Research

Genome of the Blood-Sucking Hookworm Decoded

Scientists have decoded the genome of a lowly, blood-sucking hookworm, an advance they say could lead to cures for hookworm infection, a painful condition afflicting more than 700 million people worldwide, mostly in underdeveloped countries.

But the worm’s unique relationship with the human immune system means the new findings may also provide insights into treating autoimmune diseases rampant in the United States, such as inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, asthma and allergies.

An international team of scientists focused on one of the two main hookworm species that affects humans, Necator americanus. These parasites start their lives in soil, and enter the human body through the foot, where they embark on a fantastic voyage through the blood vessels, to the heart, then into the lungs and trachea before being coughed up and swallowed and carried to their final home in the small intestine.

Once in the intestines, the centimeter-long worms can live for up to five years, mating and producing 10,000 eggs daily. They feed on blood, so much so that an infected person can become iron deficient through blood loss. For children, infection can stunt growth and cause severe cognitive deficits.

The decoded genome of Necator americanus, published today (Jan. 19) in the journal Nature Genetics, may reveal an Achilles heel — a pathway for a vaccine or drug that could either kill the worms, thwart their reproduction, or minimize the damage of their infestation.

“We now have a more complete picture of just how this worm invades the body, begins feeding on the blood, and successfully evades the host immune defenses,” said Dr. Makedonka Mitreva of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, senior author on the report, which included researchers in Australia, Singapore and Brazil.

Hookworm disease is endemic through much of the warm, rural world where people lack indoor plumbing, and is particularly common in poorer regions where children have no shoes to protect their feet. Hookworm disease was once prevalent in the southern United States, and was a major public health concern there as recently as the 1940s.

Hookworm infection is not deadly for most people, although newborns and pregnant women may die from infection. However, its reoccurring nature takes its toll in the form of chronic anemia and lassitude, leading to slow learning among children, low productivity among affected working adults, and a continuation of the cycle of poverty.

Deworming drugs are available, and are often relatively inexpensive, but their repeated and excessive use is leading to drug resistance in some regions.

Improved sanitation and use of shoes are proven to reduce infections, as was shown in the American rural south. Yet in desperately poor regions of the world, new drugs or a one-time vaccine would be a godsend.

Such treatments could arise from research on the decoded hookworm genome, Mitreva said.

The study of the hookworm could lead to treatments of other diseases as well.

One of the silver linings of chronic worm infection is that the vigorous workout it gives the immune system of an infected person is associated with a reduced risk of allergies and autoimmune conditions. Indeed, helminthic therapy —deliberately infecting a person with helminths, a group of parasites that include hookworms, tapeworms, and roundworms — recently has shown progress in the treatment of Crohn’s disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disease, as well as other immune-mediated diseases.

As part of decoding of the Necator americanus genome, the researchers identified a group of molecules that appears to protect the worm from detection by the host immune system. Hookworms evade notice by suppressing molecules that promote inflammation. This very same approach, the researchers wrote, may prove valuable in the treatment of autoimmune conditions.

“It is our hope that the new research can be used as a springboard, not just to control hookworm infections, but to identify anti-inflammatory molecules that have the potential to advance new therapies for autoimmune and allergic diseases,” Mitreva said.

Necator americanus and its hookworm cousin, Ancylostoma duodenale, also can infect dogs and cats. And under certain conditions, your pet’s hookworms could infect you, for example, if the pet feces in your backyard contain the worm’s eggs, and soil conditions are right.

Source: Yahoo news

Belgian researchers use groundbreaking surgery to repair bones

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Belgian medical researchers have succeeded in repairing bones using stem cells from fatty tissue, with a new technique they believe could become a benchmark for treating a range of bone disorders.

The team at the Saint Luc university clinic hospital in Brussels have treated 11 patients, eight of them children, with fractures or bone defects that their bodies could not repair, and a spin-off is seeking investors to commercialize the discovery.

Doctors have for years harvested stem cells from bone marrow at the top of the pelvis and injected them back into the body to repair bone.

