MEDICAL RESEARCH BANGLADESH ( BD )

Penicillin, one of the scientific marvels of the 20 th century, is currently losing a lot of battles it once won against bacterial infections. But scientists at the University of South Carolina have just reported a new approach to restoring its combat effectiveness, even against so-called "superbugs." Bacteria have been chipping away at the power of the penicillin family of drugs since their first wide-scale use as antibiotics in the 1940s. For example, the staph infection, brought about by the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, was once readily treated with penicillin and its molecular cousins. But that bug has changed. In the 1960s, a new strain arrived, termed MRSA for methicillin- (or sometimes multidrug-) resistant S. aureus. It has become a serious public health problem because the earliest deployed antibiotics are often useless against the new strain, and its prevalence has only increased since it was first observed. MRSA (pronounced mer-suh) is sometimes cal...

Monoclonal Antibody Targets, Kills Leukemia Cells  Researchers at the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center have identified a humanized monoclonal antibody that targets and directly kills chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells The findings, published in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 25, 2013 represent a potential new therapy for treating at least some patients with CLL, the most common type of blood cancer in the United States. CLL cells express high levels of a cell-surface glycoprotein receptor called CD44. Principal investigator Thomas Kipps, MD, PhD, Evelyn and Edwin Tasch Chair in Cancer Research, and colleagues identified a monoclonal antibody called RG7356 that specifically targeted CD44 and was directly toxic to cancer cells, but had little effect on normal B cells. Moreover, they found RG7356 induced CLL cells that expressed the protein ZAP-70 to undergo apoptosis or programmed cell dea...

Stem Cell Treatment May Become Option to Treat Non healing Bone Fractures Stem cell therapy enriched with a bone-regenerating hormone, insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), can help mend broken bones in fractures that are not healing normally, a new animal study finds. The results are being presented at The Endocrine Society's 93rd Annual Meeting in Boston. A deficiency of fracture healing is a common problem affecting an estimated 600,000 people annually in North America, according to the principal investigator, Anna Spagnoli, MD, associate professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "This problem is even more serious," Spagnoli said, "in children with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, and in elderly adults with osteoporosis, because their fragile bones can easily and repeatedly break, and bone graft surgical treatment is often not successful or feasible" Fractures that do not hea...

Stem Cells Fill Gaps in Bones  For many patients the removal of several centimetres of bone from the lower leg following a serious injury or a tumour extraction is only the beginning of a long-lasting ordeal. Autologous stem cells have been found to accelerate and boost the healing process. Surgeons at the RUB clinic Bergmannsheil have achieved promising results: without stem cells, it takes on average 49 days for one centimetre of bone to regrow; with stem cells, that period has been reduced to 37 days. In the past, large bone defect inevitably led to an amputation. Today, the arm or leg is stabilised in an external support, and a transport wire is pulled through the marrow of the intact part of the injured bone. Once the soft tissue surrounding the injury is healed, the surgeons cut the healthy part of the bone into two. The transport wire is affixed to the winches of a ring fixator that is attached around the leg. Using a sophisticated cable-pull system, the previously d...

Natural killer cell From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia   (Redirected from Natural Killer cell ) Jump to: navigation , search Natural killer cells (or NK cells ) are a type of cytotoxic lymphocyte critical to the innate immune system . The role NK cells play is analogous to that of cytotoxic T cells in the vertebrate adaptive immune response . NK cells provide rapid responses to virally infected cells and respond to tumor formation, acting at around 3 days after infection . Typically immune cells detect MHC presented on infected cell surfaces, triggering cytokine release causing lysis or apoptosis . NK cells are unique, however, as they have the ability to recognize stressed cells in the absence of antibodies and MHC, allowing for a much faster immune reaction. They were named “natural killers” because of the initial notion that they do not require activation in order...

Baldness as a Signal of Heart Disease Risk Courtesy : NY Times and BMJ online. Baldness may indicate an increased risk for coronary heart disease. The risk is associated only with male pattern baldness, the kind that starts at the top or back of the head, and not with a receding hairline, according to researchers who reviewed six studies that included 37,000 participants. The analysis, published online in BMJ Open , found that baldness increased the risk for heart disease by between 30 and 40 percent compared with men with a full head of hair. They found the association among men 55 to 60 as well as among older men, and the more severe the baldness, the greater the risk. The reason for the association is unclear, but the authors suggest that known risk factors for heart disease — hypertension, high cholesterol, smoking and others — may affect both conditions, and that baldness may be a marker of atherosclerosis. In previous studies, baldness has been linked to an increased risk...

Liver Stem Cells Discovered in Mice Share on email Share on facebook Share on twitter Scientists successfully identified and grew a renewable population of liver stem cells for the first time, a new study reported. Tissues derived from these stem cells slightly boosted liver function when implanted into mice with a liver disorder. The findings could eventually lead to approaches that help rejuvenate damaged livers in people. A single cell was coaxed to mature into liver cells that produce common liver proteins (green and red).  Image courtesy of Huch et al.,  Nature . The liver is a large, versatile organ that has many jobs, including cleansing blood and digesting food. The liver also has a unique ability to quickly regenerate and regain its original size if partially removed by surgery. Scientists have long known that stem cells that have the potential to create more liver cells must exist in the adult liver. But until now, no one had found a way to detect a...