Technut News

Just in time for the Olympics, scientists say they have discovered drugs that could cause the next athletic doping scandal.

In a study published today in the journal Cell¹, scientists say they have found the first targeted drugs that boost endurance. They are already working with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to develop tests to expose would-be cheats who use the drugs.

The scientists examined the effects of two compounds, called GW1516 and AICAR, on endurance in mice. When dosed with GW1516 and exercised on a treadmill every day for five weeks, the mice could run about 68% longer and 70% farther than mice that underwent the same training programme but didn’t receive the drug, the scientists found. When given daily doses of AICAR, but no exercise training, another set of mice could run 23% longer and 44% farther than untreated mice.

The AICAR-treated mice also lost fat and had boosted expression of genes involved in making energy — similar to the beneficial effects induced by exercise, according to Ronald Evans of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in La Jolla, California, who led the work.

The compound resveratrol, found in red wine, also boosts endurance in mice, but acts on many molecules and therefore has many other effects. Evans says his work is the first to target a specific molecular pathway to mimic the effects of endurance exercise. “We have discovered that there’s a switch that can be flipped to unlock a little bit more potential out of your muscles and give yourself a chance to be in a much more healthy state,” Evans says, calling the study “the true couch potato experiment”.

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Finally, man. More fitness will help us survive our working days.

Also see this article.

Doctors have released pictures of the first man to have a double arm transplant.

The German man who was not named for legal reasons made medical history by having two complete arms transplanted.

He has been given the arms of a teenage boy who is believed to have died in a car crash. The 54-year-old patient lost both of his arms in a farming accident six years ago.

The operation, which was conducted at the Klinikum rechts der Isar hospital in Munich by a team of 30 experts lead by Edgar Biemer and Christoph Hoehnke, lasted over 16 hours from Friday until Saturday last week.

The arm donor who had been declared brain dead was kept alive on a life support until the arms were ready to be transplanted.

The hospital said that the dead arms had to be kept filled with blood when severed and chilled to keep them alive, but that attaching them with chilled blood inside would have killed the 54-year-old man.

They avoided the problem by switching on the blood supply to one arm and then to the second arm half an hour later.

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Words escape me.

Also see this article on Britain’s first bionic hand.

Independent geneticist J. Craig Venter raced an international consortium of scientists to map the human genome in the 1990s. Now he’s putting the same cutting-edge science to work on today’s energy crisis, engineering a whole new generation of biofuels. In a rare in-depth interview, we talked to Venter recently about his latest project to save the world, as well as historical flubs, today’s presidential candidates and the future of genetics. —Chris Ladd

So how did you get from mapping the human genome to creating biofuels?
We considered the biggest issues facing society that we thought we could impact. What’s happening to the environment and getting weaned off oil and coal are the biggest issues out there.

Is it similar to the genome project? More daunting?
Nobody thought that such a massive project as sequencing the human genome could be undertaken by a single team, like we did. But that challenge is minor compared to trying to replace the 30 billion barrels of oil that we use globally each year, and the 3 billion tons of coal. The scale of that is beyond my imagination.

I think the real challenge won’t necessarily come from biology, because biology is infinitely scalable, but from engineering. [If we can overcome that,] we have the potential to stop using oil and coal hopefully within the next 10 to 20 years, and even start reducing the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

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Craig Venter is a talented guy. I expect to hear more about him in the future.

For the first time, an experimental drug shows promise for halting the progression of Alzheimer’s disease by taking a new approach: breaking up the protein tangles that clog victims’ brains.

The encouraging results from the drug called Rember, reported Tuesday at a medical conference in Chicago, electrified a field battered by recent setbacks. The drug was developed by Singapore-based TauRx Therapeutics.

Even if bigger, more rigorous studies show it works, Rember is still several years away from being available, and experts warned against overexuberance. But they were excited.

“These are the first very positive results I’ve seen” for stopping mental decline, said Marcelle Morrison-Bogorad, director of Alzheimer’s research at the National Institute on Aging. “It’s just fantastic.”

The federal agency funded early research into the tangles, which are made of a protein called tau and develop inside nerve cells.

For decades, scientists have focused on a different protein — beta-amyloid, which forms sticky clumps outside of the cells — but have yet to get a workable treatment.

The drug is in the second of three stages of development, and scientists are paying special attention to potential treatments because of the enormity of the illness, which afflicts more than 26 million people worldwide and is mushrooming as the population ages.

The four Alzheimer’s drugs currently available just ease symptoms of the mind-robbing disease.

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By the looks of it, most of us won’t have to deal with this Alzheimer crap anymore by the time we get to senior age.

(not that I think ageing will still be an issue decades from now…)

George Church: sequencing 100,000 genomes

George Church is dyslexic, narcoleptic, and a vegan. He is married with one daughter, weighs about 210 pounds, and has worn a pioneer-style bushy beard for decades. He has elevated levels of creatine kinase in his blood, the consequence of a heart attack. He enjoys waterskiing, photography, rock climbing, and singing in his church choir. His mother’s maiden name is Strong. He was born on August 28, 1954.

