nanotechnology

Nanomotors can now navigate inside human cells

English: Cancer cells photographed by camera a...
English: Cancer cells photographed by camera attached to microscope in time-lapse manner. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The ability to control the movement of artificial nanomotors inside a human cell has far and wide implications for finding and treating cancers and other conditions. The hope is that the technology could be developed to perform intracellular surgeries and deliver drugs noninvasively.

Researchers tried introducing nanomotors years ago, but they had to use toxic fuels to propel them and even then they wouldn’t move in biological fluids, so the approach wasn’t practical in living tissue. Now they’ve discovered how to use ultrasonic waves to get the nanomotors to move forward or spin. They can also steer them using magnetic forces. And several of the little guys can be directed to move independently within the same cell. This technique has already been shown to be able to do some damage inside a HeLa cancer cell.

Check out the article and the Fantastic-Voyage-like nanomotor video.

Science fiction does indeed come to life every day in this age of biomedical wonders.

Enhanced by Zemanta

nitric oxide

Sunshine facilitates nitric oxide flow – and lowers blood pressure

Digitales Blutdruckmessgerät / Digital Blood P...
Digitales Blutdruckmessgerät / Digital Blood Pressure Monitor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A recent experiment showed that exposing people to UV rays can measurably reduce their blood pressure. The conjecture is that the rays are promoting the transfer of nitric oxide via the skin into the circulation, thus lowering blood pressure along with risk of stroke and heart attack.

Dermatologists were quick to say this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still avoid sun exposure for fear of skin cancer. However, docs who did the experiment point out that high blood pressure, stroke and heart attack kill 80 times more people than skin cancer.

Hmm. Lower blood pressure, more relaxed = benefits of sunshine. Does this surprise anyone? How many millennia have human beings been seeking out sunny locales in which to spend their vacations?

In addition, no change was detected in the subjects’ vitamin D levels, when it’s long been a scientific claim that sunshine exposure helps raise vitamin D absorption.

Clearly, this is a small study, but it’s a good reminder that science sometimes needs to be taken with a healthy dose of common sense.

Enhanced by Zemanta

BiomedNews

Doctor’s physical exam still best diagnostic tool for heart failure prognosis

Shown is the back of a female patient with a d...
Shown is the back of a female patient with a doctor who is using a stethoscope to listen to her lungs. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s great to know that what a doctor can hear/feel in the physical exam of a patient with advanced heart failure is the best predictor of how well that patient will fare.

Despite the development of continually more sophisticated diagnostic tools, it’s comforting to know that the best guide to a patient’s prognosis is the doctor’s careful listening to and observation of four important indicators: 1) distended jugular venous distention, 2) a third heart sound, 3) rales (crackles) in the lungs, and 4) peripheral edema (swelling in the legs and ankles).

I am grateful that most doctors have some training in how to present bad news to a patient. As one of their duties, that’s gotta suck. But the hope is that patient and doctor have developed a respectful, caring relationship along the way.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

nanotechnology, nitric oxide

5 news bits – nitric oxide and nanoparticles

English: An experimental setup used to measure...
English: An experimental setup used to measure the fraction of exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) in human breath samples. The subject blows into the tube (1) after a mouthpiece (2) has been connected to it. The wires on the side measure parameters like breath velocity, while the exhaled gas is taken to a FeNO analyzer (3). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The first item is about nitric oxide (NO) used in testing, and the rest are all about using nanoparticles for delivering things into the human body, including NO. It’s astounding that scientists have found nanotechnology so helpful in these kinds of applications. I just hope more research is done on how safe it is to inject nanomaterials into our bodies or make us breathe them in. Their size is so similar to the deadly asbestos fibers that are currently costing billions in lawsuits by workers whose companies didn’t protect them from breathing and ingesting them.

Gotta make sure the cure doesn’t damage the patient in different ways than the condition it’s meant to help.