The ground-breaking technique of Saint Luc’s centre for tissue and cellular therapy is to remove a sugar cube sized piece of fatty tissue from the patient, a less invasive process than pushing a needle into the pelvis and with a stem cell concentration they say is some 500 times higher.

The stem cells are then isolated and used to grow bone in the laboratory. Unlike some technologies, they are also not attached to a solid and separate ‘scaffold’.

“Normally you transplant only cells and you cross your fingers that it functions,” the centre’s coordinator Denis Dufrane told Reuters television.

His work has been published in Biomaterials journal and was presented at an annual meeting of the International Federation for Adipose Therapeutics and Science (IFATS) in New York in November.

BONE FORMATION

“It is complete bone tissue that we recreate in the bottle and therefore when we do transplants in a bone defect or a bone hole…you have a higher chance of bone formation.”

The new material in a lab dish resembles more plasticine than bone, but can be molded to fill a fracture, rather like a dentist’s filling in a tooth, hardening in the body.

Some of those treated have included people recovering from tumors that had to be removed from bones. One 13-year-old boy, with a fracture and disorder that rendered him unable to repair bone, could resume sports within 14 months of treatment.

“Our hope is to propose this technology directly in emergency rooms to reconstitute bones when you have a trauma or something like that,” Dufrane said.

A spin-off founded last year called Novadip Biosciences will seek to commercialize the treatment, initially to allow spinal fusion among elderly people with degenerated discs.

It may also seek to create a bank of bone tissue from donors rather than the patients themselves.

IFATS president Marco Helder, based at Amsterdam’s VU university medical centre, said the novelty was the lack of solid scaffold.

“It is interesting and it is new, but it will have limitations regarding load-bearing capacity and, as with other implants, it will need to connect to the blood vessels of the body rapidly to avoid dying off,” he said, adding:

“Any foreign object can cause irritation and problems, so the fact that this is just host tissue would be an advantage.”

Source: Top News Today

Sperm robots on way to deliver babies

Apart from their natural act, sperms are set to be used as biological motors for transporting drugs, genes and other sperms to help treat infertility and other issues.

Called spermbots – sperms turned into micro-robots – they could be controlled from outside a patient’s body to deliver drugs, and even sperm itself, to parts of the body where it is needed, says a path-breaking research.

Researchers at Dresden Institute for Integrative Nanosciences in Germany are looking for a way to propel micro-robots through bodily fluids safely.

“We thought of using a powerful biological motor to do the job instead and we came up with the flagella of a sperm cell, which is physiologically less problematic,” professor Oliver G Schmidt, director of the institute, was quoted as saying in Gizmag.com that covers new and emerging technologies.

To create these tiny robots, scientists designed microtubes, which are thin sheets of titanium and iron rolled into conical tubes and having a magnetic property.

They put the microtubes into a solution in a Petri dish and added bovine sperm cells, which are similar size to human sperm, said the report.

When a live sperm entered the wider end of the tube, it became trapped near the narrow end.

The scientists also closed the wider end, so the sperm wouldn’t swim out.

The trapped cell pushed against the tube, moving it forward.

Then, the scientists used a magnetic field to guide the tube in the direction they wanted it to go, relying on the sperm for the propulsion, the report said.

Source: Times of India

Stem cell breakthrough explains how breast cancer spreads

Breast cancer stem cells exist in two different states and each state plays a role in how cancer spreads, a new study has revealed.

Study’s senior author Max S. Wicha from University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center said the lethal part of cancer is its metastasis so understanding how metastasis occurs is critical.

“We have evidence that cancer stem cells are responsible for metastasis – they are the seeds that mediate cancer’s spread. Now we’ve discovered how the stem cells do this,” Wicha said.

First, on the outside of the tumor, a type of stem cell exists in a state called the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) state. These stem cells appear dormant but are very invasive and able to get into the bloodstream, where they travel to distant parts of the body.

Once there, the stem cells transition to a second state that displays the opposite characteristics, called the mesenchymal-epithelial transition state (MET). These cells are capable of growing and making copies of themselves, producing new tumors.

