves tumors of an amino acid, cysteine, which was found to be critical to...
Fralin Biomedical Research Institute scientists show how infection rewires brain VIRGINIA TECH Think about traffic flow in a city – there are stop signs, one-way streets, and traffic lights to organize movement across a widespread network. Now, imagine what would happen if you removed some of the traffic signals. Among your brain’s 86 billion neurons...
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURAL, CONSUMER AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES URBANA, Ill. – You know that feeling in your gut? We think of it as an innate intuition that sparks deep in the belly and helps guide our actions, if we let it. It’s also a metaphor for what scientists call the “gut-brain axis,” a...
Highlights • IRBIT is required for homeostasis of the intestinal epithelium • IRBIT inhibition of RNR ensures proper intestinal stem cell differentiation • Suppression of RNR in intestinal stem cell progeny reverses age-related dysplasia SummaryThe maintenance of the intestinal epithelium is ensured by the controlled proliferation of intestinal stem cells (ISCs) and differentiation of their...