  1. Mayo Clinic officially recognizes the exhaled-nitric-oxide test to confirm asthma diagnoses and to determine how well medications are working – http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/nitric-oxide-test/basics/definition/prc-20012958
  2. Japanese researchers have found a way to use nano-sized particles to deliver nitric oxide to cells as needed – http://www.azonano.com/news.aspx?newsID=28613
  3. Government wants scientists to adapt nano-delivery systems to protect soldiers in the field from bio and chemical weapons – http://www.abqjournal.com/328885/news/dod-wants-protocell-to-protect-soldiers-2.html
  4. Nanoparticles can carry RNA gene-silencing snippet to treat breast cancer – http://www.azonano.com/news.aspx?newsID=29083
  5. Inhaled nanoparticles to carry antimicrobial meds to treat pneumonia caused by drug-resistant bacteria – http://www.nanowerk.com/nanotechnology_news/newsid=33688.php
Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

BiomedNews

New way to tell heart failure prognosis

Heart Failure causes more damage than you think
Heart Failure causes more damage than you think (Photo credit: Novartis AG)

Just a quickie on a new method for determining prognosis for heart failure patients. This study shows that measuring how the heart metabolizes energy can give docs a better way to predict who’s going to have a rough time of it and who will do better with heart failure.

Using a non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique, researchers at Johns Hopkins found they could predict clinical outcomes for heart failure very well – independent of the patient’s symptoms or the actual pumping strength of the heart.

“Having a more precise way to determine a patient’s risk would enable us to identify high-risk people earlier and tailor their treatments more specifically,” according to Robert Weiss, senior author of the study.

“And with a new target – impaired energy metabolism – we can also open the door to developing and testing new therapies for heart failure.”

Wonder how this correlates with the new studies indicating exercise that’s more strenuous (relatively speaking) looks to be beneficial for heart failure patients. Does more vigorous exercise improve the heart’s ability to metabolize energy? Sounds good to me.

Enhanced by Zemanta

BiomedNews

“First Do No Harm” film highlights med insurance shortfalls

First Do No Harm
First Do No Harm (Photo credit: edenpictures)

It wasn’t on purpose that I ended up with the movie “First Do No Harm” playing on  my computer on January 1, 2014. But the timing was convenient in the sense that today is the day a whole bunch of the 45 million Americans who previously didn’t have medical insurance will start having coverage.

The movie is about a family being torn to pieces financially and emotionally while dealing with their little boy’s epilepsy. It touches on the devastating consequences possible when medical insurance is absent or inadequate to the task for a major illness – a question this new law hopes to make obsolete now for many more in the United States.

Plus the movie touches on the powerfully important question of how blindly we are required to trust in our doctors when the treatment appears to be worse than the illness. Read my previous review of the book, Your Medical Mind, about patients feeling empowered about making choices in treating serious health challenges.

I wish for 2014 that allowing millions more Americans to gain health insurance will save more lives and improve the quality of life for millions – and will not in any important way negatively affect those who already had it. And that we all will have doctors who are open to listening when we’re confused or find new information.

Happy new year.

Enhanced by Zemanta

nanotechnology, nitric oxide

Light-triggered nanosystem delivers NO gas to cells

Nitric oxide (white) in conifer cells, visuali...
Nitric oxide (white) in conifer cells, visualized using DAF-2 DA (diaminofluorescein diacetate) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Japanese researchers have developed a new way to deliver nitric oxide (NO) gas into cells.

Nitric oxide is a workhorse in the body. It signals cells to divide, expands blood vessels and sends signals between nerve cells in the brain. Scientists believe that figuring out how NO controls all this may help them come up with new approaches to treating cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

Despite progress, it’s still a mystery just how much NO causes specific effects. “No existing technique has been able to capture what this gas is truly doing at the cellular level,” said Stephane Diring, who led the study.

By combining chemical and biological techniques the team of researchers, from Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) put together a nano-based structure called MOF for delivering NO that could release its payload to nearby cells based on how much light is delivered to it.  Kind of like an underground sprinkler system delivers water to a lawn.

The system lets them control exactly where and how much nitric oxide is delivered by tuning the intensity and wavelength of the light, according to researcher Shuhei Furukawa. Plus, the fact that the light is infrared means it won’t harm other cells.

One giant leap into understanding NO. One small step in the never-ending battle to develop non-invasive therapies.