The study looked specifically at breast cancer stem cells but the researchers believe the findings likely have implications for other cancer types as well.

The study was published in the journal of Stem Cell Reports.

Source: ANI

 

Gene therapy reverses blinding eye disease

An experimental therapy for a blinding eye disease showed early – and surprising – promise when it improved the vision of patients in an early trial that was only supposed to test its safety, doctors reported Wednesday.

The experimental gene therapy not only stopped the steady degeneration of the patients’ vision, but appears to have reversed some of the damage. And the effects have lasted two years in one case, British researchers report in the Lancet medical journal.

Wayne Thompson of Staffordshire in Britain saw the stars for the first time in years after being treated in April.

“One night in the summer, my wife called me outside as it was a particularly starry evening. As I looked up, I was amazed that I was able to see a few stars,” Thompson, 43, said in a statement.

“I hadn’t seen stars for a long, long time,” he added.

“It is still too early to know if the gene therapy treatment will last indefinitely, but we can say that the vision improvements have been maintained for as long as we have been following up the patients, which is two years in one case,” says Dr. Robert MacLaren of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology at the University of Oxford, who leads the research team.

“In truth, we did not expect to see such dramatic improvements in visual acuity and so we contacted both patients’ home opticians to get current and historical data on their vision in former years, long before the gene therapy trial started. These readings confirmed exactly what we had seen,” he added in a statement.

The men taking part in the trial all have choroideremia, a genetic disease that causes vision to start breaking down when patients are still children. The defective gene, called CHM, is on the x chromosome, so it almost exclusively affects males – females have an extra x chromosome that usually makes up for any lost function. It causes about 4 percent of all cases of blindness, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The condition breaks down various parts of the retina, the reflective tissue at the back of the eye that collects light and images. The gene therapy approach uses a virus to carry a corrective gene directly into the retina.

Gene therapy itself has a mixed record – it’s harder than scientists thought to safely deliver new genes into the body. And there is no guarantee that the patient’s cells will accept the new gene and use it.

But the eye is a good place to try, in part because doctors can see the effects in real time, and also because one eye can be treated and the other eye used to compare results.

“I think that this is a very important study,” said Dr. Richard Weleber, professor of ophthalmology who is leading a team at Oregon Health and Science University trying gene therapy to treat Usher Syndrome.

MacLaren’s trial was meant to be a stage 1 safety trial, designed simply to show that the treatment did no harm. But the six patients in the trial said they noticed improvements quickly.

“This has huge implications for anyone with a genetic retinal disease such as age-related macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa, because it has for the first time shown that gene therapy can be applied safely before the onset of vision loss,” MacLaren said.

He says nine patients have now had one eye treated with the gene therapy in operations at the Oxford Eye Hospital. The patients had varying degrees of vision loss, but MacLaren thinks the best course will be to treat people when they are young, before much damage has been done.

“If we were able to treat people early, get them in their teens or late childhood, we’d be getting the virus in before their vision is lost,” he said. “If the treatment works, we would be able to prevent them from going blind.”

Weleber, who says his own gene therapy trial is moving along but who could not release details, says MaCLaren’s surgical technique may have helped the therapy work more successfully. MacLaren’s team lifted an area called the macula to deliver the engineered viruses directly into the tissue that needed correcting.

Last year, researchers reported success against a different genetic disease causing blindness , one called Leber congenital amaurosis. But even though the patients’ vision improved, the eye continued to deteriorate.

“Each type (of genetic disease) needs to be tested separately,” Weleber said.

Gene therapy also works to some degree against blood cancers and immune diseases.

Last year, doctors reported they had successfully treated the first children in the U.S. for severe combined immune deficiency or SCID, sometimes known as “bubble boy” disease. Like choroideremia, SCID is caused by a mutated recessive gene, meaning children must inherit a defective copy from each parent to show symptoms.

