But those don’t address the electrical circuitry at work in the brain, which scientists hope will provide a more precise option for treatment.
“We’ve focused a lot on the chemical side, because in the mid-20th century, we began to develop the first medications that affected neurotransmitters,” said Dr. Darin Dougherty, director of the division of neurotherapeutics and the department of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. “The other side, the electrical, that’s been less exploited as a treatment potential.”
Dougherty and others are working to change that. With funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, scientists are working to build new ways to treat psychiatric disorders, like PTSD, through deeper understandings of the electrical signals in our brains.
A light-activated injectable device that could eventually be used to stimulate nerve cells and manipulate the behavior of muscles and organs has been developed.
Investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have identified a natural molecular pathway that enables cells to burn off calories as heat rather than store them as fat. This raises the possibility of a new approach to treating and preventing obesity, diabetes, and other obesity-linked metabolic disorders including cancer.
Reporting in an online publication by the journal Cell, scientists led by Bruce Spiegelman, PhD, director of the Center for Energy Metabolism and Chronic Disease at Dana-Farber, and professor of cell biology and medicine at Harvard Medical School, discovered the mechanism in energy-burning brown and beige fat cells in mice. They identified an enzyme, PM20D1, which is secreted by the cells and triggers the production of compounds called N-acyl amino acids. These N-acyl amino acids “uncouple” fat burning from other metabolic processes, allowing for weight loss. Such “uncouplers” were known as synthetic chemicals but this is the first known natural small molecule with uncoupling activity.
When they injected the N-acyl amino acids into obese mice which ate a high-fat diet, the researchers noted significant weight loss after eight days of treatment. The weight loss was entirely in fatty tissue.
One of the biggest challenges in treating brain cancer has been getting drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier and attack tumours where they’re needed.
But scientists say they’ve now developed a truly soluble liquid aspirin that can make its way into the brain, and, in the lab at least, kill cancerous glioblastoma cells without harming healthy brain tissue.
The research hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal as yet, so we need to take it with a big pinch of salt for now. But scientists from the Brain Tumour Research Centre at the University of Portsmouth in the UK just presented it at the Brain Tumours 2016 conference in Poland.
3D printing has has a presence in the medical industry since the 1980s for modelling body parts that are otherwise untouchable without invasive surgery, but research into the potential of this technology is bringing clinicians closer to getting a good look up close at the real thing. Instead of scans, what about injecting a camera no bigger than a grain of salt into your patient?
A group of German researchers have been working on a complex lens system that is small enough to fit inside a syringe, and applications aren’t just limited to the medical industry. They have the potential to also be used in many products which need parts to be as small and light as possible, such as drones and smart phones.
Two interconnected brain areas — the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex — help us to know where we are and to remember it later. By studying these brain areas, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute have uncovered new information about how dysfunction of this circuit may contribute to memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease. Their results appear in Cell Reports.
“We created a new mouse model in which we showed that spatial memory decays when the entorhinal cortex is not functioning properly,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Joanna Jankowsky, associate professor of neuroscience at Baylor. “I think of the entorhinal area as a funnel. It takes information from other sensory cortices — the parts of the brain responsible for vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste — and funnels it into the hippocampus. The hippocampus then binds this disparate information into a cohesive memory that can be reactivated in full by recalling only one part. But the hippocampus also plays a role in spatial navigation by telling us where we are in the world. These two functions converge in the same cells, and our study set out to examine this duality.”
The new mouse model was genetically engineered to carry a particular surface receptor on the cells of the entorhinal cortex. When this receptor was activated by administering the drug ivermectin to the mice, the cells of the entorhinal cortex silenced their activity. They stopped funnelling information to the hippocampus. This system allowed the scientists to turn off the entorhinal cortex, and to determine how this affected hippocampal function.
A drink containing liquid aspirin could extend the lives of thousands of brain cancer patients, according to breakthrough research.
British experts have found that the simple drug can cross the ‘blood-brain barrier’ — a hurdle which has so far stopped cancer drugs attacking brain tumours.
Scientists will today announce the results of early tests which show liquid aspirin is ten times more effective than any existing chemotherapy at killing brain cancer cells.
With this enabling technology, real time information can be applied to devices monitoring heart fibrillation as well as glucose monitoring for diabetics.
This new radio, designed by Graduate Student Research Assistant Yao Shi, can transmit information from inside the body up to one foot to a data base receiver, more than 5 times the distance from any known radio of equal size.
ABOUT THE PROFESSORS David Blaauw received his B.S. from Duke University in 1986 and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1991. From 1993 until August 2001, he worked for Motorola, Inc. in Austin, TX, where he was the manager of the High Performance Design Technology group. Since August 2001, he has been on the faculty at the University of Michigan where he is currently a full Professor. His work has focused on VLSI design with particular emphasis on adaptive and low power design.
David D. Wentzloff received the B.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1999, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 2002 and 2007, respectively. Since August, 2007 he has been with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on RF integrated circuits, with an emphasis on ultra-low power design.
Different species of animals either live a very long time or do not die of old age. Some cases are the tortoise & lobster species that live to be over 130 years old naturally and don’t usually die unless they get sick or are killed.
After we grow up our cells ultimately stop self-replicating. A researcher named Leonard Hayflick figured out that each of our cells divide around 50 times and then they stop. Once all of our cells stop duplicating we start to deteriorate and then ultimately die. This finding showed that we are in fact programmed to die biologically.