Enhanced by Zemanta

BiomedNews

Overweight confers longer life expectancy for certain conditions

Obesity Campaign Poster
Obesity Campaign Poster (Photo credit: Pressbound)

My bee antennae shot up when I saw this honey headline: “Obese heart failure patients do better than lean ones.” A decent-sized study (8000 patients) done over 3 years by Yale University School of Medicine, showed a protective effect for heart failure patients who were overweight or obese.

Being someone who tips the scale somewhat beyond the guidelines, as well as a person with heart failure, I’m happy to read this. Apparently, doctors are stumped about it and speculating all over the place as to what this might mean.

Here’s an in-depth article on how obese patients with certain CV conditions actually have better short- and long-term prognoses. http://content.onlinejacc.org/article.aspx?articleid=1139724 The CV conditions include hypertension, coronary heart disease, heart failure and peripheral artery disease. In addition, a significant number of non-cardiovascular conditions seem to exhibit the same “obesity paradox.” They include being elderly or having end-stage renal disease with dialysis, advanced cancers, COPD (chronic obstructive lung disease), rheumatoid arthritis, or HIV/AIDS.

In other words, data show that being overweight or even obese seems inescapably to be conferring a protective effect on people with many different conditions. The article speculates on why this might be. What I think from a quick read (and of course with no medical training) is that it’s simply pointing out all the many ways in which the verdict is still out regarding some of medicine’s long-held beliefs about diseases and conditions.

And just to throw another spanner in, check out the “new German medicine” approach that posits that severe emotional shocks can lead to diseases like cancer – and that such conditions can and do spontaneously heal themselves if we let them alone.

Let’s face it. For more than a few health issues, we just don’t have all the information yet.

Enhanced by Zemanta

nanotechnology, nitric oxide, stem cells

Heart cells’ unique communication opens new paths for heart failure research

English: Treatment Guidelines for Chronic Hear...
English: Treatment Guidelines for Chronic Heart Failure (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Research into how the heart communicates is yielding some fascinating insights. A recent study with mice has shown that the heart’s cells receive signals from the nervous system, but then the heart initiates its own way of passing on signals to other heart cells. The results could lead to novel ways to study the mechanisms of heart failure – where the system that speeds up and slows down the heart gets out of whack and results in the heart’s being unable to pump enough blood to the muscles.

What heart cells use to send messages to other heart cells is the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (ACh). The study used mice whose heart cells only had been engineered not to release ACh. Their heart rates remained normal at rest but went much higher than usual rates during exercise and their hearts took much longer to return to normal after exercise. “The results suggest the heart cell derived ACh may boost parasympathetic signaling to counterbalance sympathetic activity.”

The researcher thinks this heart-critical non-neuronal source of ACh might also play a role in other organs. This study was supported by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

BiomedNews

New gene therapy for heart damage goes to clinical trial

English: Coronary circulation, with coronary a...
English: Coronary circulation, with coronary arteries labeled in red text and other landmarks in blue text. This vector graphics image was originally created with Adobe Illustrator, and modified with Inkscape. 32px|alt=W3C|link=http://validator.w3.org/? The source code of this SVG is valid. Category:Valid SVG (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Researchers at Saint Louis University have had such promising results from a small (40 patients) earlier study using gene therapy for repairing heart failure damage that they’re now instituting a clinical trial.  The trial will use a genetically targeted regulatory protein replacement therapy to see how well it can repair damage in 200 patients who’ve either had a prior heart attack or have cardiomyopathy or advanced heart failure.

The therapy involves infusing a gene – a type of regulatory protein called SERCA-2a – down the coronary arteries that may help heart cells utilize calcium better, which is similar to an engine getting better gas mileage. This outpatient procedure is performed in a cardiac catheterization lab and aims to increase the level of SERCA-2a, which is reduced in the individual heart muscle cells in patients with heart failure and can thereby change the way those cells function.

Worldwide 52 sites will participate in the trial, 33 in the U.S.  To participate in the trial, please contact the Cardiology Research Office at Saint Louis University at 314-577-8876. Read the original article here.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Looking at how bioscience news affects business, higher education, government – and you and me