Gene therapy has helped 26 of 59 two patients with a form of cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia go into remission after a type of gene therapy treatment that programmed immune system cells to hunt down and kill the leukemia cells. And last year doctors reported 24 people with acute lymphocytic leukemia got at least temporary remission after gene therapy.

Source: nbc news

Positive thinking may increase effectiveness of migraine drugs

Headache_Use

Boston researchers recruited 66 migraine patients in an attempt to quantify how much of their pain relief came from a medication and how much was due to what’s called the placebo effect, the healing power of positive belief.

More than 450 headaches later, they reported Wednesday that it’s important for doctors to carefully choose what they tell patients about a powerful medicine – because the message could help enhance its benefits, or blunt them.

“Every word you say counts, not only every gram of the medication,” said Harvard professor Ted Kaptchuk, who led the new study with a team at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital.

Here’s how it worked. First, the patients who suffer regular migraines agreed to forgo pain relievers for several hours during one attack, recording their symptoms for comparison with later headaches.

Then for each of their next six migraines, the patients were given a different pill inside an envelope with a different message. Sometimes they were told it was an effective migraine drug named rizatriptan, a positive message. Other times they were told it was a placebo, a dummy pill, suggesting no benefit. Still other times they were told the pill could be either one, a neutral message.

Sometimes the doctor’s message was true – they were told they got rizatriptan and they really did. Sometimes it was false because researchers had secretly switched the pills.

Mixing up the possibilities allowed researchers to tease out how the same person’s pain relief differed from migraine to migraine as his or her expectations changed.

Of course the real migraine drug worked far better than the dummy pill. But remarkably, people who knew they were taking a placebo still reported less pain than when they’d left their migraine untreated, the researchers found.

The surprise: Patients’ reports of pain relief more than doubled when they were told the migraine drug was real than when they were told, falsely, that it was a fake, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

In fact, people reported nearly as much pain relief when they took a placebo that they thought was the real drug as they did when they took the migraine drug while believing it was a fake.

“The more we gave a positive message to the patient, the bigger the placebo effect was,” Kaptchuk said.

He said that effect probably isn’t purely psychological, saying the ritual of taking a medication may trigger some subconscious memory that could leave people feeling better even if they knew they’d taken a fake drug.

Scientists have long known that some people report noticeable improvements in pain and certain other symptoms when they’re given a placebo, which can be a sugar pill or sham surgery or some other benign intervention. Some studies even have documented that a placebo actually can spark a biological effect.

But scientists don’t know why the placebo effect works or how to harness its potential benefit.

The new research is an interesting attempt to answer some of those questions, at least for one kind of pain, said Dr. Mark Stacy, vice dean for clinical research at Duke University Medical Center, who wasn’t involved with the work. And learning how much of an impact it makes could help design better studies of new drugs, to ensure the phenomenon doesn’t skew the results, he added.

For now, it shows “the power of positive thinking may be helpful in taking care of your migraine,” he said

Source: airing news

New surgical ‘smart patch’ for shoulder injury to be tested

An innovative ‘surgical patch’ that promotes rapid regrowth of tendon tissue could transform the success of shoulder repair operations.

The patch will be used by surgeons to repair torn tendon tissue, and patient trials are expected to begin this year.

Made from a new material developed by a team of surgeons, engineers and biochemists in Oxford, the ‘smart patch’ promotes rapid regrowth of damaged tissue ensuring the injury heals more quickly and more successfully.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, and is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Unit and the Medical Research Council.

Andy Carr, an Oxford University Hospitals surgeon and Nuffield Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Oxford, led the development of the patch. It has been designed to repair damage to the rotator cuff, the group of tendons and muscles that controls movement of the shoulder.

More than 10,000 rotator cuff repairs are performed in the UK each year (more than 300,000 are performed in the US), and the group’s own research has shown that between 25% and 50% will fail to heal properly.

‘Around a third of the population will suffer from shoulder pain due to tendon disease at some time in their life, making it the third most common musculoskeletal complaint,’ said Professor Carr of the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences at Oxford University.

