NSP

Transplantation Of Monkey Embryonic Stem Cells Reverses Parkinson Disease In Primates

The replenishment of missing neurons in thebrain as a treatment for Parkinson disease reached the stage of humantrials over 15 years ago, however the field is still in its infancy.Researchers from Kyoto University have now shown thatdopamine-producing neurons (DA neurons) generated from monkey embryonicstem cells and transplanted into areas of the brain where these neuronshave degenerated i...

The transparent organism: EMBLEM and Carl Zeiss give labs a unique look at life

A novel high-tech microscope will be brought to the marketplace, giving laboratories everywhere fascinating new insights into living organisms. EMBLEM Technology Transfer GmbH (EMBLEM), the commercial entity of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), announced today that it has signed a licensing deal with technological leader Carl Zeiss to commercialize a new technology called SPIM (Se...

Sea skate experiment sheds light on human cell transport

Along with Mark Musch, a longtime University of Chicago collaborator, Goldstein conducted an experiment with the red blood cells of skates to understand how these skinny, graceful fish can swim from salt water to fresh water. For humans, such a drastic environmental change would prompt an equally drastic physiological change: Our cells would take in too much water, diluting blood and other body f...

Transport System Smuggles Medicines Into Brain

Parrots, long a favorite pet animal, are attractive to owners because of their vibrant colors. But those colors may mean more to parrots than what meets the eye. For more than a century, biochemists have known that parrots use an unusual set of pigments to produce their rainbow of plumage colors, but their biochemical identity has remained elusive. Now, an Arizona State University researc...

UCSD Discovery Shows How Embryonic Stem Cells Perform 'Quality Control' Inspections

A team led by Johns Hopkins scientists hasfound the first clear evidence that the process behind the human immunesystem's remarkable ability to recognize and respond to a milliondifferent proteins might have originated from a family of genes whoseonly apparent function is to jump around in genetic material. essentially cut...

Circles Of DNA Might Help Predict Success Of Stem Cell Transplantation

Measuring the quantity of a certain type of immune cell DNA in the blood could help physicians predict whether a bone marrow stem cell transplant will successfully restore a population of infection-fighting cells called T lymphocytes in a child. This research, by investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, is published in the journal Blood. This finding could help physicians p...

World-first Living Donor Islet Cell Transplant A Success; Procedure Offers Promise For Diabetics

A University of Alberta and Capital Health surgeon, well known for his pioneering work in developing the Edmonton Protocol treatment for diabetes, has taken another important step in the fight against diabetes. On January 19, at Kyoto University Hospital, Dr. Koichi Tanaka and Dr. James Shapiro, along with a team of Japanese surgeons, removed part of a 56-year-old woman's pancreas. Dr. Sh...

First North American Encapsulated Islet Transplant without Long-term Immune Suppression into a Patient with Type 1 Diabetes

Biologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered how the plagues of the Middle Ages have made around 10% of Europeans resistant to HIV. Scientists have known for some time that these individuals carry a genetic mutation (known as CCR5-delta32) that prevents the virus from entering the cells of the immune system but have been unable to account for the high levels of the gene in Scandinavi...

Nature provides inspiration for important new adhesive

Researchers from the College of Forestry at Oregon State University have developed a new group of adhesives that may revolutionize a large portion of the wood products industry, and have important environmental and economic benefits. The discovery has already resulted in three pending patents and should lead to a wide range of new products. But it was originally based on the aroused curios...

Single-donor Islet Transplantation Procedure Shows Promise For Patients With Type 1 Diabetes

Patients with type 1 diabetes who received islet transplantation from a single donor pancreas were insulin independent one year later, according to a study in the February 16 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical applications of biotechnology. Type 1 diabetes remains a therapeutic challenge, according to background information in the article. The success rate of islet (cells that produc...

Precise Timing Enabled Pig-to-rat Transplants To Cure Diabetes

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have learned that a temporal "window of opportunity" was critical to their earlier successes in treating diabetic rats with embryonic pig tissues. In those experiments, published in 2004, researchers were surprised to find that they didn't have to give anti-rejection drugs to diabetic rats treated with embryonic pig cell...

Motor transport in bio-nano systems

Molecular motors are nanoscale engines which move along very thin rod-like filaments and, in this way, drive the heavy traffic of molecular cargo within biological cells. Both motors and filaments can be isolated from the cells and used to construct biomimetic transport systems. In order to increase the flux of the cargo transport, it would be necessary to increase the number of motors that contr...

Discoveries by UAB and Florida scientists may help transplanted organs survive longer

Scientists may have found a way to dramatically slow organ transplant rejection by as much as several years. The research team reporte...

