Medicine

A new saliva test developed by geneticists at the University of California, Los Angeles, reveals a person's age within five years, a finding that could have many applications in medicine, at crime scenes, and more.

"With just a saliva sample, we can accurately predict a person's age without knowing anything else about them," says principal investigator Dr. Eric Vilain, a professor of human genetics, pediatrics and urology, in a UCLA news release.

The team's research, published online this week in the Public Library of Science's PLoS One journal, focuses on methylation, a process by … Read more

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pushing harder than ever for government leaders around the world to increase vaccination investments.

In a keynote address yesterday to the 64th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spoke for nearly half an hour to health ministers from 193 countries about the importance of "seeking good health care for every human being."

"I believe we have the opportunity to make a new future in which global health is the cornerstone of global prosperity," he said.

Gates called on the assembly to make this "the Decade of Vaccines," with some basic goals: eradicate polio early in this decade; build a system capable of delivering vaccines to every child; make five or six new vaccines available to all children around the world. With these investments, Gates said, the world "can save 4 million lives by 2015 and 10 million lives by 2020."

Another challenge Gates cited was lowering the cost of antigenic materials, such as pentavalent, pneumococcus, and rotavirus vaccines. The Gates Foundation is working with vaccine manufacturers to cut prices of those inoculations in half by 2016. Lower costs would be beneficial to many countries around the world that are reeling from budget woes. … Read more

Two professors at Binghamton University in New York are using a novel imaging technique to observe the behavior of an enzyme--called tubulin tyrosine ligase, or TTL--as its behavior can suggest whether certain cancer cells might grow more aggressively than others.

Though they are not developing actual therapies, Susan Bane and Susannah Gal say their research could help further personalize targeted cancer therapies.

"Potentially, we could put [a tumor sample] in our labeling system and say, 'Yes, that has a problem with the TTL system, and therefore you should be more aggressive with it,'" says Gal, whose work is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "Or we could say, 'That's probably OK, so you can treat it with normal chemotherapy.'"

The enzyme TTL involves microtubules, which both help chromosomes line up correctly during cell division and provide part of the scaffolding of a cell's structure. Those microtubules are made of proteins called tubulin; the enzyme carboxypeptidase clips an amino acid called tyrosine off the ends of some of these proteins, and later the enzyme TTL puts that tyrosine back on.

Bane says it's unclear why tyrosine is clipped off only to be reattached, but it's clearly an important part of the cell's cycle: "We do know that if you don't have that enzyme, you'll die."

In some cancer cells, that cycle of removing and reattaching tyrosine is disrupted, with too many tubulins lacking tyrosine altogether. Tumors made of those cells, Bane says, "tend to grow more aggressively."… Read more

Researchers at the University of East Anglia in England say they have identified the gene that helps cancer spread throughout the body, and that finding a drug that deactivates that gene could make treating cancer both easier and more likely to be successful.

The culprit, called WWP2, is an enzymatic bonding agent in cancer cells that attacks the body's natural inhibitors of the spread of cancer.

Lead author Andrew Chantry says in the school's press release that the discovery could lead to the development of a new generation of drugs within the coming decade to stop cancer's … Read more

Researchers are using nanoparticles to create a material sensitive enough to analyze a person's breath in real time and detect indicators of cancer, diabetes, and other illnesses.

Scientists at Purdue University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology said today that even though diagnostic breath-analysis tools have been around for several decades, this is the first time a material has been developed that's sensitive enough to deliver on-the-spot results.

"We are talking about creating an inexpensive, rapid way of collecting diagnostic information about a patient," Carlos Martinez, an assistant professor of materials engineering at Purdue, … Read more

Imagine administering first aid to a crash-test dummy that breathes, blinks, bleeds and even urinates.

That's what medics are doing these days as increasingly lifelike mannequins are being used by the U.S. military and other forces for training.

Military personnel are practicing on patient simulators including the SimMan 3G, manufactured by medical equipment maker Laerdal.

The mannequins are wireless, battery-operated and remote-controlled, allowing for a range of realistic combat medicine scenarios. Their eyes dilate, they secrete liquid from the eyes, nose and mouth, they bleed from severed limbs, and cough and moan.

If medics don't stop the bleeding, the mannequin will "die" just like a real patient. Sometimes simulations involve human actors whose lower limbs are concealed, covered by mannequin legs that are severed and bleeding profusely. (Check out the vid below featuring an injured SimMan Essential mannequin in Norway.)

Such grisly scenes are being played out at U.S. military training centers at home and abroad in an attempt to improve the effectiveness of first responders. Computers monitor how medics react to simulations and the debriefing data helps them improve their performance. … Read more

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health said yesterday they have come up with a computer model they say can predict infection rates of the influenza virus, and it could help people gird up for flu season in the future.

It has been well established in the scientific community that the extent to which a flu virus spreads in a given year is related to how much it has mutated from previous seasons. But these scientists set out to translate that knowledge into something more concrete.

The group looked specifically at data on virus genetics and infection rates from 16 … Read more

Cell phones with sophisticated cameras are already being fitted with microscopes for mobile, in-the-field testing. Connecting microfluids to these cell phones, however, has proved to be its own challenge.

So biomedical engineers at UC Davis have developed what they call a Fit-to-Flow fluid connector (F2F for short) they compare to the USB interface, through which microfluids can be connected to electronic devices for biological and chemical testing.

They filed a provisional patent on November 1 and published a paper describing the chip on November 25 in the journal Lab on a Chip.

"We think there is a huge need … Read more

Soldiers may soon be able to avoid an all too common injury associated with modern warfare, if a new helmet and visor design make it to the field.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the most common military injury is known as "blast-induced traumatic brain injury." Some 130,000 U.S. service members deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have sustained traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) as a result of explosions, according to the Department of Defense, which can result in concussions, long-term brain damage, and death. (And that number could be even higher.)

So a team of researchers at MIT have … Read more