‘This type of injury will not kill you but it can seriously affect your quality of life. Patients are often in a lot of pain, with severely restricted movement. In some cases it can affect your livelihood and in older people it can affect independence. This will become more and more of a problem as the population ages and the retirement age is increased.’

Professor Carr said the failure rate of surgery was due to the fact that the body was failing to repair properly after surgery. To improve the outcomes of surgery, the team have designed a material that mimics the normal environment that cells require in order to mount a successful repair.

He added: ‘The key to the new patch is creating a composite of two material layers. One layer is a very fine “nanoscale” synthetic mesh that is recognised by cells and which promotes growth of new tissue. Our patch provides the physical cues needed for normal growth and development.

‘However, because this fine mesh is relatively flimsy, a second woven layer of thicker strands is bonded to it to provide strength. This stronger layer means the scaffold can be sutured in position by a surgeon. It also protects the repair during the six to eight weeks required for tissue healing.’

new shoulder

 

An additional and important feature is that the scaffold degrades and is absorbed by the body after three to six months, leavin

g no foreign material in the long term.

With an expected price tag of less that £1,500, the new patch could offer effective treatment at a fraction of the cost of alternatives such as the use of stem cells or growth factors. Given the increasing number of operations being carried out, this will be a significant consideration.

Professor Carr said: ‘One of the great strengths here in Oxford is having clinicians, engineers, biochemists and other specialists working together across the partnership between the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. This multidisciplinary approach means that when unsolved clinical problems are identified we can investigate the cause, then develop a solution, before returning to clinic to test if it helps patients. It’s a bedside to bench and back again journey.’

Patient trials of the new patch are set to begin next year. Professor Carr added: ‘If successful, the patch has the potential to be adapted for use in other tissue repair operations such as heart surgery, hernia repair, bladder repair and the treatment of early arthritis.’

Source: University of Oxford

Ear Acupuncture May Hold Promise for Weight Loss

Placing five acupuncture needles in the outer ear may help people lose that spare tire, researchers report.

Ear acupuncture therapy is based on the theory that the outer ear represents all parts of the body. One type uses one needle inserted into the area that is linked to hunger and appetite, while the other involves inserting five needles at different key points in the ear.

“If the trend we found is supported by other studies, the hunger acupuncture point is a good choice in terms of convenience. However, for patients suffering from central obesity, continuous stimulation of five acupuncture points should be used,” said lead researcher Sabina Lim, from the department of meridian and acupuncture in the Graduate College of Basic Korean Medical Science at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea.

According to Lim, the effectiveness of acupuncture on obese patients is closely related to metabolic function. “Increased metabolic function promotes the consumption of body fat, overall, resulting in weight loss,” she said.

The report was published online Dec. 16 in the journal Acupuncture in Medicine.

Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, said, “We must avoid rushing to judge that a treatment is ineffective just because we don’t understand the mechanism. Rather, if a treatment is genuinely effective, it invites us to figure out the mechanism.”

But this study does not prove the effectiveness of acupuncture, he said. “Placebo effects are strong, particularly when they involve needles. The evidence here falls short of proof,” Katz said.

According to the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, results from the few studies on acupuncture and weight loss have been mixed.

In one study, researchers examined the effect of ear acupuncture with sham acupuncture on obese women. “Researchers found no statistical difference in body weight, body-mass index and waist circumference between the acupuncture group and placebo,” said Katy Danielson, a spokeswoman for the center.

For this latest study, Lim and her colleagues compared acupuncture of five points on the outer ear with one-point acupuncture. They randomly assigned 91 overweight people to five-point acupuncture, one-point acupuncture (hunger) or sham (placebo) treatment.

During the eight weeks of the study, participants were told to follow a restrictive diet, but not a weight-loss diet. They were not supposed to increase their exercise.

Those who received five-point acupuncture had needles placed 2 millimeters deep in one outer ear taped in place and kept there for a week. Then the same treatment was applied to the other ear. The process was repeated over eight weeks.

