Archive for the ‘Health’ Category
Nobel Prize for Medicine Awarded to Scientist Who Prolonged His Own Life With His Research
The prize, awarded jointly to three scientists, celebrates the discovery of the immune system's front-line responders--though one winner succumbed to cancer three days before
One half is awarded jointly to Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann and one half goes to Ralph Steinman. But Steinman died on Friday after a battle with pancreatic cancer, according to in New York, where he was a cell biologist and director of its Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases. He was diagnosed four years ago, and was able to extend his life using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design, the university said. He was 68.
The Nobel committee learned he died three hours after it officially bestowed him with the honor, the Nobel Assembly said Monday. Steinman's own university from his family, as officials were compiling information about his Nobel win. Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously, but the Nobel Foundation's rules specify that if a person wins an award and dies before accepting it, the prize is still presented.
"The decision to award the Nobel Prize to Ralph Steinman was made in good faith, based on the assumption that the Nobel Laureate was alive," the assembly explained . "This was true – though not at the time of the decision – only a day or so previously." The foundation further explains that this situation is unprecedented in the history of the Nobel Prize.
The split award honors research into the immune system's dual nature. A group of first responder cells seek out and destroy invaders and block their ability to replicate, and a second group bats cleanup, producing antibodies that kill cells which have already been infected. Scientists now know a great deal about the genetic rules underlying these systems, but much of this knowledge stands on the shoulders of Beutler, Hoffmann and Steinman, the Nobel Assembly explains.
In 1996, Hoffmann, now 70, was working with some genetically modified fruit flies and infecting them with fungi or bacteria. He discovered that the activation of a gene called Toll is crucial for switching on the initial immune response that allowed his flies to fight off infection. Then in 1998, Beutler, now 54, was searching for a protein receptor involved in regulating septic shock, which results when the body is overwhelmed by infection. He found a mutation in a mouse gene that looked pretty similar to Hoffmann’s Toll gene. This gene codes for a receptor — nicknamed a Toll-like receptor — that binds to a bacterial product involved in septic shock.
Together, the work showed that insects and vertebrates shared similar molecules that activated the innate immune response — and now scientists knew what the molecules looked like. Since then, scientists have identified a dozen more Toll-like receptors in mice and humans.
Decades before that work, Steinman was pioneering research on the secondary immune response, the adaptive response. In 1973, he discovered the dendritic cell — so named because it has little tails, like dendrites in neurons — and set about explaining their function. They serve as the body’s surveillance cells, constantly moving around and sampling their environment. Steinman proved that dendritic cells activate T cells, a class of white blood cells that are important in .
The immune researchers’ work has been crucial in understanding treatment and prevention of disease, from AIDS to cancer. The research is also relevant for understanding auto-immune and inflammatory diseases, in which the immune system attacks the body’s own cells.
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Israeli Researchers Build a Rat Cyborg With a Digital Cerebellum
The team’s synthetic cerebellum is more or less a simple microchip, but can receive sensory input from the brainstem, interpret that nerve input, and send the appropriate signal to a different region of the brainstem to initiate the appropriate movement. Right now it is only capable of dealing with the most basic stimuli/response sequence, but the very fact that researchers can do such a thing marks a pretty remarkable leap forward.
To achieve such a breakthrough, the cerebellum was a pretty ideal place to start. Its architecture is simple enough and one of its functions is to orchestrate motor movements in response to stimuli, making it easy enough to test. Using what they already knew about the way a rat’s cerebellum interacts with its brainstem to generate motion, they built a chip that mimicked that kind of neural processing and activity.
They then hooked up their chip to a rat whose cerebellum had been disabled (they did this externally, with the chip connected to the brain by electrodes--they did not implant the chip in the rat’s brain). Before hooking up their synthetic chip, they tried to teach the rat a behavior with its cerebellum switched off by combining an auditory tone with a puff of air to the rat’s eye that caused it to blink. The rat should’ve quickly learned to blink its eye at the stimulus of the tone alone without the puff of air (think Pavlov), but with its cerebellum disabled it could not.
The team then switched on the synthetic cerebellum chip. Soon enough, the rat learned to blink at the sound of the tone as a normal rat would. Their chip proved a sufficient stand-in for the rat’s own neural tissue.
This is a simple stimulus-response, but it’s also huge in terms of what it means for our understanding of how to manipulate the brain. The system would clearly have to be scaled way up for human use, which is not expected any time in the foreseeable future. But it does swing the door wide open for future synthetic implants that could replace nervous tissue damaged by injury, stroke, or age-related degradation.
Mash that up with the huge leaps being made all the time in robotic prosthetics and brain-computer interfaces, and you’re quickly wandering into full-on cyborg territory. See, we told you the future is now.
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Brain-Scanning "Painometer" Is an Attempt to Measure Pain Objectively
A new, very early version of a "painometer" is being tested at Stanford. The tests are actually sort of medieval-sounding, but to test pain, you've got to inflict pain. Subjects were touched with a heat probe (on the arm, people) and the ensuing brain signals were measured. Those measurements were used to create an algorithm that, the researchers hoped, would be able to indicate pain.
