New Antitumor Compounds Designed To Act on Cancer Stem Cells

The pharmaceutical company Pfizer has voluntary recalled a blood pressure medication for the second time in a month. Pfizer is recalling five lots of blood pressure medicine Accupril because of elevated levels of a nitrosamine, Nnitroso-quinapril, the company said in a news release posted Friday on the FDA website. Nitrosamines...

MILLIONS of Brits have been urged to take up a rapid test to see if they have bowel cancer. The Health Secretary has called on men over 60 to make sure they have the life-saving checkups. It couldn't be easier - with a home testing kit on offer, or use...

Christine Bronstein took at home colon cancer test after seeing blood in her stool. It was positive, but her doctor texted: "You don't have cancer :)"

Tragic events like wars, famines, earthquakes, and accidents create fearful memories in our brain. These memories continue to haunt us even after the actual event has passed. Luckily, researchers from Tokyo University of Science (TUS) have recently been able to understand the hidden biochemical mechanisms involved in the selective suppression of fearful memories, which is called fear extinction. The researchers, who had previously demonstrated fear extinction in mice using the chemically synthesized compound "KNT-127," have now identified the underlying mechanism of this compound's action. Their findings have been published recently in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Last year, scientists at Scripps Research and Toscana Life Sciences studied the blood of 14 COVID-19 survivors to find the most potent antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. One of the leading molecules that emerged—now in stage II/III trials in Italy—was an antibody dubbed J08, which seemed to be capable of both preventing and treating COVID-19.

Instead of relying on the cell’s repair mechanisms, the vaccinia virus MacGyvers a tool for DNA repair from one that it already uses to copy DNA, reports a team of researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in the Journal of Virology. Blocking that tool – an enzyme known as polymerase – at once disrupts the virus’s ability to copy and to repair DNA, exposing an Achilles’ heel that could be targeted with a therapeutic.

Ultra-powerful 7T MRI scanners could be used to help identify those patients with Parkinson’s disease and similar conditions most likely to benefit from new treatments for previously-untreatable symptoms, say scientists. Both Parkinson’s disease and a related disorder, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), are progressive brain diseases that not only affect...

Rapid, accurate and cost-effective quantitation of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) is essential for bioprocessing. There are currently more than 140 mAbs approved by the FDA as biotherapeutic agents, representing the most rapidly growing class of new drugs. Despite advances in downstream processing technology, affinity purification of monoclonal antibodies using Protein A chromatography is still predominantly utilized.

Research by Newcastle University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi quantified antibiotic and metal resistance in sediments from the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India and streams in the River Tyne catchment. The results show heavy metals, which are high in the River Tyne catchment due to historic mining and industrial activity, relate to antibiotic resistance levels in the river. The same was seen in the Indian rivers, especially in areas of industrial activity.

Today is International Celiac Day; close to one percent of the global population suffers from celiac disease, a complex auto-immune disorder caused by the ingestion of gluten, for which there is no treatment besides eliminating gluten from the diet. As such, the detection of gluten before the product reaches the consumer is essential, in order to guarantee the food safety and prevent possible health problems in people who suffer from celiac disease.

PerkinElmer, Inc. has announced the availability of ultrarapid whole genome sequencing (urWGS) through PerkinElmer Genomics. This addition to the Company’s portfolio of whole genome sequencing (WGS) offerings provides physicians with comprehensive, meaningful results in five days to help inform clinical management and improve outcomes for critically ill patients in neonatal and pediatric intensive care units (NICUs and PICUs). With many genetic diseases being chronic and progressive in nature, reducing the time to reaching an accurate diagnosis can eliminate unnecessary procedures, initiate treatment and improve clinical outcomes.

Are you interested in automating your NGS workflows but don't know how to get started? Learn more through Genuity Science's Automation Journey: From laying out all workflow steps and estimating sample throughput, to designing the right deck layout to automate QC, Normalization, Library Prep and Pooling. This video is part of our Webinar "Automating NGS Workflows for the Analysis of Rare Diseases". Watch the full Webinar here: https://hubs.ly/Q018Pqbm0.

Proteros biostructures GmbH (“Proteros”) has announced an expansion of its collaboration with AstraZeneca focused on the discovery and development of novel epigenetic drugs. The new multi-year agreement builds on an ongoing collaboration with AstraZeneca announced in June 2021, to include the development of small molecule inhibitors targeting a second cancer-associated epigenetic protein.

Led by Juan Song, PhD, scientists at the UNC School of Medicine used optogenetic techniques to stimulate specific brain cells to increase production of neural stem cells and neurons relevant to memory and emotion processing in animal models. We humans lose mental acuity, an unfortunate side effect of aging. And...

In early research led by the University of Michigan Health Rogel Cancer Center, the oral medication zanubrutinib was found to help most patients with a slow-growing type of cancer known as marginal zone lymphoma. Cancers shrunk in 80% of the 20 patients on the clinical trial with marginal zone lymphoma,...

Researchers led by King’s, Karolinska Institute and Erasmus University have identified 10 new genes linked with hearing loss and located the part of the ear affected. The findings, published today in American Journal of Human Genetics, cast doubt on the understanding that age-related hearing impairment originates mainly from sensory hair cells and propose the stria vascularis, a part of the cochlea in the ear, as a new target for treatments to help people with hearing loss.

An unexpected trick in cancer’s playbook may fool an important component of our immune systems into knocking down our natural defenses against solid tumors. Scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center say this newfound vulnerability involves a misuse of a type of T cell, part of a large family of blood cells that are essential to a functioning immune system.

Lyme disease has been a nationally recognized condition in the United States since 1991 and is the most common vector-borne illness in North America and Europe.1 Since 1991, the incidence of Lyme disease in the United States has nearly doubled and Lyme disease is now endemic to Northeastern States as well as Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that ~300,000 people get Lyme disease each year, however only about 35,000 cases are reported each year. This discrepancy is largely due to that fact that many cases do not get reported to the Nationally Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS).2 Additional limitations of surveillance data includes data are subject to each state’s abilities to capture and classify cases, and that data are captured by county of residence, not county of exposure.1 In the article below, we explore the current state of Lyme disease testing, and share perspectives on how improvements could be made in the future to improve time to diagnosis.

In the human embryo, the neural tube forms between the 22nd and 26th day of pregnancy. Later, the brain and spinal cord will develop from this tube. The neural tube forms when an elongated flat tissue structure, the neural plate, bends lengthwise into a U shape and closes to form a tube. What drives this development is not yet clear. Researchers in the group of Dagmar Iber, Professor of Computational Biology at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel, have now been able to show that the surrounding tissue is likely to play a significant role by exerting pressure from the outside.

Redness, swelling, pain - these are signs of inflammation. It serves to protect the body from pathogens or foreign substances. Researchers from the Universities of Bonn and Cologne were able to show that inflammatory reactions of an important sensor protein proceed in a specific spatial direction. This finding has the potential to conceivably stop inflammation at the "growing end", and thus bring chronic inflammatory diseases to a halt. The study has now been published in the journal "Science Advances".