Tag Archives: biology

Natural extract shows promise for preventing breast cancer, study suggests

“Doctors, patients and researchers are looking for alternative treatments for triple negative breast cancer, and people are always looking for ways to prevent cancer,” said Patrick Martin, Ph.D., associate professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and leader of the study. “How awesome would it be to be able to say: Here, take a daily vitamin tablet from the rose plant to possibly help prevent or treat cancer? It’s a natural product that we found to be effective, with no known side effects.” Triple negative breast cancer draws its name from the fact that the cancer cells in these tumors lack the three growth factor receptors that are normally targeted during breast cancer treatment. …

New therapeutic target may improve treatment for brain cancer

The research will be presented at the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) Annual Meeting during Experimental Biology 2015. Monteagudo’s research indicates a new possible chemotherapeutic target for treating GBM: transglutaminase 2 (TG2), a multifunctional protein that can regulate cell adhesion and motility. Given these documented functions of TG2, Monteagudo and her colleagues in the laboratory of Gail Johnson, Ph.D., at the University of Rochester, were interested in determining if TG2 played an important role in GBM cell growth. …

An extra protein gives naked mole rats more power to stop cancer

The protein is associated with a cluster of genes (called a locus) that is also found in humans and mice. It’s the job of that locus to encode–or carry the genetic instructions for synthesizing –several cancer-fighting proteins. As Professor of Biology Vera Gorbunova explains, the locus found in naked mole rats encodes a total of four cancer-fighting proteins, while the human and mouse version encodes only three proteins. …

Chlamydia knock out body’s own cancer defense

Hundreds of mutations occur every day in almost every cell in our body. The protein p53 is then activated in order to limit these changes in the genome: either the cell repairs the damaged DNA or, if that is not possible, it triggers the cellular suicide program. In this way, cells are normally protected against the development of cancer. As the Berlin-based team at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology reported last year, chlamydial infections lead to a drastic increase in the mutation rate. …

Clock gene dysregulation may explain overactive bladder — ScienceDaily

“We hope our study will stimulate further progress in understanding circadian control of body physiology and aging-related dysfunction and ultimately lead to new strategies of treatment by targeting the circadian regulatory process, including non-drug treatment approaches,” said Changhao Wu, M.D., Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Biochemistry and Physiology at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. To make this discovery, scientists used genetically modified mice in which a special wavelength of light was emitted when the clock proteins were produced in isolated bladder tissue. This light reported real-time clock expression and acted directly as a measure of peripheral clock expression…

‘Treasure in saliva’ may reveal deadly diseases early enough to treat them

The study, the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted of RNA molecules in human saliva, reveals that saliva contains many of the same disease-revealing molecules that are contained in blood. It was published online today by the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Chemistry and will be published in the journal’s January 2015 special print issue, “Molecular Diagnostics: A Revolution in Progress.” “If we can define the boundaries of molecular targets in saliva, then we can ask what the constituents in saliva are that can mark someone who has pre-diabetes or the early stages of oral cancer or pancreatic cancer — and we can utilize this knowledge for personalized medicine,” said Dr…