Tag Archives: recipient

Dscovery may help breast cancer treatment — ScienceDaily

Triple negative breast cancers (TNBCs) have a high mortality rate owing to aggressive proliferation and metastasis and a lack of effective therapeutic options. However, Professor Auguste’s team, discovered the overexpression of intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) in human TNBC cell lines and tissues, and demonstrated that it is a potential molecular target and biomarker for TNBC therapy and diagnosis. “No therapies are available to treat triple negative breast cancer cells and because of that patients have a poor prognosis,” said Professor Auguste, the recipient of a 2014 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The Identification of ICAM-1 as a TNBC target and biomarker may lead to the development of a new strategy and platform for addressing a critical gap in TNBC patient care, she added. …

Scientists control cells following transplantation, from inside out

Associate Professor Jeffrey Karp, PhD, and James Ankrum, PhD, demonstrate in this month’s issue of Nature Protocols how to load cells with microparticles that provide the cells cues for how they should behave over the course of days or weeks as the particles degrade. "Regardless of where the cell is in the body, it’s going to be receiving its cues from the inside," said Karp, a Harvard Stem Cell Institute Principal Faculty member at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. "This is a completely different strategy than the current method of placing cells onto drug-doped microcarriers or scaffolds, which is limiting because the cells need to remain in close proximity to those materials in order to function. Also these types of materials are too large to be infused into the bloodstream." Cells are relatively simple to control in a Petri dish. …

Vaccine blackjack: IL-21 critical to fight against viral infections

The results are published in the Journal of Virology. "Our findings highlight how IL-21 could be important in the development of antiviral vaccines," says research associate Ata Ur Rasheed Mohammed, PhD, the first author of the paper. The senior author is Rafi Ahmed, PhD, director of the Emory Vaccine Center and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar…

Adult cells transformed into early-stage nerve cells, bypassing the pluripotent stem cell stage

Bypassing the ultra-flexible iPSC stage was a key advantage, says senior author Su-Chun Zhang, a professor of neuroscience and neurology. "IPSC cells can generate any cell type, which could be a problem for cell-based therapy to repair damage due to disease or injury in the nervous system." In particular, the absence of iPSC cells rules out the formation of tumors by pluripotent cells in the recipient, a major concern involving stem cell therapy. A second advance comes from the virus that delivers genes to reprogram the adult skin cells into a different and more flexible form…