Tag Archives: medical research

Nobel Laureate Initiates Symposia for Student Scientists

The video shows a portion of Oliver Smithies’ Nobel acceptance lecture. See the rest of the speech, and more info, on the Nobel Prize site.

As an undergraduate student at Oxford University in the 1940s, Oliver Smithies attended a series of lectures by Linus Pauling, one of the most influential chemists of the 20th century. It was a powerful experience, one that sparked the young scientist’s ambitions and helped launch his own eminent career.

“It was tremendously inspiring,” says Smithies, one of three scientists who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2007. “People were sitting in the aisles to listen to him.”

Now Smithies, who was a genetics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1960-88, is taking it upon himself to expose a new generation of undergraduates to this sort of experience. Using the prize money that came with his Nobel Prize, Smithies is funding symposia at all four universities he has been affiliated with throughout his scientific career: Oxford, the University of Toronto, UW-Madison and the University of North Carolina, where he is currently the Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Each university will receive about $130,000 to get things started.

“He wants the symposium to be a day when we bring the very best in biology to campus to interact with the students,” says geneticist Fred Blattner, who is in charge of organizing the symposium at UW-Madison and who collaborated with Smithies when their careers paths overlapped in Wisconsin.

The first of two speakers at the UW-Madison’s inaugural Oliver Smithies Symposium will be Leroy Hood, director of the Institute for Systems Biology, located in Seattle. Hood is a pioneer of high-throughput technologies and was instrumental in developing the technology used to sequence the human genome. More recently, Hood has focused his efforts on systems biology, the field of science in which researchers create computer models to describe complex biological processes, such as the development of cancer in the body. He is also at the forefront of efforts to use computer models to help doctors tailor drugs and dosages to an individual’s genetic makeup.
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Breastfeeding Linked to More Intelligent Kids

McGill study links breastfeeding to increased intelligence

The largest randomized study of breastfeeding ever (14,000 children for 6.5 years) conducted reports that breastfeeding raises children’s IQs and improves their academic performance, a McGill researcher and his team have found.

“Our study provides the strongest evidence to date that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding makes kids smarter,” said Kramer, a Professor of Pediatrics and of Epidemiology & Biostatistics in the McGill University Faculty of Medicine and lead investigator in the study.

Kramer and his colleagues evaluated the children in 31 Belarusian hospitals and clinics. Half the mothers were exposed to an intervention that encouraged prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding. The remaining half continued their usual maternity hospital and outpatient pediatric care and follow-up. This allowed the researchers to measure the effect of breastfeeding on the children’s cognitive development without the results being biased by differences in factors such as the mother’s intelligence or her way of interacting with her baby.

The children’s cognitive ability was assessed by IQ tests administered by the children’s pediatricians and by their teachers’ ratings of their academic performance in reading, writing, mathematics and other subjects. Both sets of measures were significantly higher in the group randomized to the breastfeeding promotion intervention.

“The effect of breastfeeding on brain development and intelligence has long been a popular and hotly debated topic,” says Dr. Kramer. “While most studies have been based on association, however, we can now make a causal inference between breastfeeding and intelligence – because of the randomized design of our study.”

Walking Without Shoes

You Walk Wrong

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans – i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers – had the unhealthiest
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My new Vivo Barefoots aren’t perfect – they’re more or less useless in rain or snow, and they make me look like I’m off to dance in The Nutcracker. But when I don’t wear them now, I kind of miss them. Not because they’re supposedly making my feet healthier, but because they truly make walking more fun. It’s like driving a stick shift after years at the wheel of an automatic – you suddenly feel in control of an intricate machine, rather than coasting on cruise control. Now I better understand what Walt Whitman meant when he wrote (and I hate to quote another Transcendentalist, but they were serious walking enthusiasts): “The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.”

Potential Viral Therapy for Difficult Cancers

Potential viral therapy weapon for difficult cancers is safe and effective in study

Combining a herpes virus genetically altered to express a drug-enhancing enzyme with a chemotherapy drug effectively and safely reduced the size of highly malignant human sarcoma grafted into mice. This new finding may add to the growing arsenal of so called oncolytic viruses under development as novel cancer treatments, especially for difficult, inoperable tumors
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“Based on these findings and other preclinical studies, we expect oncolytic viral therapy will be one additional treatment modality available in the future for oncologists,” Dr. Cripe said. “The challenge over the next decade will be determining which viruses work best for which cancers, at what doses, schedules, routes of administration, and in what combinations with other treatments.”

