Sometimes it’s best to fight fire with fire, and that’s the approach doctors are taking against acne,
that bane of adolescence, by sending in a relatively inert virus to
fight the bacteria responsible for skin blemishes. These viruses are
already embedded in pores deep inside the skin and have a natural
ability to infect bacterial cells, turning them into virusmaking
factories before causing the bacteria to self-destruct. It’s just a
matter of boosting their numbers, which researchers say can be done with
a topical cream that’s loaded with the viruses. Or they could simply
slather the cream with the bacteria-killing agent that the viruses
produce. Either way, it could mean welcome clear skin for teens.
9. Man-Made Mouse Eggs
Stem
cells have made what seemed like impossible biological feats
attainable: treating diabetes, helping paralyzed patients to walk again,
repairing heart tissue damaged by a heart attack. But even for stem
cells, regenerating the most fundamental elements of life — egg and
sperm — from scratch seemed too great a challenge. Or maybe not.
Scientists in Japan used two kinds of stem cells from mice — those
taken from days-old embryos and those reprogrammed from adult mouse skin
cells — and created viable egg cells that they then successfully
fertilized to generate the first ever pups born from stem-cell-derived
eggs. The apparently healthy mouse pups are the ultimate test of the
regenerative capabilities of stem cells and represent a breakthrough
that could potentially lead to new treatments for infertility in human
couples.
8. Decoding Childhood Tumors
Survival rates for pediatric cancers have improved to an impressive 80%–90%
in recent years, and much of the boost is due to early detection of
tumors and treatment with some well-established interventions, including
surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. So doctors hope that the Pediatric
Cancer Genome Project, a three-year, $65 million effort to sequence
major pediatric cancers, will become a rich source of new targets for
therapies. Understanding the genetic drivers of cancers can hopefully
reveal common pathways among different types of cancers, allowing
doctors to borrow treatments effective against one type of tumor to
treat another, for example, or to generate entirely new drugs for
thwarting cells that grow abnormally. It’s the future of cancer
treatment that may bump survival rates even higher.
7. Speeding DNA-Based Diagnosis for Newborns
Fifty hours.
That’s how long it now takes to decode and interpret a newborn baby’s
genome — an undertaking that used to take weeks or even months. And
those two days can mean the difference between life and death for a
critically ill infant. The speedier genomic analysis is possible thanks
to advances in sequencing technology as well as innovative software that
links the 3,500 known genetic defects to their childhood diseases,
allowing doctors to quickly decide on the right treatment that could
save a baby’s life. About 30% of babies admitted to the neonatal
intensive care unit each year have inherited a genetic disease, and
sequencing their genomes may become a critical part of improving their
care in coming years — the sooner the better.
6. Breaking Down Breast Cancer
Breast
cancer is certainly a complex disease, driven by myriad genetic and
lifestyle factors. But in the latest analysis of the DNA of breast
tumors, researchers are heartened by the fact that the disease may be
slightly simpler than they had thought. The Cancer Genome Atlas, a
government project that is sequencing the genomes of dozens of cancers,
found more than 30,000 mutations in 510 samples of breast tumors, but
these fell into four major subtypes.
One showed close ties to ovarian cancer, opening up the possibility
that treatments for that cancer can also help breast-cancer patients,
while another helps explain why some have better outcomes than others
among women with HER-2 receptor tumors that are supposed to respond to
drugs like Herceptin. The knowledge could translate into changes in the
way doctors treat breast cancers and be the difference between surviving
or becoming a victim of the disease.
5. Hope for Reversing Autism
In encouraging news for parents of autistic children, researchers say early behavior therapy
can help normalize brain patterns responsible for the symptoms of the
condition. Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders who
participated in the Early Start Denver Model program, which involves
intensive social and linguistic engagement with toddlers, showed changes
in the way their brains process human faces and objects. Autistic
youngsters generally show more brain activity when they view images of
an inanimate object like a toy than when they see a picture of a woman’s
face. But after two years of ESDM therapy, the autistic children showed
the opposite response, and these patterns came close to mimicking those
found among normally developing children. It’s a hopeful sign that it’s
possible to halt some of the brain changes linked to autism and
possibly even reverse them. But the key to the program’s success
involves early and intensive intervention with properly trained
counselors who actively engage the toddlers in several hours of therapy a
week.
4. Lab-Grown Body Parts
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Windpipes
are not like kidneys or livers; they aren’t among the organs that
routinely show up on the organ-transplant list. But thanks to stem
cells, patients in need of a new trachea can grow their own. Researchers
at the Karolinska Institute fashioned only the second man-made trachea,
which connects the nose and mouth to the lungs, using synthetic
microfibers and a bath of stem cells removed from the bone marrow of a
patient whose own trachea was destroyed by cancer. In the first case, a
donor trachea from a deceased individual served as the scaffold for a
Spanish woman’s stem cells. In the latest advance, the scientists used a
bioengineered matrix to seed the cells. Such techniques represent the
future of regenerative medicine, in which stem cells of all kinds,
including those made from patients’ own skin cells, can serve as the
basis for generating any type of cell or tissue that needs to be
replaced or repaired
3. Do-It-All HIV Drug
It’s already a potent weapon against HIV, but Truvada,
a combination of two antiviral medications, is now the first drug-based
way to prevent infection against the virus among healthy people. After
groundbreaking trials showed that uninfected individuals using the
medication could lower their risk of acquiring HIV, the Food and Drug
Administration expanded Truvada’s approval to include healthy people at
high risk of becoming infected with HIV. Studies showed that high-risk
gay men as well as the uninfected partner of an HIV-positive patient
lowered their chances of becoming positive by anywhere from 42% to 75%.
While critics are concerned that the treatment may lead to higher-risk
behavior, like unprotected sex, public health experts welcome the new
way of fighting AIDS: preventing infections from occurring in the first
place.
2. What Are Bugs For?
What’s the most populace component of the human body? Cells? No. Genes? Not even close. It’s bugs.
The microbes, including bacteria, that live in, on and around us
outnumber our human cells 10 to 1. And researchers have just completed
the first phase of the Human Microbiome Project, the most comprehensive
accounting to date of who these microbial residents are and what they
do. Most of them are actually our friends, working hard to ensure that
we digest our food, for example, and build up strong immune systems. But
as they learn more about the bugs that live within us, scientists are
recognizing that they may play an important role in a number of chronic
diseases and conditions, including inflammation and obesity. Far from
being unwelcome intruders, these microbes may eventually help us treat
some of our most intractable health problems.
1. Junk No More
After being ignored as useless genetic garbage,
the vast 98% of the human genome that does not code for genes finally
has a purpose. It turns out that these previously insignificant portions
of DNA are the true genetic masterminds, or metabolic switches that
regulate how and when genes function as well as how prolifically genes
churn out their respective proteins. Without them, scientists say, genes
would be like a jumbled mess of words that have no meaning. Scientists
are already exploiting the newly discovered trove of biological
information and pursuing new ways of controlling, and possibly even
curing, diseases with the flick of a genetic switch.
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