A new discovery in stem cell research may mean big things for cancer patients in the future. After being the first to genetically map and identify a gene that regulates adult stem cells, the researchers investigated the gene’s protein product, Latexin, which can be used to ramp up the body’s stem cell count. The team’s findings are being published in Nature Genetics.
An international team of researchers, led by Columbia University Medical Center, Boston University School of Medicine and the University of Toronto, has uncovered a major new gene — SORL1 — implicated in late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Replicated in four distinct ethnic groups, SORL1 is only the second genetic variant for late-onset Alzheimer’s, the type of Alzheimer’s found in 90 percent of people with this devastating disease. ApoE4, the first, was identified in 1993.
Toddlers should eat fruit at meal times to make sure they have enough iron for proper development of their brains. A study at The University of Auckland has been looking at dietary habits and iron status in children aged between 6 and 23 months.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is proposing to limit the materials used in some medical products in order to keep them free of the agent thought to cause mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE.
A recent study by investigators at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development may help explain the long-term behavioral and neurological problems associated with prenatal exposure to cocaine.
Current organ donor networks appear able to supply human wombs, or uteruses, for transplantation as a possible approach to treating infertility, researchers report in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Canadian scientists have found astonishing evidence that the lifelong use of two languages can help delay the onset of dementia symptoms by four years compared to people who are monolingual.
PTEN is one of the most commonly mutated tumor suppressor genes. It is an antagonist for many cellular growth, proliferation and survival processes. When mutated or deleted, it causes cancers of the prostate, breast, colon and brain. Researchers led by scientists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have now identified fundamentally novel regulatory mechanisms of PTEN function. The findings from two related studies are published in the Jan. 12 issue of Cell.
Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine are the first to report that in animal studies, a common diabetes drug prevents the memory and learning problems that cancer patients often experience after whole-brain radiation treatments.
Using a new and dramatically effective treatment approach, scientists at the Scripps Research Institute have for the first time achieved complete inhibition of new blood vessel growth in animal models of a highly vascular brain tumor and of neovascular eye diseases with little or no effect on normal tissue vasculature.