New type of rejection blocker protects kidneys after transplant

In an international clinical trial, a new drug that selectively blocks immune responses has proved as effective in preventing acute kidney transplant rejection as cyclosporine, the standard anti-rejection treatment. Patients who took the experimental drug, a co-stimulatory blocker called belatacept (LEA29Y), also had better kidney function and experienced less of the toxic side effects as...

Beetle-inspired switch uses water for bonding

Imagine this: A tiny, fast switch that uses water droplets to create adhesive bonds almost as strong as aluminum by borrowing a mechanism found in palm beetles. The new beetle-inspired switch, designed by Cornell University engineers, can work by itself on the scale of a micron -- a millionth of a meter. The switches can be combined in arrays for larger applications like powerful adhesive...

Monkeying around to improve organ transplantation

Organ transplantation is accompanied by nonspecific immune suppression therapy to prevent T cell-mediated rejection. These immunosuppressants can cause infection, hypertension, cancer, and other undesirable side effects. Therefore, specific suppression of the T cells that attack the transplanted organ is needed. It was known that anergic T cells (immune T cells that do not respond to antig...

Researchers identify genes associated with lung transplant rejection

Researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have identified six genes associated with lymphocytic bronchitis, which is thought to lead to obliterative bronchitis (OB), the most common cause of long-term failure of transplanted lungs. The researchers hope their results will lead to an earlier, more sensitive, and more ac...

Nanotubes inspire new technique for healing broken bones

Scientists have shown for the first time that carbon nanotubes make an ideal scaffold for the growth of bone tissue. The new technique could change the way doctors treat broken bones, allowing them to simply inject a solution of nanotubes into a fracture to promote healing. The report appears in the June 14 issue of the American Chemical Society's journal Chemistry of Materials. ACS is the...

Green diesel: New process makes liquid transportation fuel from plants

University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering researchers have discovered a new way to make a diesel-like liquid fuel from carbohydrates commonly found in plants. Reporting in the June 3 issue of the Journal Science, Steenbock Professor James Dumesic and colleagues detail a four-phase catalytic reactor in which corn and other biomass-derived carbohydrates can be converted to sulfu...

Israeli scientists successfully transplant frozen-thawed ovaries in sheep

New freezing technique raises future hopes for human applications Follow-up tests showed that the ovaries in the two s...

Transplanting Animal Organs Could Soon Be A Reality

In findings with implications for pandemic influenza, a new study reports for the first time that a less-virulent strain of avian influenza virus can spread from poultry to humans. The research appears in the October 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online. Crossing the species barrier is an important step in the development of a flu virus with pandemic potenti...

Key To Stem Cell Transplant Success Is Tricking Immune System

A new study reveals critical molecular events in the origin of fat cells. The findings are central to understanding chronic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes, as fat cells produce hormones critical for metabolic control, the researchers said. The study finds that a hormonal cocktail routinely used in the lab induces a key genetic switch in the transition from fat-cell precursors to fu...

New cell transplantation technique restores insulin production in diabetics

Researchers are using a new cell transplantation technique to restore the cells that produce insulin in patients with type 1 diabetes. The method is minimally invasive, with few complications. The study was presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). "We used ultrasound guidance to inject donor cells into the portal vein of diabetic patients,...

New antifreeze protein found in fleas may allow longer storage of transplant organs

A new antifreeze protein discovered in tiny snow fleas by Queen's University researchers may lengthen the shelf life of human organs for transplantation. Drs. Laurie Graham and Peter Davies, from the Department of Biochemistry, found that the potent protein produced by the fleas to protect themselves against freezing is capable of inhibiting ice growth by about six Celsius degrees. This wo...

Implantable pumps extend lives of patients too sick for transplant

Pumps implanted into the chest to maintain circulation can significantly extend the lives of the sickest patients in end-stage heart failure who are not candidates for heart transplantation, according to the results of a clinical trial led by Duke University Medical Center cardiologists. The pumps, known as left ventricular assistant devices (LVADs), are employed when the heart's left vent...

Infant transplant patients resist infections that kill adult AIDS patients

Investigators have discovered that some type of protective system goes into action in some cases when a baby's immune system is deficient. This discovery indicates a hidden safety net that might have far-reaching consequences for treating diseases of the immune system such as AIDS. The Mayo Clinic-led study was conducted with colleagues in Toronto and Baltimore, and is reported in the early onlin...

Diabetes researchers pioneer islet cell xenotransplantation in primate studies

A team of researchers from the University of Alberta, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University and the Emory Transplant Center has successfully transplanted insulin-producing neonatal porcine islet cells into monkeys, a procedure the researchers say represents a promising intermediate solution to the critical supply problem in clinical islet cell transplantation. "Ou...

