Turn back time

In the effort to cure alzhiemer's disease a group of scientist at Salk institute have found a drug that will slow aging. The current treatments for alzhiemer's disease has focused on breakup the amyloids that build up in the cell. Their question was what if the amyloids were prevented to begin with. Alzhiemer's is connected to aging in some way. Older cells and DNA are more prone to mutations and mutations cause the misfolded proteins that then clump together.

Well the answer to this question came in the form of the drug J127. While feeding transgenic mice J127 to see if it would slow alzhiemer's progression they found that the mice showed better memory and were "younger" than the control mice. Using an undefined set of physiological factors these transgenic mice treated with J127 were at a younger state than the control mice. They showed improved memory and less alzhiemer's symptoms. These mice even looked younger than the control mice.

This is would be a great way to help alzhiemer's patients. By not allowing amyoids to for there won't be damage that cannot be reversed. However, it would be interesting to see if this drug could extend life. But even as just a treatment for old age and not specifically alzhiemer's this drug would be helpful. If it works the same way with humans as it does with mice it would be able to give people to ability to live independently and have a better quality of life longer. As it is now there really is a certain point where the older people cannot function in society. Their memories are no longer as good and the body starts to break down. I wonder if this drug would be able to help with the gradual break down of the body by slowing aging.

blood cells and stem cells

Stem cells are important to development of well everything. They are part of the immune system and when there is damage the stem cells will respond to fix that damage. they can be used to regrow a liver or fight off infection. These cells are being studied to find a way to grow new organs for patients that need them. In the time that the stem cells have been studied the questions of how blood came up. After studying 3000 single cell blood cultures it was found that the development of blood is two stages.The process is different between adults and children but the article is very unspecific about what is different between these stages. So it turns out that the mature blood cell are a direct daughter cell of the stem cell. This means that instead of like other cell types where stem cells mature into specific progenitor cells and then finally mature into functional cells. Skipping the progenitor cell makes the system much quicker.

Now that the system of blood development is more fully understood this could mean big changes in the way blood diseases are treated. We could theoretically supply patients with their own blood instead of with donor blood which would reduce rejection rates. The treatment options are endless and would really increase the patients lives.

Here is the article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151105143819.htm

DNA repair

Your DNA is in constant flux. It folds, copies, transcribes genes, refolds, and is mutated constantly. Part of the ability to be dynamic allows for changes, sometimes these are good, sometimes these are bad. Changes are caused by many damaging effect like UV or chemical exposure. For the most part DNA fixes itself. It has many different repair mechanisms that interact with the bases to determine if they are right or wrong. Researchers have found a repair mechanism that doesn't interact with the base pairs.

We know that a family of repair proteins called glycosylases that flip incorrect bases outside the helix and replace them with the new correct base. These alkD repair mechanisms interact with only the backbone and locate positively charged bases caused by alklyation. They remove these bases and fix them. Since it locates problems based on charge it can do a much bigger area and more types of damage than the other types of glycosylases.

This finding just constantly shows that we do not yet know all there is to know about our DNA repair systems. Finding these new mechanisms could lead to future work in DNA repair therapies. We could learn how to understand these mechanisms and learn how to manipulate them for treatments.

Here's the link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151029190840.htm

Premature death test

Do you ever just have a bad day? Like lost your lucky rabbit foot type bad day? Where everything goes wrong and you get a parking ticket after running inside for 5 minutes?

Well what if you went to the doctor and had a routine blood test and the results came back positive for premature death? Yeah that would be pretty sucky. But science is getting close to this.

Researchers have found a biomarker called GlycA that is caused by low level inflammation. Long exposure to inflammation increases a risk of death. This inflammation is caused by low levels of microbial infections.

Even though they have found this marker and have determined that it has some effect in premature death they do not know very much about it. They do not have a treatment for it or any preventative actions to take, They also still do not know how long the patient will have to live or rather not to live.

Here is the article:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151022124339.htm

Knee pain? Back pain? Tendon problem or high cholesterol

Your doctor wants to blame all your joint pain on body weight or over excercising. They say "here take this anti-inflammatory and try not to move too much. It'll get better eventually." But what if your tendon pain wasn't caused by just inflammation from overworking your tendons. We aren't treating the root cause of the pain then only the symptoms.

