A product that can help people with medical problems from controlling diabetes to growing hair to preserving transplant organs? Snake oil, anyone?

Nope. A blue bandage made with synthetic nanoparticles promises just such wonders. Its secret? When you wet the bandage, the way the fibers degrade releases nitric oxide–a natural chemical that works wonders for people but that diabetics don’t make enough of. Their invention takes advantage of earlier efforts with nanofiber bandages that help wounds heal faster by releasing nitric oxide.

The researchers will focus, among other things, on making materials such as socks or wraps to improve blood flow in the feet of patients with diabetes.

I remember wondering a while back why I loved green beans so much when they didn’t appear to have an especially high food value/nutrition. A few years ago I was excited to learn that green beans, in fact, contain something called flavonoids (a recently discovered nutrient) that were really good for you. Hurray, I thought. My body’s wisdom does work after all.

Today I found this on the value of flavonoids as tools in sensitizing cancer cells–but not healthy ones–so that they will react more intensely to standard cancer treatments such as chemo and radiation.

Researchers are talking about trying to synthesize this element and use it in stronger doses to further boost cancer cell death. Now that’s one of my favorite topics–taking advantage of nature’s wisdom.

Interesting discussion here on how the financial and credit crisis in American is causing upheaval in the healthcare industry and is expected to continue to do so. Hospitals delaying construction; purchases of high technology gadgets canceled; doctors delaying retirement because of investment losses.

Good coverage on both sides of the issue–the negatives but also the positives that could come out of it. That our fascination with high-tech stuff hasn’t made the quality of care higher, so maybe we can learn to do things better instead of throwing money at them. That we have a huge number of people without insurance and therefore with little or no access to healthcare, so maybe this is a good time to institute reform. That doctors delaying retirement could mean we won’t suffer quite so soon such a shortage of general practitioners as is expected as the baby boomers age.

Also both presidential candidates claim they will not forget about their healthcare reform agendas–and one source claiming that the fact that the government just paid $600 billion to bail out Wall Street is a clear sign that health care will never receive top priority. It’ll be interesting to see what happens after the election.

If you live in one of the states that’s got a location, this sounds like it’s worth attending. The Nanotechnology Colloqium is presenting a video-conference lecture through the auspices of the University of Texas by Jan Beck, PhD–whose credentials as an expert on nanoscale engineering are impressive.

The blurb says you don’t have to know math or quantum physics to understand how the materials are made and how they act. Lots of real world examples of nano-materials in action. Read the announcement and register here–the date is Monday, October 20, from 12:00 to 1:30 CT.

In Chicago, it’ll be broadcast at Illinois Institute of Technology, Stuart Building, room 21210 West 31st Street. The rest of the locations are in Texas–congrats to Chicago for snagging a venue.

Believe it or not, a couple of the drugs you see advertised on television for asthma are actually being used in combination with other drugs as a deterrent against the slow but deadly progression of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). My mother had this difficult disease, and we watched as it progressed over the years into emphysema.

The industry-sponsored study refers to positive results with Advair’s active ingredient (salmeterol) when combined with fluticasone proprionate–reducing the loss of ability to breathe out over a year. It also gave similar positive ratings to the ingredient in Flonase (fluticasone) combined with another bronchodilator (salmeterol in Serevent).

Significantly, the study indicates that patients must have some kind of treatment and that use of corticosteroids is “unnecessary and inappropriate.” Details of the large study (5000-plus patients) here. It will be good to see followup studies that confirm the results but are conducted without the sponsorship of the drug companies.

One-third of uninsured Americans have at least one chronic disease, according to a new report from the Annals of Internal Medicine, including asthma/COPD, diabetes, heart disease, and previous cancer. It refutes suggestions that the uninsured are mainly healthy people not much in need healthcare.

Latest stats are that 43 million Americans are without insurance. The nearly 11 and a half million with chronic diseases and no way to get healthcare are much more likely to “face early disability and death as a result.” But researchers say that insurance reform will not be sufficient. That because of budget issues, optimal care is not available even to many of those who have coverage. That if resources flow to organizations that serve many vulnerable patients and quality improvements are made, that alone can “improve outcomes for the uninsured.”