The algorithm does work, though not perfectly; the current accuracy rating is around 81%, which is plenty to show that it works but also not nearly high enough to actually rely on. The other major problem is the relative lack of understanding we have about the nature of pain: this test, says Sean Mackey, an associate professor and member of this project's team, only measures "thermal pain" in a lab setting, and "We should take care not to extrapolate these findings to say we can measure and detect pain in all circumstances."
Still, it's a major step forward to creating a real, objective pain sensor, which could have some pretty major effects on diagnostic medicine, as well as helping those who are too young, too old, or otherwise unable to properly communicate their degree of pain. Then we can get back to making pain medicine out of and .
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The Incredible Shrinking Shot: Needles Get a Pain-Free Makeover
SKIN DEEP
Shots cause pain in two ways: a momentary pinch from piercing the skin and a muscular ache that can last for days. In May, the FDA approved a device that releases flu vaccine directly into the skin, avoiding the muscles (and the ache) altogether. The Fluzone Intradermal microinjector’s needle is about a tenth as long as the needle on a regular syringe and the width of a human hair. And because there are more immune cells in skin than in muscle, doctors could use less vaccine per shot, which could decrease vaccine shortages. The device’s manufacturer, medical company Sanofi Pasteur, says it will start shipping it in the U.S. this fall, just in time for flu season.
LOW PRESSURE PLUNGER
Mosquitoes use a combination of vibrating mouthparts, some smooth and some serrated, to discreetly extract blood. Engineers at Kansai University in Japan created a multipart needle that works like a mosquito’s (possibly the only thing we have to admire about the ): three individually motorized 0.04-inch-long needles—a smooth one for drug delivery flanked by two jagged ones—vibrate while taking turns advancing into the skin. The mechanism requires less than a third of the pressure of a standard needle to penetrate silicone skin test samples. The engineers hypothesize that less pressure causes less skin damage, which could also mean less pain.
PRICKLY PATCH
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University have developed a dissolving microneedle patch that could painlessly deliver drugs straight into the skin, leaving behind no sharp parts that could accidentally stick someone and spread disease. About 100 dissolvable, drug-loaded polymer microneedles (each about two hundredths of an inch long) fit on a Band-Aid-like patch the size of a quarter. The patch is easy to apply and can be stored at room temperature, making it particularly useful in poor countries where refrigeration is scarce and doctors may not be available to supervise injections. In clinical studies, the patch delivers drugs with almost no pain. A commercial version could be available in five years.
Researchers Capture "Natural Killer" White Blood Cells in Action in Highest Resolution Ever
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There are myriad difficulties in trying to observe this kind of event. For one thing, the cells are incredibly small, and execute their, well, executions (that's an apt description, as you'll see) very, very quickly. Then there's the problem that the cells are three-dimensional (of course), while the high-speed microscopes used for this are only capable of seeing the horizontal plane. (3-D cameras are not, at the moment, quick enough to work for this.) Previously, researchers would have to painstakingly capture many 2-D images, then stack them on top of each other--not very efficient, and not particularly effective, either.
So how did these researchers pull it off? Says Professor Paul French of Imperial College London: "Using laser tweezers to manipulate the interface between live cells into a horizontal orientation means our microscope can take many images of the cell contact interface in rapid succession. This has provided an unprecedented means to directly see dynamic molecular processes that go on between live cells." But taking lots of images at once, the researchers can reconstruct a 3-D image with ease.
What's going on in that video above is essentially an execution. Inside the "natural killer" or "NK" cell, enzyme-filled granules organize, ready to stream out as soon as the cell creates a portal. Then, the granules attack the diseased cell. In this case, the NKs are using membrane nanotubes to pull them in, like a bungee cord.
NKs are used by the body to attack all kinds of damaged cells, from tumors to viruses, though they also sometimes attack transplanted organs. By understanding the intricacies of this operation, the scientists hope to create better medical treatments--they might use NK cells in medicine, or discover ways to stop them from attacking foreign but welcome tissue.
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IBM’s Watson Hired For His First Real Job
IBM's Jeopardy! master robot Watson may not be anytime soon, but he has gotten his first job: as a diagnostic whiz, like . (Note: We will refer to Watson as a "he" and not an "it" until he stops being more charismatic than most humans we know.) According to the , IBM and health insurer WellPoint have agreed to use Watson to "help suggest treatment options and diagnoses to doctors." Congratulations, Watson! Don't blow your first paycheck on anything frivolous! []
Cuba Announces Release of the World’s First Lung Cancer Vaccine
CimaVax-EGF isn’t a vaccine in the preventative sense--that is, it doesn’t prevent lung cancer from taking hold in new patients. It’s based on a protein related to uncontrolled cell proliferation--that is, it doesn’t prevent cancer from existing in the first place but attacks the mechanism by which it does harm.
As such it can turn aggressive later-stage lung cancer into a manageable chronic disease by creating antibodies that do battle with the proteins that cause uncontrolled cell proliferation, researchers say. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy are still recommended as a primary means of destroying cancerous tissue, but for those showing no improvement the new vaccine could be a literal lifesaver.
The vaccine has already been tested in 1,000 patients in Cuba and is being distributed at hospitals there free of charge. That’s a big deal for a country where smoking is part of the national culture and a leading cause of death. If it proves as successful as researchers say it is, it should give those suffering from lung cancer reason to celebrate--just not with a Cohiba.
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