Well some researchers have seen that high cholesterol may be the cause of some tendon pain. Specifically that abnormal tendon shape and thickness coorelates to a high lipid content in the blood. We do not know if this is an effect or a causation. But we do know that high levels of cholesterol changes the immune system which then seems likely to cause low levels of inflammation. But in any case bad lipid levels in the blood shows bad tendons.

The researchers do point out that people with high cholesterol may work out less and therefore have a higher body weight that then causes tendon abnormality. So all in all we did some work, read somethings, and may or may not have discovered anything of any use. The article doesn't answer some main questions like: will treating the cholesterol levels change the joint pain.


Here's the article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151015211823.htm

Utilizing mycobacterium for the good of all people!

Bladder cancer is a rough thing to battle. My family has dealt with the ups and downs of cancer much like most other people.  Six years ago my grandfather was diagnosed with bladder cancer after being in and out of the hospital with kidney failure and other health problems. After four years of chemo and surgery he passed away in his sleep. Almost every family has their own story of lost loved ones to the battle against cancer. But what if something as unconventional like Mycobacterium was the answer to prolonging life?

Well there is a current study going on using mice models and Micobacterium brumae. They have found that when this bacteria is introduced into the bladder it can reduce tumor size and stimulates an immune response in the area. Nothing is better at destroying cancer cells like the immune system sometimes it just needs a little push by infection to get it started. The good thing about this particular strand is that it is non pathogenic so there is no fear of infection. This is very important as infection is a cancer patients worst enemy. In mice it has been seen that the cancer tumors reduce and the life span is prolonged. Making this a widespread treatment would give families the extra time they pray for every night.

Currently, a similar treatment is used for superficial bladder cancer using Mycobacterium bovis. It is very good at keeping new tumors from forming but it is also pathogenic and if not watched carefully it can lead to infection. Like I said infection is a cancer patients worst enemy. When your immune system is already down the last thing you want to do is take antibiotics and try to fight off infections. The new treatment may only reduce tumor size but at least it doesn't present danger of infection.

There may be more hope in using bacteria to treat cancer in ways we never thought of before. Its research like this that I would love to be a part of. The answer is out there, we just need to find it.


Here's a link to the story: http://www.news-medical.net/news/20151006/Mycobacterium-could-be-more-effective-in-treating-superficial-bladder-cancer-study-finds.aspx

Cute fluffy little koalas (also full of chlamydia)

Everyone loves koalas. I mean how can you not, they are little fluff balls that sleep all day and eat all the time. If you don't love koalas here is a picture to change your mind.

He looks so happy! But chances are this little guy has chlamydia. Yup. Chlamydia. You know which STD I'm talking about. Well it turns out that ecologist expect that nearly half of the 80,000 wild koala population have chlamydia. . SO naturally they are being treated with high doses of antibiotics because koalas only live in Australia and there's only 80,000. We need as many of them to live and reproduce as possible. Now there are less koalas dying of chlamydia but more dying of lack of nutrients. Especially innocent little baby joeys. Researchers have determined that this is being caused by the antibiotic wiping out the tannin-protein-complex-degrading entreobacteria. Why is this bacteria important? Because eucalyptus is really toxic and doesn't have many nutrients and this bacteria slowly degrades that toxins to allow the koala to get as many nutrients as possible from the leaf. The joeys are suffering because the pap, a substance that is rich in these bacteria that is transferred from mother to joey, isn't full of the bacteria needed. This means that the joey isn't properly colonized.

So to fix this researchers have found a gene called the koala interferon gamma. This gene blocks infections including chlamydia. They think that if they can introduces these genes to each koala they can stop the antibiotic treatment. I am not sure how they would do this but it would allow our cute little friends to be infection free and nutrient rich!

Here's the link:http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/treating-koala-stds-may-also-quash-their-essential-gut-microbes/

Mini organ drug testing

What's better than testing for complications and benefits of a new drug or medical procedure on humans? Nothing really. But since that is illegal in the USA scientist have found a way to produce lab miniature organs. 