Other patients received similar treatment with one needle or with sham acupuncture where the needles were removed immediately after insertion.

source: webmd

New technique enables patient with ‘Word Blindness’ to read again

In the journal Neurology, researchers report a novel technique that enables a patient with “word blindness” to read again.

Word blindness is a rare neurological condition. (The medical term is “alexia without agraphia.”) Although a patient can write and understand the spoken word, the patient is unable to read.

The article is written by Jason Cuomo, Dr Murray Flaster and Dr Jose Biller of Loyola University Medical Centre.

Here’s how the technique works: When shown a word, the patient looks at the first letter. Although she clearly sees it, she cannot recognize it. So beginning with the letter A, she traces each letter of the alphabet over the unknown letter until she gets a match. For example, when shown the word Mother, she will trace the letters of the alphabet, one at a time, until she comes to M and finds a match. Three letters later, she guesses correctly that the word is Mother.

“To see this curious adaption in practice is to witness the very unique and focal nature” of the deficit, the authors write.

The authors describe how word blindness came on suddenly to a 40-year-old kindergarten teacher and reading specialist. She couldn’t make sense of her lesson plan, and her attendance sheet was as incomprehensible as hieroglyphs. She also couldn’t tell time.

The condition was due to a stroke that probably was caused by an unusual type of blood vessel inflammation within the brain called primary central nervous system angiitis.

Once a passionate reader, she was determined to learn how to read again. But none of the techniques that she had taught her students — phonics, sight words, flash cards, writing exercises, etc — worked. So she taught herself a remarkable new technique that employed tactile skills that she still possessed.

The woman can have an emotional reaction to a word, even if she can’t read it. Shown the word “dessert,” she says, “Oooh, I like that.” But when shown “asparagus,” she says, “Something’s upsetting me about this word.”

Shown two personal letters that came in the mail, she correctly determined which was sent by a friend of her mother’s and which was sent by one of her own friends. “When asked who these friends were, she could not say, but their names nevertheless provoked an emotional response that served as a powerful contextual clue,” the authors write.

What she most misses is reading books to children. She teared up as she told the authors: “One day my mom was with the kids in the family, and they were all curled up next to each other, and they were reading. And I started to cry, because that was something I couldn’t do.”

Source: India medical times

‘Sticky balls’ may stop cancer spreading

Cancer-killing “sticky balls” can destroy tumour cells in the blood and may prevent cancers spreading, early research suggests.

The most dangerous and deadly stage of a tumour is when it spreads around the body.

Scientists at Cornell University, in the US, have designed nanoparticles that stay in the bloodstream and kill migrating cancer cells on contact.

They said the impact was “dramatic” but there was “a lot more work to be done”.

One of the biggest factors in life expectancy after being diagnosed with cancer is whether the tumour has spread to become a metastatic cancer.

“About 90% of cancer deaths are related to metastases,” said lead researcher Prof Michael King.

They attached a cancer-killing protein called Trail, which has already been used in cancer trials, and other sticky proteins to tiny spheres or nanoparticles.

When these sticky spheres were injected into the blood, they latched on to white blood cells.

Tests showed that in the rough and tumble of the bloodstream, the white blood cells would bump into any tumour cells which had broken off the main tumour and were trying to spread.

The report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed the resulting contact with the Trail protein then triggered the death of the tumour cells.

Prof King told the BBC: “The data shows a dramatic effect: it’s not a slight change in the number of cancer cells.

“The results are quite remarkable actually, in human blood and in mice. After two hours of blood flow, they [the tumour cells] have literally disintegrated.”

He believes the nanoparticles could be used used before surgery or radiotherapy, which can result in tumour cells being shed from the main tumour.

It could also be used in patients with very aggressive tumours to prevent them spreading.

However, much more safety testing in mice and larger animals will be needed before any attempt at a human trial is made.

So far the evidence suggests the system has no knock-on effect for the immune system and does not damage other blood cells or the lining of blood vessels.

But Prof King cautioned: “There’s a lot of work to be done. Various breakthroughs are needed before this could be a benefit to patients.”

Source: BBC news