Gel

Gel lowers blood clot risk for breast cancer patients

Gel lowers blood clot risk for breast cancer patients

A gel form of a popular drug taken orally to prevent breast cancer has brought cheers for such patients as this can reduce the growth of cancer cells with minimum side effects.

Tamoxifen is an oral drug that is used for breast cancer prevention and as therapy for non-invasive breast cancer and invasive cancer.

Since the gel form of the drug is absorbed through the skin directly into breast tissue, blood levels of the drug are much lower and it minimises dangerous side effects like blood clots and uterine cancer, researchers said.

“Delivering the drug though a gel, if proven effective in larger trials, could potentially replace oral tamoxifen for breast cancer prevention and encourage many more women to take it,” said lead author Seema Khan, a surgical oncologist from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

The gel was tested on women diagnosed with the non-invasive cancer ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) in which abnormal cells multiply and form a growth in a milk duct. Because of potential side effects, many women with DCIS are reluctant to take oral tamoxifen.

The new study involved 26 women, ages 45 to 86, who had been diagnosed with DCIS that was sensitive to estrogen. Half the women received the gel which they applied daily and half the oral drug, which they took daily.

The gel minimised exposure to the rest of the body and concentrated the drug in the breast where it is needed. “There was very little drug in the bloodstream in women who used gel which should avoid potential blood clots as well as an elevated risk for uterine cancer,” Khan noted.

The paper was published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

Source; Business standard

Nepal’s miracle gel saves newborns from infection

Sangita Shrestha desperately waits in a hospital bed to see the baby girl she has just delivered. In the next room, a nurse applies a gel to the stump of the newborn’s umbilical cord, wraps her in cloth and places her in a cot next to her mother.

“I was naturally worried and getting impatient. Now I am happy to know that my daughter is safe from infection,” 18-year-old Shrestha said at the Dhulikhel hospital, 30 km (19 miles) east of Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.

The baby was briefly separated from her mother when an antiseptic gel known as “Navi Malam”, or chlorhexidine, was applied to avoid umbilical cord infection – a main cause of newborn deaths in the impoverished Himalayan nation.

Made by local firm Lomus Pharmaceuticals and backed by the government, the U.S. aid agency and other donors, the gel was introduced in 2011 in hospitals across Nepal and has helped to reduce the number of babies dying from umbilical cord infection.

Trials have shown a 23 percent drop in newborn deaths due to infection since the gel was introduced, according to USAID.

Nepal was the first country to adopt chlorhexidine for newborn cord care, with Nigeria and Madagascar in the process of implementing it in their health programs.

“The United States will work to bring the chlorhexidine to the world,” Rajiv Shah, the head of USAID, said during a visit to Nepal last month while presenting the government with the “Pioneers Prize” for leading the cord care program.

TABOOS AND HURDLES

Nepal emerged from a decade-long civil war in 2006 and political infighting since then has deepened the economic woes of its 27 million people, a quarter of whom live on less than $1.25 a day. The crisis has hit development efforts, driving thousands of young people to seek work abroad.

Experts say Nepal’s public health sector is in tatters, with fewer than 2,000 doctors and some 63,000 health workers at about 100 hospitals. Many of the country’s 4,000 villages do not have a health facility and nearly two-thirds of babies are born at home without the presence of skilled midwives.

Part of the reason for the high number of newborn deaths, experts say, is because pregnancy in the majority-Hindu nation is attached with taboos that confront women with social and religious hurdles to safe delivery.

Many women cannot discuss pregnancy with anyone or take a decision to seek medical help without the family’s consent.

Families often apply a paste of turmeric powder, mustard oil and ash to the newborn after cutting the umbilical cord, raising the risk of infection and death.

The newborn and the mother are considered “unholy” for 11 days after delivery and often have to live in a dark, cold and unhygienic room with the mother lacking a nutritious diet.

Government officials say many people are still unaware that they should go to health facilities and seek the assistance of skilled birth attendants.

“But things are gradually changing,” said Baburam Marasini, a senior Health Ministry official. “The use of the simple technology and the low-cost naval gel has made a positive impact in reducing newborn deaths due to infection.”

Source: Reuters

New sponge-like gel steers tooth formation

Inspired by this embryonic induction mechanism, Ingber and Basma Hashmi, a Ph.D. candidate at SEAS who is the lead author of the current paper, set out to develop a way to engineer artificial teeth by creating a tissue-friendly material that accomplishes the same goal. Specifically, they wanted a porous sponge-like gel that could be impregnated with mesenchymal cells, then, when implanted into the body, induced to shrink in 3D to physically compact the cells inside it.

To develop such a material, Ingber and Hashmi teamed up with researchers led by Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., a Wyss Institute Core Faculty member who leads the Institute’s Adaptive Materials Technologies platform. Aizenberg is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at SEAS and Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University.

They chemically modified a special gel-forming polymer called PNIPAAm that scientists have used to deliver drugs to the body’s tissues. PNIPAAm gels have an unusual property: they contract abruptly when they warm.

But they do this at a lukewarm temperature, whereas the researchers wanted them to shrink specifically at 37°C — body temperature — so that they’d squeeze their contents as soon as they were injected into the body. Hashmi worked with Lauren Zarzar, Ph.D., a former SEAS graduate student who’s now a postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for more than a year, modifying PNIPAAm and testing the resulting materials. Ultimately, they developed a polymer that forms a tissue-friendly gel with two key properties: cells stick to it, and it compresses abruptly when warmed to body temperature.

As an initial test, Hashmi implanted mesenchymal cells in the gel and warmed it in the lab. Sure enough, when the temperature reached 37°C, the gel shrank within 15 minutes, causing the cells inside the gel to round up, shrink, and pack tightly together.

“The reason that’s cool is that the cells are alive,” Hashmi said. “Usually when this happens, cells are dead or dying.”

Not only were they alive — they activated three genes that drive tooth formation.

To see if the shrinking gel also worked its magic in the body, Hashmi worked with Mammoto to load mesenchymal cells into the gel, then implant the gel beneath the mouse kidney capsule — a tissue that is well supplied with blood and often used for transplantation experiments.

The implanted cells not only expressed tooth-development genes — they laid down calcium and minerals, just as mesenchymal cells do in the body as they begin to form teeth.

“They were in full-throttle tooth-development mode,” Hashmi said.

In the embryo, mesenchymal cells can’t build teeth alone — they need to be combined with cells that form the epithelium. In the future, the scientists plan to test whether the shrinking gel can stimulate both tissues to generate an entire functional tooth.

When the temperature rises to just below body temperature, this biocompatible gel shrinks dramatically within minutes, compressing tooth-precursor cells (green) enclosed within it.

As a new bioinspired, sponge-like gel shrinks, it squeezes cells (green) inside it, triggering them to shrink, round up, become denser, and begin to deposit the minerals that harden teeth.

Source; Science2.0