University of California, Santa Barbara, has been working on producing a miniature brain that can then be used to study the effects of drugs. Using an army of stem cells, progenitor cells, vesicular cells, and microglila on copious amounts of the right media they grew these mini brains. The brains could then be studied for altered gene expressions caused by drugs using an algorithm. 

As for the mechanics for this miniature organ growth. They plated the cells on a media called Hydrogel which contains all the polypeptides needed for protein production and then they allowed the cells to do what they will. Amazingly, we have not developed a better way to produce tissue other than to let tissues make themselves. 

This will have a huge impact on drug studies.  Even though these lab grown organs are lacking the effect of the physio-chemical environment of the human body, the results will still be more closely related to what will actually happen. Using mice and other model organisms can only give us results that only give us an idea of what could possibly happen in a human. We never know what will actually happen until the clinic trials begin. These mini organoids will allow us to study the drug affects in human tissues. Thus, making clinical trials much safer as we know if something is going harm human tissues or not. 

Here is a link to the article: http://www.futurity.org/stem-cells-drug-testing-1010722-2/

Diabetes and staph bacteria

I have a tendency to want to share random, sometimes useless, information that is generally not interesting to the general population but it is to me. This had lead to various jokes in my family from where I have tried to explain things by saying "if you think about it" and usually ends with a " The more you know!" text from my brother. So in saying that it shouldn't be surprising that I do this at work too. I constantly want to share interesting scientific information with the patients that come through my line.

Well we've been running a promotion for the American Diabetes foundation and one woman donated and expressed her wish from them to find a cure soon. I couldn't help but start talking about this article I recently read about how type 2 diabetes may be linked to an over colonization of Staphylococcus bacteria. Basically we know that there is an increased chance of developing Type 2 with high weight gain. What researchers in Iowa have found that this increased weight also increases the colonization of Staph on the skin which then increases the bodies superantigen response system. Where the link to diabetes comes from is that over production and constant production of the staph superantigen can cause systemic inflammation that then reduces insulin sensitivity.

The same group of researchers are doing further studies on this to try to create a vaccine that will reduce the chances of developing diabetes and also to create a gel that can be applied topically to kill the staph colonies. As more research is done on this it will be interesting to see if these two things are possible.

Here's the link for anyone to read: http://now.uiowa.edu/2015/06/bacteria-may-cause-type-2-diabetes

Is Alzheimer's Disease Infectious?

Recently in an article from USA today it was suggested that Alzheimer's may be able to spread from one person to another. A group of researchers studied 8 cases where people aged 31 to 56 died from Creutzfeldts-Jakob disease after receiving cadaver generated growth hormone injections as kids. Creutzfldts-Jakob disease results from a build up of incorrectly folded proteins called prions. They are produced and aggregate very similarly to those of the protein build ups in Alzheimer's. These patients contracted CJD from exposure to the neurological tissues of infected persons. The researchers are suggesting that a similar phenomenon could happen with proteins involved in Alzheimer's too. Each of the cases studied showed early signs of Alzheimer's before they died which is abnormal for this age group. Could they have possible gotten "seeds" of Alzheimer's disease from the growth hormone infection? I think its possible. There would need to be more research done before it can be supported or disproved but it is defiantly an interesting subject to talk about. We know that the formation of amyloids in the brain caused by Alzheimer's is close to the same process that happens in prion formation. Yes, most of the time it is a random mutation and some people are genetically predisposed for it. But we know nervous tissue can transmit disease so what makes this so unlikely?
USA today and CNN and any other news source that published this article or headline did so to spark interest not panic. This is the type of topic molecular biologist should be working on. If there is some possibility for this to be true wouldn't you want to have every necessary precaution in place? Just like with any other disease or infection carried in blood or saliva or even on the skin its best to excessively clean any surface that comes in contact with it. All donors of neurological tissue should be screened for this and any tools that come in contact with it should be cleaned in a way that would reduce the risk of further spread The more we learn about this supposed phenomenon the more we can do to reduce the cases or find a remedy for the disease. Even if a hypothesis not supported information was still learned and time was not wasted .


Citation: Dier, Arden, "seed of Alzheimer's could be passed from person to person.". USA today. september 10,2015.