New Hope for Battling Brain Cancer (preview)

In May 2006 Dwayne Berg woke up on a gurney in a Seattle emergency room, an IV in his arm and a team of doctors and nurses working him up. The last thing the 42-year-old financial executive could remember was running on a treadmill at his gym, part of his regular fitness regimen. He had suffered a seizure and tumbled off the machine, and although he had not hurt himself in the fall, doctors had asked for an MRI scan of his brain to see if they could find a cause for the seizure.

They did, and the news was not good: the scan showed a large mass in the left frontal lobe that turned out to be a malignant glioma, a brain cancer that is almost invariably fatal. Berg underwent standard treatment: an operation to remove the tumor, followed by chemotherapy and radiation to eradicate any cancer cells that might remain.

Divining the Right Drug

Imagine suffering from the crushing weight of major depression, then finally getting diagnosed and starting treatment with a drug--only to realize after two months that the medication, despite its unpleasant side effects, is not alleviating your depression. Unfortunately, this experience is far from rare: more than two thirds of patients with depression have no luck with the first medication they are prescribed and must also endure the withdrawal effects that come with discontinuing a drug before trying a new one. Finding the right treatment can prove a lengthy, painful process of trial and error. A new technology, however, may bypass this ordeal by gauging very early in a treatment regimen how well a drug is working based on the patient’s brain waves.

The technology, called quantitative electro­enceph­alography (QEEG), measures a person’s brain-wave pattern with EEG and then compares it with a database of normal samples to detect abnormal function. In a study published in the September 2009 issue of the journal Psychiatry Research , scientists used QEEG to record brain activity in subjects with major depressive disorder before they began treatment, after one week on an antidepressant and after eight weeks on the drug--the period it takes such drugs to achieve full effect. Changes in the QEEG readout after just one week of medication predicted 74 percent of the time whether patients would experience either a recovery or a remission of symptoms by the end of eight weeks.

TB or Not TB?: Novel Detector Could Shorten Testing Times, Aid Treatment Efforts

Tuberculosis is a serious public health challenge in the developing world, where the infection claims roughly two million lives each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) . Yet the disease, which is a leading killer of patients with HIV/AIDS, is cumbersome to detect, resulting in delayed or inappropriate treatment, greater spread of the infection and preventable deaths. [More]

Few Studies Compare the Efficacy of Medical Treatments

The forward momentum of medical progress is manifest, it could be argued, in the $50 billion spent in 2008 on pharmaceutical research and development in the quest to bring new drugs to market. But little scientific or governmental infrastructure exists to ensure that each new treatment is actually an improvement over existing therapies--and to tease out what therapies are best for which patients. [More]

Seeing the Little Picture: Novel Nanocoating Gives Atomic Force Microscope Users a Better Look at Individual Molecules

Spotting a disease in its earliest stages can help to facilitate its treatment greatly, yet telltale clues are often hidden at a scale too small to study accurately. This hindrance has some researchers looking for ways to use high-powered atomic force microscopes (AFMs) to study individual molecules for disease markers [More]

Genetics in the Gut: Intestinal Microbes Could Drive Obesity and Other Health Issues

Outnumbering our human cells by about 10 to one, the many minuscule microbes that live in and on our bodies are a big part of crucial everyday functions. The lion's share live in the intestinal tract, where they help fend off bad bacteria and aid in digesting our dinners. But as scientists use genetics to uncover what microbes are actually present and what they're doing in there, they are discovering that the bugs play an even larger role in human health than previously suspected--and perhaps at times exerting more influence than human genes themselves. [More]

Playing the Body Electric

Each new generation of astronomers discovers that the universe is much bigger than their predecessors imagined. The same is also true of brain complexity. Every era’s most advanced technologies, when applied to the study of the brain, keep uncovering more layers of nested complexity, like a set of never ending Russian dolls. We now know that there are up to 1,000 different subtypes of nerve cells and supporting actors--the glia and astrocytes--within the nervous system. Each cell type is defined by its chemical constituents, neuronal morphology, synaptic architecture and input-output processing.