Vaccine For Strep Infections

Engineered Protein Shows Potential as a Strep Vaccine

A University of California, San Diego-led research team has demonstrated that immunization with a stabilized version of a protein found on Streptococcus bacteria can provide protection against Strep infections, which afflict more than 600 million people each year and kill 400,000.
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Group A Streptococcus (GAS). GAS causes a wide variety of human diseases including strep throat, rheumatic fever, and the life-threatening “flesh-eating” syndrome called necrotizing fasciitis. Studies were performed using M1 protein, which represents the version of M protein present on the most common disease-associated GAS strains.
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“We created a modified version of M1 with a more stable structure, and found that it is just as effective at eliciting an immune reaction, but safer than the original version of M1, which has serious drawbacks to its use in a vaccine.”

The Risks of Scanning

The Risks of Scanning by Nayer Khazeni, M.D

When ordered by your doctor in the proper setting, any risks of CT scans are far outweighed by their potential benefits. They are one of modern medicine’s greatest diagnostic tools, used to examine any part of your body and, increasingly, to guide minimally invasive procedures previously performed with surgery. CT rapidly rotates X-ray beams around you, obtaining images from different angles that a powerful computer then compiles to build, slice by slice, highly detailed pictures of your insides.
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The impressive level of detail that CT provides can also cause confusion. In CTs of healthy adults, more than 90 percent of findings are “false positives.”
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Full-body CT scans cost $500 to $1,000. Insurance companies do not cover the cost, but may use any detected abnormality to raise your premiums or limit future coverage. There are no public health organizations that advocate the use of full body or cardiac CT scans in healthy adults, and the American College of Radiology and American Heart Association have released statements recommending against them.

Parasitic Worms Reduce Hay Fever Symptoms

Parasitic worms reduce hay fever symptoms

Researchers are seeking to use the ability of the hookworm, Necator americanus, to suppress immune system responses that occur in conditions including Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, asthma and other allergies. Recently-completed studies suggest giving worms to people with hay fever is safe, and potentially beneficial.
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Scientists have suggested a lack of such intestinal parasites has left those in the developed world more vulnerable to diseases caused an overactive immune system.

Parasite Rex is an excellent book exploring similar ideas and more on the interaction of parasites with hosts. And from Good Germs Bad Germs, page 100:

in 1999 the Dutch biologist Maria Yazdanbakhsh found that eliminating intestinal worms from infected children in African villages immediately predisposed them to allergies.”

Clues to Prion Infectivity

Structural Studies Reveal New Clues to Prion Infectivity

One of the unexplained questions facing prion researchers is how a single prion can apparently assume different conformations — with each conformation having different disease or phenotypic properties. Previous structural studies of prions had not yielded a clear understanding of the basis of strains because the prion protein is large and complex. Due to the size and complexity of prions, studies utilizing x-ray crystallography, a technique commonly used to determine the structure of proteins and other molecules, have been limited to short peptide fragments of the prion protein.

“There have been a number of fairly low-resolution pictures of prions that more or less proved that these different strains were in different conformations; but they really hadn’t established the nature of the different conformations,” Weissman said. “It was really a big black box. We basically didn’t have the conformation of any single prion, let alone the two prion protein strains in two different conformations.”
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““In our minds, our findings brought to a certain level of closure the understanding of the structural differences underlying strains,” said Weissman. “Now we understand the structural differences. We also have an idea how those differences lead to the differences in physical properties, and, in turn, how these differences in the physical properties lead to the phenotypic differences. We are starting to go all the way from the structural understanding of the different strains up to in vivo understanding of why they cause different behaviors inside the cell.”

Weissman noted that the findings offer a broader lesson to researchers studying prions and other proteins whose misfolding can cause disease. “Certainly, a bottom line from this study is that the rules of protein folding and the rules of protein misfolding are fundamentally different,” he said. “In many ways, we have to relearn basic principles of how proteins misfold. We have to forget many of the rules we learned from textbooks about protein folding because they are not necessarily applicable.”

Prions are very interesting. Related posts: Scientists Knock-out Prion Gene in Cows – Gene Study Finds Cannibal Pattern – Open Access Education Materials on Protein Folding

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Takes Big Open Access Step

HHMI Announces New Policy for Publication of Research Articles that will require

its scientists to publish their original research articles in scientific journals that allow the articles and supplementary materials to be made freely accessible in a public repository within six months of publication.

Great news. Some, including me, would prefer a shorter time but this is the limit on the slowest time that will be acceptable not a goal. I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised if HHMI is the largest source of research funds outside of the federal government in the USA. This is one more sign the tactics of the old school journals are failing.

HHMI and Public Access Publishing policy

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has long viewed the sharing of research materials and tools as a fundamental responsibility of scientific authorship. That principle also extends to ensuring that original, peer-reviewed research publications and supplemental materials are freely accessible within six months of publication

Well put; it is amazing how out of touch with the basic concepts of advancing scientific ideas the old style journals are.

How The Brain Rewires Itself

How The Brain Rewires Itself:

The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it. But Pascual-Leone did not stop there. He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil.

When the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups–those who actually tickled the ivories and those who only imagined doing so–they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter.