Tag Archives: levine

Decoding the emergence of metastatic cancer stem cells

“Cells have genetic circuits that are used to switch certain behaviors on and off,” said biophysicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, a senior investigator at Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics and co-author of a new study in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. “Though some of the circuits for metastasis have been mapped, this is the first study to examine how cancer uses two of those circuits, in concert, to produce not just cancer stem cells, but also dangerous packs of hybrid stem-like-cells that travel in groups to colonize other parts of the body.” Metastasis — the spread of cancer between organs — causes more than 90 percent of cancer deaths, but not all tumor cells can metastasize…

New way to generate insulin-producing cells in type 1 diabetes

“We have found a promising technique for type 1 diabetics to restore the body’s ability to produce insulin. By introducing caerulein to the pancreas we were able to generate new beta cells — the cells that produce insulin — potentially freeing patients from daily doses of insulin to manage their blood-sugar levels.” said Fred Levine, M.D., Ph.D., professor and director of the Sanford Children’s Health Research Center at Sanford-Burnham. The study first examined how mice in which almost all beta cells were destroyed — similar to humans with type 1 diabetes — responded to injections of caerulein. …