Different cell types are wired up in specific ways. For example, a deep layer 5 pyramidal neuron might snake its gossamer-thin output wire, the axon, to a subcortical target area while also extending a connection to an inhibitory local neuron. Understanding how the brain’s corticothalamic complex creates any one conscious sensation necessitates delineating these underlying circuits for the 100 billion cells in the brain.

Next-Gen Scientists Honored for Evolving Medicine and Renewables [Slide Show]

The more mysteries that scientists unlock, the more opportunities emerge for the next generation of researchers to transform newfound knowledge into tomorrow's breakthroughs that serve society. The Lemelson–M.I.T. Program recognized several potential breakthroughs Wednesday in awarding four of its $30,000 Lemelson–M.I.T. Student Prizes to those from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (R.P.I.), and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (U.I.U.C.). [More]

Could Mini Labs and Plant-Based Vaccines Stop the Next Pandemic?

The H1N1 virus's rapid spread worldwide last year exposed the weaknesses in the global system for swiftly developing, manufacturing and distributing vaccines for newly identified strains of influenza. In Texas, researchers are attacking the first two of these problems through Project GreenVax , which will use a plant-based approach to vaccine development and a modular manufacturing environment that can scale quickly as vaccine demand grows. [More]

Scientists observe protein folding in living cells for the first time

Even in sleep , the human body is rarely still--and within it, there is the constant motion of the contents of our cells and the proteins within. [More]

Hepatitis infection induced and cleared in mice with human liver cells

To understand how bacteria and viruses work and test potential treatments, scientists study them in animals. But what about diseases that only affect humans? A group out of La Jolla’s Salk Institute has worked around that problem with a compromise--a mouse with a human liver.

Test-Tube Babies May Face Greater Health Risks Than Naturally Conceived Children

100 Years Ago: Madame Curie's Research

MARCH 1960 MODERN AGRICULTURE -- “The 20th-century Israelites came to a land of encroaching sand dunes along a once-verdant coast, of malarial swamps and naked limestone hills from which an estimated three feet of topsoil have been scoured, sorted and spread as sterile overwash upon the plains or swept out to sea in flood waters. The land of Israel had shared the fate of land throughout the Middle East. A decline in productivity and in population had set in with the fading of the Byzantine Empire some 1,300 years ago. Today most of the people of the world live in the lands where mankind has lived longest in organized societies. There, with few exceptions, the soil is in the worst condition. The example of Israel shows that the land can be reclaimed and that increase in the food supply can overtake the increase that will double the 2,800 million world population before the end of this century.”

How to make more food with transgenic crops

SAN DIEGO--In the next 50 years, humans will have to produce as much food as we have over the entire history of civilization. The planet’s ever-expanding population demands it. Yet productive farmland is scarce, and other resources such as water and fertilizer (which is made from fossil fuels) become more constrained by the day.

Shot in the Arm: Has the U.S. Invested Enough Health Stimulus Money in Prevention?

As lawmakers divvied up billions of dollars last year to address the nation's fiscal crisis via the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), they did not skimp on funding health . About one of every six and a half ARRA dollars went to programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)--the single largest allocation for any federal agency. Less than 1 percent of those monies, however, are going toward keeping people from getting sick in the first place. [More]

Stem Cell Vitamin Boost

Soon after the exciting discovery of a method to turn human adult cells into stem cells in 2007 came the frustration of actually trying to make that transformation efficient. In creating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, scientists typically only get 0.01 percent of a sample of human fibroblast (skin) cells to change.

A group led by Duanqing Pei of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health in China has found that a simple chemical can boost the efficiency by 100-fold--namely, vitamin C.

A Female Viagra?

Women who suffer from chronically low levels of sexual desire may soon be able to fix the problem with a pill. [More]

Life from a Test Tube? The Real Promise of Synthetic Biology

I have seen the future, and it is now.

Those words came to mind again as I recently listened to Craig Venter, one of those leading the new areas of synthetic genomics and synthetic biology. Every time I hear a talk on this subject, it seems a new threshold in the artificial manipulation and, ultimately, creation of life has been passed.