WASHINGTON, DC - April 14, 2015 - A new study has demonstrated that genetically modified Salmonella can be used to kill cancer cells. The study is published in this week's issue of mBio, an American Society for Microbiology online-only, open access journal. "There has long been interest in using genetically engineered microbes to target and destroy cells within solid tumors. I think this study goes a significant way in developing some strategies that will help in the overall means of using Salmonella as part of a cancer therapy," said Roy Curtiss, III, PhD, who was involved ...

LOS ANGELES (EMBARGOED UNTIL 7 A.M. EDT on APRIL 14, 2015) - An injection of stem cells into the eye may soon slow or reverse the effects of early-stage age-related macular degeneration, according to new research from scientists at Cedars-Sinai. Currently, there is no treatment that slows the progression of the disease, which is the leading cause of vision loss in people over 65. "This is the first study to show preservation of vision after a single injection of adult-derived human cells into a rat model with age-related macular degeneration," said Shaomei Wang, MD, ...

Scientists at the University of Southampton have shown that higher muscle mass is strongly linked with healthier bone development in children. Researchers also found no relationship between fat mass and bone development, indicating it is not an important factor in childhood skeletal strength. A new study, published in the journal Bone, by researchers from the University's Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit shows a link between the amount of lean muscle and healthy bone development, indicated by the size, shape and density of limb bones, in children ...

Methane, a highly effective greenhouse gas, is usually produced by decomposition of organic material, a complex process involving bacteria and microbes. But there is another type of methane that can appear under specific circumstances: Abiotic methane is formed by chemical reactions in the oceanic crust beneath the seafloor. New findings show that deep water gas hydrates, icy substances in the sediments that trap huge amounts of the methane, can be a reservoir for abiotic methane. One such reservoir was recently discovered on the ultraslow spreading Knipovich ridge, ...

Researchers at Uppsala University have, together with researchers from Turku and Bergen, discovered a new biomarker which makes it possible to identify women with uterine cancer who have a high risk of recurrence. The findings were recently published in the journal Gynecologic Oncology. Endometrial cancer of the uterus is the most common form of gynecologic cancer in Europe and North America. The treatment primarily consists of removing the uterus and in some cases offering chemotherapy if the risk of recurrence is deemed high. The current study looks at the amount ...

Researchers at the University of Manchester and Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have published data for the first time about public knowledge of and interest in the process of medicines research and development. The study, which is part of the wider European Patients' Academy on Therapeutic Innovation (EUPATI) project, is believed to be the largest peer-reviewed survey of its kind and was published today in the BMJ Open. Medicines R&D describes the entire process of bringing a new medicine to patients - from laboratory studies to clinical ...

The seabed is inhabited by vast numbers of small animals with hidden lives in the sandy sediments. Here they play an important role in keeping the oceans healthy. But how these animals behave and interact with each other is unclear, as it is not possible to see them without disturbing the sediment. Researchers like Ph.D. Matthieu Delefosse would enjoy putting on a pair of X-ray glasses and study the sediment living animals without disturbing them. "We know bits and pieces of what these animals do through different measurements/experiments, but we do not have an integrated ...

Researchers at Genes and Cancer group at Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), led by Montse Sanchez-Cespedes, have identified the PARD3 gene as a tumor suppressor that is inactivated in lung cancer squamous type. The results of the study have been published in Cancer Research. Correct polarization (orientation in space) of bronchial epithelial cells is essential for the maintenance and proper development of this tissue under normal conditions. PARD3 gene encodes a protein that regulates cell polarization and cell junctions. When the gene is inactivated, ...

Scientists at the University of Sheffield calculate that all of the UK's high level nuclear waste from spent fuel reprocessing could be disposed of in just six boreholes 5km deep, fitting within a site no larger than a football pitch. The concept - called deep borehole disposal - has been developed primarily in the UK but is likely to see its first field trials in the USA next year. If the trials are successful, the USA hopes to dispose of its 'hottest' and most radioactive waste - left over from plutonium production and currently stored at Hanford in Washington State ...

Simply declaring a region as a nature protection area is not enough, regular monitoring of its ecological condition is also necessary. Since Nature protection areas already cover almost one fifth of the surface of the European Union, it is impossible to inspect such a vast area in the traditional way on foot. Therefore, new methods are being developed to monitor Europe's nature protection areas from the air. Short laser pulses are sent to the ground, and information on the status of the habitat can be deduced from the reflected light signals using elaborate computer algorithms. Laser ...

Cancer Mortality Reductions Were Greatest Among Countries Where Cancer Care Spending Rose The Most, 1995-2007. Warren Stevens of Precision Health Economics, Dana P. Goldman of the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California, and coauthors compared cancer care across sixteen countries over time, examining changes in cancer spending and two measures of cancer mortality (amenable and excess mortality). They found that, compared to low-spending health systems, high-spending systems had consistently lower cancer mortality in the ...

Fast Facts: More than 30,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Johns Hopkins researchers have transformed skin cells donated by ALS patients into brain cells affected by the progressive, fatal disease. The resulting cell library is being used by researchers worldwide in the quest for better ALS treatments. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have transformed skin cells from patients with Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), into brain cells affected by the progressive, ...

