Tag Archives: process

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. …

Discovery of pro-metastasis protein reveals mysterious link to neurodegeneration — ScienceDaily

In work published earlier this month in Nature, they identify a protein that appears to act as a “master regulator” by blocking tumor suppressor genes and so helping to set metastasis in motion. “Although the research is in its very early days, if we learn more about how this process works, we may in the future be able to generate drugs that block the triggering of metastatic disease,” says Sohail Tavazoie, senior author on the study, Leon Hess Assistant Professor, and head of the Elizabeth and Vincent Meyer Laboratory of Systems Cancer Biology. To pinpoint this protein, Tavazoie and his colleagues used a computer algorithm previously developed by first author Hani Goodarzi and co-author Saeed Tavazoie, a professor at Columbia University, to scan both the sequence and shape of RNA molecules in breast cancer cells. Only recently have cancer researchers begun to systematically look at the shapes of messenger RNA molecules, which encode instructions from DNA. …

Mechanism that clears excess of protein linked with Type 2 diabetes

What causes this accumulation of IAPP in pancreatic beta cells of people with diabetes has remained a mystery. But a team of researchers from the Larry L. Hillblom Islet Research Center led by Dr. Peter Butler, professor of medicine at UCLA, may have found an answer in autophagy, a process that clears damaged and toxic proteins from cell. …