If this all seems like too much information, well, blame Church himself. As the director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, he has a thing about openness, and this information (and plenty more, down to his signature) is posted online at arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/pers.html. By putting it out there for everyone to see, Church isn’t just baiting identity thieves. He’s hoping to demonstrate that all this personal information — even though we consider it private and somehow sacred — is actually fairly meaningless, little more than trivia. “The average person shouldn’t be interested in this stuff,” he says. “It’s a philosophical exercise in what identity is and why we should care about that.”

As Church sees it, the only real utility to his personal information is as data that reflects his phenotype — his physical traits and characteristics. If your genome is the blueprint of your genetic potential written across 6 billion base pairs of DNA, your phenome is the resulting edifice, how you actually turn out after the environment has had its say, influencing which genes get expressed and which traits repressed. Imagine that we could collect complete sets of data — genotype and phenotype — for a whole population. You would very quickly begin to see meaningful and powerful correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, from height and hair color to disease risk and personality.

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Scientists have found a way to overcome the problem of the human body rejecting animal parts used in transplants.

The work, by the University of Leeds, means the use of animal tissue such as blood vessels, tendons and bladders may become common in surgery.

Human organs for transplant are constantly in short supply, meaning long waits for many patients.

Currently, the use of animal tissue for human transplant is restricted, and of limited effectiveness.

For instance, chemically treated heart valves from pigs have been transplanted into patients for more than a decade, but have a limited life span as they are inert and cannot be populated by the patient’s own cells, and ruling out any possibility of repair to damage.

This poses a particular problem for young patients, as the valves do not grow with the child, and must be replaced frequently.

The Leeds team used a combination of freezing, chemical baths and ultrasound to strip the animal tissue of the cells and biological molecules that trigger a response from the immune system.

This left a biological scaffold which could then be populated by cells from a patient’s own body, creating a tissue which carries no risk of rejection, which can be repaired, and which can grow with the body.

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Scientists are hailing a new drug to treat aggressive prostate cancer as potentially the most significant advance in the field for 70 years.

Abiraterone could potentially treat up to 80% of patients with a deadly form of the disease resistant to currently available chemotherapy, they say.

The drug works by blocking the hormones which fuel the cancer.

The Institute of Cancer Research hopes a simple pill form will be available in two to three years.

Richard Pflaum talks about his trial of Abiraterone

An advanced clinical trial involving 1,200 patients around the world is currently under way, with more trials likely later this year.

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A researcher at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory has pinpointed stem cells within the spinal cord that, if persuaded to differentiate into more healing cells and fewer scarring cells following an injury, may lead to a new, non-surgical treatment for debilitating spinal-cord injuries.

The work, reported in the July issue of the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology, is by Konstantinos Meletis, a postdoctoral fellow at the Picower Institute, and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Their results could lead to drugs that might restore some degree of mobility to the 30,000 people worldwide afflicted each year with spinal-cord injuries.

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I know somebody who’s paraplegic (paralysed from the neck down). Every time I read stuff like this, I pass it on to him right away.

Puts a little smile on my face every time.

A group of researchers at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen have developed models of neural networks that make it possible to simulate how the body protects itself from disease and predict the immune system’s access codes. The human body has its own natural inbuilt defence mechanism which uses access or “pincodes” to stop microorganisms that invade the body from discovering how the entire human immune system works. Every human being on the planet has their own unique version of this defence mechanism. But the sheer complexity of the immune system has, up until now, also made it difficult for researchers to understand how the immune system functions and develop precise immunological treatments. Last year, the research team led by Associate Professor Morten Nielsen and Professor Søren Buus successfully decoded some of the pincodes. Now, the team has completed work on their project and put together a complete picture of how the immune system checks the inner and outer components of our cells for dangerous invaders. The research could have significant consequences for the treatment of cancer, infectious diseases and also for transplant operations.

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Perspectives: Decoding the immune system to target disease

For the individual patient, the artifical neural networks mean that if scientists can identify the patient’s tissue type molecules (pincodes), they can then predict all the possible samples that would be taken by the tissue type molecules and displayed in the two display windows. If the patients own immune system, for example, does not react to a particular disease the knowledge could be used to stimulate (find, isolate and produce) the necessary T cells that can see the disease antigens (viruses, cancer cells etc). On a global scale, the neural network method could help researchers to deal with all the variants/single components of a global epidemic.

“We’ll be able to find candidates for vaccines which can both help the individual as well as the whole of humanity” explains professor Søren Buus. The neural networks provide the most comprehensive knowledge of the immune system to date.

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Some people have a mutation that makes them amazingly resistant to HIV — and now, scientists may have found a way to give that immunity to anyone.

Viruses enter cells and take them over, but to get inside, they need a handhold. HIV pulls itself in by grabbing onto a protein called CCR5, which decorates the surface of T-cells, which are one of the two major types of white blood cells and play an important role in helping the body fight infections. Back in the 1990’s, researchers took interest in a handful of promiscuous gay men who were able to engage in sexual relations with their HIV-positive partners with impunity. Most of them had a mutation that kept their cells from producing normal CCR5 protein.

Armed with that knowledge, scientists have developed several tactics to block the production of CCR5 or perturb its shape so that the HIV virus can’t grab onto it during the first step of its hijacking attempt. The strategy is much akin to cutting your hair before a wrestling match: It gives your opponent one less thing to grab onto.

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Another great step towards curing humanity’s ailments.

This is probably only the beginning. I expect many more diseases to be cured in the coming biotech-decade.