The World Health Organization (WHO) have announced a new statement on the public disclosure of clinical trial results which updates and expands a previous statement that noted the "the registration of all interventional trials is a scientific, ethical, and moral responsibility." The new statement includes timelines by which researchers are expected to report clinical trials results. In an Essay published in this week's PLOS Medicine Vasee Moorthy and colleagues from the WHO outline the rationale behind the new statement. A new element in the WHO statement is the definition ...

Extreme hazards - rare, high-impact events - pose a serious and underestimated threat to humanity. The extremes of the broad ensemble of natural and anthropogenic hazards can lead to global disasters and catastrophes. Because they are rare and modern society lacks experience with them, they tend to be ignored in disaster risk management. While the probabilities of most natural hazards do not change much over time, the sensitivity of the built environment and the vulnerability of the embedded socio-economic fabric have increased rapidly. Exposure to geohazards has increased ...

April 14, 2015 A new material developed at the University of Colorado Boulder could radically reduce the energy needed to produce a wide variety of plastic products, from grocery bags and cling wrap to replacement hips and bulletproof vests. Approximately 80 million metric tons of polyethylene is produced globally each year, making it the most common plastic in the world. An essential building block for manufacturing polyethylene is ethylene, which must be separated from a nearly identical chemical, ethane, before it can be captured and used. The similarities between ...

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan have uncovered the first evidence of an unusual quantum phenomenon--the integer quantum Hall effect--in a new type of film, called a 3D topological insulator. In doing this, they demonstrated that "surface Dirac states"--a particular form of massless electrons--are quantized in these materials, meaning that they only take on certain discrete values. These discoveries could help move science forward toward the goal of dissipationless electronics--electronic devices that can operate without producing the ...

SAN DIEGO (April 14, 2015) -- A team of biologists from San Diego State University has developed a platform for identifying drugs that could prove to be effective against a variety of viral diseases. In a pair of recent articles in the Journal of Biomolecular Screening and the Journal of Visualized Experiments, the researchers describe how the methodology works, using dengue virus as an example, and they identify a novel drug which may someday be used to combat the disease. Over the past several years, the researchers, led by SDSU biologist Roland Wolkowicz, have been ...

Research from The University of Manchester using cutting edge computer analysis reveals that despite mutating, Ebola hasn't evolved to become deadlier since the first outbreak 40 years ago. The surprising results demonstrate that whilst a high number of genetic changes have been recorded in the virus, it hasn't changed at a functional level to become more or less virulent. The findings, published in the journal Virology, demonstrate that the much higher death toll during the current outbreak, with the figure at nearly 10,500, isn't due to mutations/evolution making ...

Physicists from ITMO University, Ioffe Institute and Australian National University managed to make homogenous cylindrical objects completely invisible in the microwave range. Contrary to the now prevailing notion of invisibility that relies on metamaterial coatings, the scientists achieved the result using a homogenous object without any additional coating layers. The method is based on a new understanding of electromagnetic wave scattering. The results of the study were published in Scientific Reports. The scientists studied light scattering from a glass cylinder filled ...

The number of children being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes is increasing 3-4% every year and more so in school-aged children. Treating the condition is complex and poor management can often lead to medical emergencies that result in hospitalisation, placing ever greater demands on health services. To improve the efficiency of these services and reduce potentially unnecessary admissions, researchers wanted find out how often children with type 1 diabetes are admitted to hospital compared with children of the same age, gender and socioeconomic class, living in the same ...

The amount of government money pumped into dementia and stroke research in the UK has risen significantly in recent years, but it is still way too low when compared with the economic and personal impact these conditions have, finds a study published in the online journal BMJ Open. The researchers assessed central government and charity research expenditure in 2012 into the UK's leading causes of death and disability: cancer, coronary heart disease, dementia and stroke. In 2012, all four conditions accounted for over half (55%) of all UK deaths and for 5.5 million disability ...

Children with type 1diabetes run almost five times the risk of being admitted to hospital for any reason as their peers, finds research published in the online journal BMJ Open. Pre-schoolers and those from disadvantaged backgrounds are most at risk, the findings indicate. The number of new cases of childhood type 1 diabetes has been rising steadily by around 3-4% a year, the evidence shows, and the risk of death among those with the condition under the age of 30 is nine times that of the general public. The researchers analysed the causes of hospital admission after ...

A new type of technology that senses minute changes in the levels of particular compounds in exhaled breath, accurately identifies high risk changes which herald the development of stomach cancer, reveals research published online in the journal Gut. The findings prompt the researchers to suggest that the technology--known as nanoarray analysis--could be used not only to test for the presence of stomach cancer, but also to monitor those at high risk of subsequently developing the disease. Gastric cancer develops in a series of well-defined steps, but there's currently ...

1. Task Force weighs evidence on diabetes screening Researchers for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) have completed a systematic evidence review to inform an upcoming update of Task Force recommendations on screening asymptomatic, nonpregnant adults for type 2 diabetes. The review is published in Annals of Internal Medicine . Approximately 21 million persons in the U.S. received a diabetes diagnosis in 2010 and an estimated 8 million cases went undiagnosed. Screening asymptomatic persons for diabetes may lead to earlier identification and earlier ...

While a debate was raging between scientists and government regulators on how best to explain to patients the risks of participating in clinical research studies that compare standardized treatments, a team of bioethicists boldly went where no experts had gone before -- to the public. What the respondents said surprised them: Keep it simple, but always ask permission, even when the research only involves gathering data from anonymized medical records. "We didn't anticipate that people would want to grant permission for medical record searches, a research method that ...