Skin transformed for cancer fight

Dynamic sites reviled us that scientists are working tirelessly to open new possibilities that one day Cancer Patients will be using their own skin cells to fight their tumours.

This study was published in the famous journal Gene Therapy and was focused on dendritic cells and their unique properties, which are responsible to organised a part of their immune response. By showing identifying antigens or markers cells tell the immune system what and where to attack. If they can display cancer markers then obviously the cancerous cells will become the targets.

Experiments conducted in various laboratory showed that these dendritic cells were able to activate both kind of cells, namely those which kill foreign cells and those produce anti bodies.

"Now the very next challenge is to confirm out if these laboratory-generated cells will be competent enough for immunotherapy-based cancer-treatments to be used in the clinic."

Solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs)

Solar flares are like large explosions found on sun that send light, energy and high speed particles into space. These flares are found associated with large solar magnetic storms that are known as (CMEs) coronal mass ejections. The number of such flares usually increases in every 11 years, and currently sun is moving towards another, that is likely to be in 2013. This means that more of the flares will be coming in the times to come, some may be small and some may be big enough to send their harmful  radiation to the Earth.

If these will be directed at Earth, such CMEs and the associated flares will result in very long lasting radiating storms that will harm communication system, power grids, satellite systems, and various land-based technologies. For example,: X-class flares occured on 5th Dec, 2006 and 6th Dec, 2006, triggered the CME that had badly interfered with the GPS signals which used to be forworded to land-based signal receivers.

Farewell to Assays? Researchers Create Web-based Tool for Determining Pluripotency in Human Stem Cells

In an effort to create a cheaper, faster, and animal-free method for determining pluripotency in stem cells, an international research team has developed a web-based test that helps investigators determine whether their cell lines are pluripotent based on their gene expression profiles.

"Many scientists are unhappy" with the teratoma assay, Jeanne Loring, a Scripps Research molecular biologist and one of the authors of the study, said in a statement. The method can take six to eight weeks to get results, she noted, and is also "technically challenging and difficult to standardize." PluriTest uses two related classifiers: The "pluripotency score," which indicates whether a query sample contains a pluripotent signature; and the "novelty score," which measures how far the stem cells in a query sample deviate from the normal pluripotent stem cell lines.

Simply put, "you upload raw data to the website and it tells you if your cell line is pluripotent or not and it's also got some information about ... interesting patterns in the gene expression profile," Franz-Josef Mueller, a researcher at the Center for Integrative Psychiatry in Kiel, Germany, and a co-author on the paper, told BioInform.

Source: A bioinformatic assay for pluripotency in human cells (NATURE METHODS)

• Franz-Josef Müller,
• Bernhard M Schuldt,
• Roy Williams,
• Dylan Mason,
• Gulsah Altun,
• Eirini P Papapetrou,
• Sandra Danner,
• Johanna E Goldmann,
• Arne Herbst,
• Nils O Schmidt,
• Josef B Aldenhoff,
• Louise C Laurent
• & Jeanne F Loring

Treatment breakthrough for rare disease linked to diabetes

University of Manchester scientists have led an international team to discover new treatments for a rare and potentially lethal childhood disease that is the clinical opposite of diabetes mellitus. Congenital hyperinsulinism (CHI) is a condition where the body's pancreas produces too much insulin – rather than too little as in diabetes – so understanding the disease has led to breakthroughs in diabetes treatment.

Current drug treatments for CHI often fail in the most severe forms of the disease and the patient has to have some, or most, of their pancreas removed. The Manchester researchers discovered that treating cells under specially modified conditions helped to recover the function of the internal switches that control insulin release. Through these experiments the team have provided the first evidence that the outcomes of gene defects can be reversed in human insulin-producing cells.

Source : @EurekAlert, Content