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Mars Base

The Flu Virus Can Tell Time. Here's Why You Should Care | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...time-heres-why-you-should-care

scibyte78 Flu

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The flu knows how long it has to invade our cells and spread to other humans. So new treatments could fight the virus by resetting its clock.
  • Influenza can tell time, and it choreographs its actions according to a strict schedule. If new vaccines can reset flu’s clock, the human immune system might be able to fight it more effectively
  • Viruses multiply by invading a host cell, hijacking its machinery and using it to make new copies of itself. Cells have warning systems that can detect this invasion and call in reinforcements, but that can take a while.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The virus has to orchestrate its actions carefully--if it moves too fast, it won’t have time to make new copies of itself, and if it moves too slowly, it might be stopped by immune defenses.
  • Researchers knew the virus has about eight hours to make copies of itself before a cell will notice
  • To produce sufficient copies to infect another human, it needs about two days of continuous activity inside our cells
  • The team figured out that the virus slowly gathers a protein it needs to make its exit, and leaves the cell in the nick of time.
  • To fight it, they tricked the virus into changing the amount of time it took to gather the protein.
  • First, they made it acquire the protein too quickly, which caused the flu to leave the cell before it had made enough copies of itself.
  • In this case, the cells were lung epithelial cells. Then they altered it to leave too late, giving immune cells enough time to respond and kill the virus before it escaped.
  • This is promising for new flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, which could target this internal protein clock
  • a flu vaccine is still the best way to protect yourself against the flu, not everyone is eligible to get one--especially the nasal spray, which is not recommended for the very young and the very old.
  • also rely on an educated guess about which flu will spread throughout the population in a season, and there are only so many vaccines.
  • a treatment that targets the virus’ clock wouldn’t need a dead or weakened version of the flu--it would just need to fool the virus into losing track of time
Mars Base

Study: Old flu drug speeds brain injury recovery - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...rug-brain-injury-recovery.html

scibyte36

shared by Mars Base on 01 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • reporting the first treatment to speed recovery from severe brain injuries caused by falls and car crashes: a cheap flu medicine whose side benefits were discovered by accident decades ago
Mars Base

Cell therapy shows remarkable ability to eradicate cancer in clinical study - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...arkable-ability-eradicate.html

scibyte121 MedicalTreatment

shared by Mars Base on 20 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The largest clinical study ever conducted to date of patients with advanced leukemia found that 88 percent achieved complete remissions after being treated with genetically modified versions of their own immune cells.
  • Adult B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), a type of blood cancer that develops in B cells, is difficult to treat because the majority of patients relapse.
  • Patients with relapsed B-ALL have few treatment options; only 30 percent respond to salvage chemotherapy.
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  • In the current study, 16 patients with relapsed B-ALL were given an infusion of their own genetically modified immune cells, called T cells.
  • The cells were "reeducated" to recognize and destroy cancer cells that contain the protein CD19.
  • one of the first patients to receive this treatment more than two years ago. He was able to successfully undergo a bone marrow transplant and has been cancer-free and back at work teaching theology since 2011
  • Cell-based, targeted immunotherapy is a new approach to treating cancer that harnesses the body's own immune system to attack and kill cancerous cells.
  • Cell-Based Therapies
  • Unlike with a common virus such as the flu, our immune system does not recognize cancer cells as foreign and is therefore at a disadvantage in eradicating the disease.
  • researchers
  • have been exploring ways to reengineer the body's own T cells to recognize and attack cancer.
  • In March 2013, the same team of researchers first reported the results of five patients with advanced B-ALL who were treated with cell therapy. Remarkably, all five patients achieved complete remissions.
  • In 2003, they were the first to report that T cells engineered to recognize the protein CD19, which is found on B cells, could be used to treat B cell cancers in mice.
  • In the current study, seven of the 16 patients (44 percent) were able to successfully undergo bone marrow transplantation
  • the standard of care and the only curative option for B-ALL patients
  • following treatment.
  • Three patients were ineligible due to failure to achieve a complete remission
  • three were ineligible due to preexisting medical conditions
  • two declined
  • one is still being evaluated for a potential bone marrow transplant.
  • Historically, only 5 percent of patients with relapsed B-ALL have been able to transition to bone marrow transplantation.
  • The study also provides guidelines for managing side effects of cell therapy, which can include severe flu-like symptoms such as fever, muscle pain, low blood pressure, and difficulty breathing
  • The researchers developed diagnostic criteria and a laboratory test that can identify which patients are at greater risk for developing this syndrome.
  • Additional studies to determine whether cell therapy can be applied to other types of cancer are already underway
  • studies to test whether B-ALL patients would benefit from receiving targeted immunotherapy as frontline treatment are being planned.
Mars Base

Twitter Kept Up With Haiti Cholera Outbreak - Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...up_with_Haiti_cholera_outbreak

scibyte29 twitter diseas

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Twitter, blogs and other social media can be powerful tools for tracking infectious diseases as they spread
  • researchers who followed social media during Haiti’s post-earthquake cholera outbreak in 2010.
  • Twitter posts and news about cholera gathered
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  • in the first 100 days of the outbreak tracked closely
  • data reported from hospital and clinics
  • social media data were available almost instantly
  • others have shown that Twitter and other online sources can provide meaningful information about outbreaks of diseases such as H1N1 and swine flu
  • new work establishes that the approach is useful for tracking a disease that emerges in the unsafe living conditions that often follow a disaster, says Polgreen.
  • 188,819 tweets that contained or were tagged with the word cholera during the first 100 days of the cholera outbreak
  • analysis suggests the social tool provides a good measure of the disease’s spread
  • The researchers compared the tweets to data from HealthMap, a disease-tracking tool that mines Internet news stories, blogs and discussion groups and lets the public report illness by cell phone. Both the Twitter and HealthMap data corresponded to official data from the Haitian Ministry of Public Health.
  • Official sources of data are better validated, but on the downside they are going to take time
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