Carnegie Mellon develops non-invasive technique to detect transplant rejection at cellular level

Carnegie Mellon University scientist Chien Ho and his colleagues have developed a promising tool that uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to track immune cells as they infiltrate a transplanted heart in the early stages of organ rejection. This pre-clinical advance, described in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), ultimately could provide a non-invas...

UC Berkeley researchers create a biologically-inspired artificial compound eye

Using the eyes of insects such as dragonflies and houseflies as models, a team of bioengineers at University of California, Berkeley, has created a series of artificial compound eyes. These eyes can eventually be used as cameras or sensory detectors to capture visual or chemical information from a wider field of vision than previously possible, even with the best fish-eye lens, said Luke P...

Guiding principles for facial transplantation unveiled

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) and the American Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery (ASRM) today unveiled a landmark joint document, Facial Transplantation-ASPS/ASRM Guiding Principles, to assist plastic surgeons considering participation in facial transplantation procedures. "This is truly a remarkable and historic time in plastic surgery," said Bruce Cunningham, MD a...

Researchers discover way to transport environmental arsenic to plant leaves in new clean-up strategy

Environmental arsenic pollution is a serious and growing environmental problem, especially on the Indian subcontinent. Researchers at the University of Georgia had, several years ago, used genetic techniques to create "arsenic-eating" plants that could be planted on polluted sites. There was a problem, however. The arsenic sequestered from soil remained largely in the roots of the plant, m...

Pennsylvania researchers find liver transplants provide metabolic cure for rare genetic disease

Liver transplants cured the metabolic symptoms of 11 patients with a rare but devastating genetic condition known as Maple Syrup Urine Disease (MSUD), according to a study by researchers from Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and the Clinic for Special Children. All patients from the study (ranging in age from 1-20) are alive and well with normal liver function, according to the researcher...

Stem cell transplants improve recovery in animal models for stroke, cerebral palsy

A single dose of adult donor stem cells given to animals that have neurological damage similar to that experienced by adults with a stroke or newborns with cerebral palsy can significantly enhance recovery from these types of injuries, researchers say. Using a commonly utilized animal model for stroke, researchers administered a dose of 200,000-400,000 human stem cells into the brain of an...

Predicting successful outcomes in living-donor liver transplants

A new study on identifying which patients were likely to have poor outcomes following a living-donor liver transplant (LDLT) found that measuring how a certain non-toxic dye was eliminated by the liver shortly after surgery was an accurate indicator of liver function, and therefore a reliable indicator of the outcome of the procedure. The study used a simple non-invasive device to measure the dye...

Plastic surgeons countdown first full facial transplantation

Even after news of the first partial facial transplantation performed in France spread around the world, plastic surgeons have continued to research how to make the first full facial transplantation a reality. In the first peer-reviewed, scientific studies of their kind, U.S. plastic surgeons demonstrated how to successfully complete a full facial tissue transplantation from one human body...

Scientists discover why cornea is transparent and free of blood vessels, allowing vision

Scientists at the Harvard Department of Ophthalmology's Schepens Eye Research Institute and Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) are the first to learn why the cornea, the clear window of the eye, is free of blood vessels--a unique phenomenon that makes vision possible. The key, say the researchers, is the unexpected presence of large amounts of the protein VEGFR-3 (vascular endothelial gro...

Successful transplantation from pig embryos to mice

Millions of diabetics face a lifetime of daily injections to replace the insulin their bodies fail to produce, as well as a host of risks that includes blindness, amputation, kidney failure, and heart disease. For many, particularly those afflicted with juvenile diabetes, transplants of the pancreatic tissue in which insulin is produced might alleviate these problems. Unfortunately, there are not...

Failure of 'scout cells' may lead to cancer in transplant patients

A serious form of cancer that occurs in some transplant patients may arise because cells that normally serve as scouts for the immune system become weakened, a new study suggests. The cancer is caused by Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a herpesvirus that infects more than 90 percent of Americans but is ordinarily kept under control by the immune system. That control can be lost in people whose...

Stem cells found in adult skin can be transplanted and function in mouse models of disease

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the University of Calgary have found that stem cells derived from adult skin can create neural cell types that can be transplanted into and function in mouse models of disease. This research is reported in the June 14, 2006 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. SickKids researchers previously discovered what type of cells can be...

Methane-belching bugs inspire a new theory of the origin of life on Earth

Two laboratories at Penn State set out to show how an obscure undersea microbe metabolizes carbon monoxide into methane and vinegar. What they found was not merely a previously unknown biochemical process--their discovery also became the inspiration for a fundamental new theory of the origin of life on Earth, reconciling a long-contentious pair of prevailing theories. This new, "thermodynamic"...