Biotechnology

Selecting the right course of chemotherapy and kinase inhibitor is a daunting task. Although we now have decades of collective experience describing the average best course of action for a given tumor type, in too many cases in a given cancer patient, the selected drug regimen proves ineffective. In recent years, the search for biomarkers that can predict sensitivity or resistance to specific drugs has intensified, but so far, useful molecular signatures predictive of treatment outcomes for patients are few and far between. As a patient's cancer cells are usually readily available from biopsies or surgically resected tumors, shouldn't it be possible to test therapies on the cancer cells isolated from patients and identify the most effective drug and regimens? Clinicians and scientists have asked this question from the very beginning of the modern era of cancer medicine. Starting in the mid-1950s researchers began to develop methods to isolate and ...

Jan. 31, 2013 — For the first time, researchers have been able to see a thought "swim" through the brain of a living fish. The new technology is a useful tool for studies of perception. It might even find use in psychiatric drug discovery, according to authors of the study, appearing online on January 31 in Current Biology. "Our work is the first to show brain activities in real time in an intact animal during that animal's natural behavior," said Koichi Kawakami of Japan's National Institute of Genetics. "We can make the invisible visible; that's what is most important." The technical breakthrough included the development of a very sensitive fluorescent probe to detect neuronal activity. Kawakami, along with Junichi Nakai of Saitama University and their colleagues, also devised a genetic method for inserting that probe right into the neurons of interest. The two-part approach allowed the researchers to detect n...

Jan. 30, 2013 — A pair of University of Colorado Cancer Center studies published this month show that the milk thistle extract, silibinin, kills skin cells mutated by UVA radiation and protects against damage by UVB radiation -- thus protecting against UV-induced skin cancer and photo-aging. "When you have a cell affected by UV radiation, you either want to repair it or kill it so that it cannot go on to cause cancer. We show that silibinin does both," says Rajesh Agarwal, PhD, co-program leader of Cancer Prevention and Control at the CU Cancer Center and professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. The first study, published in the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology worked with human skin cells subjected to UVA radiation, which makes up about 95 percent of the sun's radiation that reaches Earth. The Agarwal Lab treated these UVA-affected cells with silibinin. With silibinin, the rate at which these damaged ...

Jan. 30, 2013 — Worldwide, many strains of the bacterium Staphyloccocus aureus are already resistant to all antibiotics except vancomycin. But as bacteria are becoming resistant to this once powerful antidote, S. aureus has moved one step closer to becoming an unstoppable killer. Now, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have not only identified the mechanism by which vancomycin resistance spreads from one bacterium to the next, but also have suggested ways to potentially stop the transfer. The work, led by Matthew Redinbo, professor of chemistry at UNC's College of Arts and Sciences, addresses the looming threat of incurable staph infections -- a global public health problem that has mobilized scientists across disciplines to work together to identify the Achilles heel of these antibiotic-resistant bacteria. "We used to live in a world where antibiotics could readily cure bacterial disease," said Redinbo. "...

Jan. 29, 2013 — Many different tissues and organs form from pluripotent stem cells during embryonic development. To date it had been known that these processes are controlled by transcription factors for specific tissues. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, in collaboration with colleagues at MIT and the Broad Institute in Boston, have now been able to demonstrate that RNA molecules, which do not act as templates for protein synthesis, participate in these processes as well. The scientists knocked down a gene for long non-coding RNA molecules (lncRNA) and thereby disrupted the development of the heart to an extent that was lethal to the embryos. Genesis of the ventral body wall was also impaired. It became apparent that the lncRNA participates in controlling transcription factors that themselves are responsible for controlling tissue- and organogenesis. The lncRNA itself thus acts as a modulating factor in these proc...

Jan. 29, 2013 — Hydrogen sulfide* (H 2 S) may play a wide-ranging role in staving off aging, according to a paper published online ahead of print in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology . In this review article, a team from China explores the compound's plethora of potential anti-aging pathways. "H 2 S has been gaining increasing attention as an important endogenous signaling molecule because of its significant effects on the cardiovascular and nervous systems," the team writes. The evidence is mounting, they note, that hydrogen sulfide slows aging by inhibiting free-radical reactions, by activating SIRT1, an enzyme believed to be a regulator of lifespan, and probably through its interactions with a gene, klotho, which appears to have its own market basket of anti-aging activity. Hydrogen sulfide is produced within the human body, and has a variety of important physiological effects. For example, it relaxes the vascular endothelium a...

Jan. 28, 2013 — UCLA researchers, in a finding that runs counter to conventional wisdom, have discovered for the first time that a gene thought to express a protein in all cells that come under stress is instead expressed only in specific cell types. The group, from the Jules Stein Eye Institute and UCLA Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, focused on αB-Crystallin, a small heat shock protein. Heat shock proteins are a class of functionally-related proteins involved in the folding and unfolding of other proteins. Their expression is increased when cells are exposed to taxing environmental conditions, such as infection, inflammation, exercise, exposure to toxins and other stressors. αB-Crystallin may be associated with certain cancers and could be developed into a biomarker to monitor for diseases such as multiple sclerosis, age-related macular degeneration, heart muscle degeneration and clouding of the eye lens. Any discoveries about how this protein...