Watched a Chicago angel investors’ group at work this past week. Sword Diagnostics presented the business plan and revenue projections for its new super-sensitive biomarker testing technology. The quote in their presentation is from the CEO of GE, Jeff Immelt: “Over the next decade, $250 billion in healthcare spending will shift from disease treatment to diagnosis.”

Sword uses its own version of Raman spectroscopy to get detailed readouts on not only the presence but also the levels–in many cases, even very low levels–of various biomarkers. One such is troponin in coronary artery disease, where the ability to detect its presence at earlier stages can prevent misdiagnosing unstable angina which, when missed, can lead to more deaths.

Other applications include finding low-level biomarkers for cancer in the blood–thus not sending patients home to wait for the cancer to grow big enough to test for–and being able to detect Alzheimer’s biomarkers with a blood test, thus saving patients the necessity of having a painful and intrusive lumbar punch.

Heartland Angels is helping Sword find investors, so if this sounds as good to you as it does to me–and so it seemed to several of the investors at the meeting–talk to Ron Kirschner at Heartland.

If you were a bookworm or otherwise inclined to stay inside when you were a kid, your mom may have yelled at you to get outside and play. Turns out she was right–that being outside is literally good for your health.

Vitamin D, that elusive nutrient that’s only available from sunshine and from vitamin supplements, seems to play a significant role in death rates. A study shows people tend to die sooner from all causes when their vitamin D is lower than accepted levels. How’s that for a powerful reinforcement of your mom’s prescription!

Plus, I read the other day about a test comparing how students’ hearts behaved while doing an assignment and viewing either a) a blank wall, or b) a video screen showing a nature scene, or c) an actual window onto the same natural scene. Guess what? The only situation that proved favorable to the students’ hearts was viewing the real natural scene.

So with the impending holiday weekend ahead, it’s good advice to take to heart. Getting outside’s good for it.

I’ve had a long busy couple of weeks, but today I read this and simply had to take the time to share it.

New studies in neuroscience are proving that RNA is directly moderated by environmental influences and it, in turn, moderates the expression–or non-expression–of genetic coding in our DNA. Integrative biologist Daniela Kaufer found,

“Under stress, molecules outside the genome change the RNA in new ways, trimming and rearranging it to alter gene function.”

Neuroscientist Darlene Francis couldn’t figure out why she ended up a PhD and the kids of her friends ended up in jail. So she started experimenting. For example, she takes away puppies of mother rats bred-to-be-anxious and gives them to mom rats bred-to-be-calm, and vice versa. What happens is that the kind of nurturing care the puppies get transforms them–despite their genetic makeup. The anxious-DNA pups become calm under the care of the calm moms, and the calm-DNA pups get crazy living with the anxious moms. And what’s more, they seem to pass on their newly acquired tendency to the next generation.

She’s now collaborating with scientists in molecular biology, public health, psychology, and even moral reasoning–this work is going to close the traditional chasm between hard science and softer sciences.

“Americans, Francis contends, believe that poor people are poor because they
make poor decisions. Francis believes the experience of her rats points
to something very different.”

Got this from an Utne magazine reprint of an article in the Alumni House publication of University of Berkeley.

One of our favorite multi-use substances, nitric oxide, is doing it again. This time it’s being released to work its healing magic by a new substance called iroxanadine (now being put into the works to get approved for Phase II clinical trials). A report about the study appeared recently in a financial news source online.

Given that most treatments have focused on simply preventing infection rather than effecting healing, iroxanadine could represent a whole new way to look at treating the nearly-inevitable foot sores and other problems of diabetic patients. Like stem-cell therapy, a non-invasive method that mobilizes the body’s own resources–like nitric oxide–to do the work they are fully capable of doing. The manufacturer, CytRx Corporation, says: iroxanadine promotes healing by normalizing endothelial dysfunction through the molecular chaperone amplification pathway, as well as releasing endothelial nitric oxide synthase from its negative regulator caveolin.”

Seems these days scientists are regularly experiencing breakthroughs like this. What a great time to be in the bioscience field.

A few other posts about NO: wound healing with light, stored blood helper, fighting TB…oh, there are too many. Just use the search box in the left margin.