Corneal Repair: A Clear Vision!

Damage to the surface of the cornea causes pain and loss of vision, but regenerative therapies are providing a clearer, brighter future.

If the eyes are the window to the soul, then it is the cornea that lets the light enter.

For more than 200 years, physicians have been preoccupied with keeping this dome-shaped, transparent surface in front of the iris and pupil clear. German surgeon Franz Reisinger was the first to attempt a corneal transplant in animals in 1818. And in 1838, US ophthalmologist Richard Kissam tried to replace the opaque cornea of a young patient with the healthy cornea of a pig, but the procedure failed when the transplant was rejected. The first successful transplant in humans was in 1905, but outcomes remained poor until the mid-twentieth century, when developments in infection control, anaesthesiology, surgical techniques and immunology vastly improved the success rate of corneal transplantation. In the twenty-first century, advances in cell-culture techniques and bioengineering have opened the door to regenerative treatments for people with damage to one or both corneas.

Unclouded vision requires a clear cornea. Its epithelial surface constantly renews itself to maintain an unblemished, uniformly refractive surface. Cells that are shed from the surface are replaced by new ones that emanate from a small population of stem cells located at the edge, or limbus, of the cornea.

If the stem cells at the limbus are damaged, the renewal process is interrupted. The complete or partial loss of these stem cells — limbal stem-cell deficiency (LSCD) — allows the opaque conjunctiva to grow over the cornea. This can lead to intense pain and, in the most-severe cases, blindness.

Let there be sight -David Holmes

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Nature Video: Repairing the cornea: let there be sight

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Source: Nature

Hormone Therapy for Prostate Cancer Increases Cardiac Risk!

Androgen-deprivation therapy, which is a common treatment for prostate cancer, has been tentatively linked with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. A new study solidifies these concerns.

Prostate cancer needs testosterone to grow and thrive, so androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) is designed to reduce the amount of testosterone in the body to close to zero, thereby helping to slow cancer's growth.

Although the findings are controversial, some studies have shown that ADT combined with radiation therapy is more successful at treating prostate cancer than just radiation alone.

Currently, ADT is recommended for advanced prostate cancer. But it is increasingly being used to treat localized prostate cancer, despite minimal evidence for its efficacy.

At the same time, the number of localized prostate cancer cases has increased dramatically over recent years, due in part to the more widespread use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing.

Side effects of ADT — including erectile dysfunction, diabetes, bone loss, and swollen breast tissue, or gynecomastia — can be fairly substantial. Added to this, there is growing evidence to suggest that low testosterone levels might increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD).

A common prostate cancer treatment comes under scrutiny in a new study.

Read more: Hormone Therapy for Prostate Cancer Increases Cardiac Risk!

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Source: MedicalNewsToday

Swarms of Magnetic Bacteria Could be Used to Deliver Drugs to Tumors

One of the biggest challenges in cancer therapy is being able to sufficiently deliver chemotherapy drugs to tumors without exposing healthy tissues to their toxic effects.

Researchers funded in part by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have recently shown that magnetic bacteria are a promising vehicle for more efficiently delivering tumor-fighting drugs. They reported their results in the August 2016 issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Read more: Swarms of Magnetic Bacteria Could be Used to Deliver Drugs to Tumors

Illustration showing magnetic bacteria delivering drugs to a tumor.

Source: LabManager

From Krebs to Clinic: Glutamine Metabolism to Cancer Therapy

The resurgence of research into cancer metabolism has recently broadened interests beyond glucose and the Warburg effect to other nutrients, including glutamine. Because oncogenic alterations of metabolism render cancer cells addicted to nutrients, pathways involved in glycolysis or glutaminolysis could be exploited for therapeutic purposes. In this Review, we provide an updated overview of glutamine metabolism and its involvement in tumorigenesis in vitro and in vivo, and explore the recent potential applications of basic science discoveries in the clinical setting.

• Cancer cells show increased consumption of and dependence on glutamine.
• Glutamine metabolism fuels the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, nucleotide and fatty acid biosynthesis, and redox balance in cancer cells.
• Glutamine activates mTOR signaling, suppresses endoplasmic reticulum stress and promotes protein synthesis.

Read more: From Krebs to Clinic: Glutamine Metabolism to Cancer Therapy

Major metabolic and biosynthetic fates of glutamine

Source: NatureReviewsCancer

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Study Finds Potential New Biomarker For Cancer Patient Prognosis

To treat or not to treat? That is the question researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) hope to answer with a new advance that could help doctors and their cancer patients decide if a particular therapy would be worth pursuing.

Berkeley Lab researchers identified 14 genes regulating genome integrity that were consistently overexpressed in a wide variety of cancers. They then created a scoring system based upon the degree of gene overexpression. For several major types of cancer, including breast and lung cancers, the higher the score, the worse the prognosis. Perhaps more importantly, scores could accurately predict patient response to specific cancer treatments.

The researchers said the findings, to be published Wednesday, Aug. 31, in the journal Nature Communications, could lead to a new biomarker for the early stages of tumor development. The information obtained could help reduce the use of cancer treatments that have a low probability of helping.

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The centromeres and kinetochores of a chromosome play critical roles during cell division. In mitosis,
microtubule spindle fibers attach to the kinetochores, pulling the chromatids apart. A breakdown in this
process causes chromosome …more

Source: medicalxpress

A novel device claims to be an 'off switch' for painful menstruation.

It’s estimated that nine out of 10 women suffer from period pain each month, and an unfortunate 10 percent of those will get it so bad, they could be incapacitated for up to three days. 

Other than using contraceptives to skip their period altogether (just like astronauts do), menstruating women have precious few options to beat this thing and get on with their lives. Some over-the-counter pain-killers and a strategically placed hot water bottle is about it.

But there’s another option behind secret door #3, and early reports are saying this thing actually works. Dubbed Livia, this new medical device claims to be an"off switch for menstrual pain".

Okay, so first thing’s first: how does this supposed 'miracle cure' actually work? 

As the Livia website explains, the device comes with two electrodes, which you need to place on the painful areas on your abdomen. Switch the device on, and these electrodes will start delivering imperceptible electric pulses to your nerves, which will settle the pain.

Read more: A novel device claims to be an 'off switch' for painful menstruation.

Source: sciencealert

We could be close enough to the stem cell revolution!

Stem cell therapy has been in use for many years, but with only limited reach. As such the oft bandied stem cell revolution has still yet to arrive. Steve Buckwell and Chris Coe explain why this is set to change and why now is the perfect time for its potential to be achieved. 

The stem cell revolution as it’s often referred to is now already in its third decade. But like the paper free office, is it just one of those envisaged futures that never seem to really happen? Embryonic stem cells were first isolated 18 years ago, but stem cell therapies have been slowed by high production costs, batch-to-batch variability and limited seed material. But we still believe the revolution will kick off some time in the second half of this decade. This is why.

Firstly the early ethical issues have, in many cases been overcome, with adult stem cells showing promise in the clinic but not requiring the embryo exploitation and destruction that made embryonic stem cell research so controversial in the years after 1998. Secondly, there is now substantial mid-stage clinical evidence that stem cells work in areas of unmet medical need, much of which has only become evident in the last five years.

There are various stem cell products in development that work allogeneically, meaning that the patient receives stem cells sourced from someone else’s body. As a general rule, allogeneic therapies are quite cost effective because they have the potential to be ‘off-the-shelf’, whereas autologous therapies (use of the patient’s own cells) can be considerably more expensive.

Read more: We could be close enough to the stem cell revolution!

Source: labnews