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Researchers have found a way to stop active cancer cells in their tracks – meaning they can then be eliminated by new drug treatments. A collaborative research project between the University of Dundee’s Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) and Queen Mary University of London, has identified chemical compounds, called tool molecules, that can halt active cancer cells. Advancing Cancer Therapy Through Collaboration.. Using these tool molecules forces tumor cells from a specific type of breast cancer into a pro-senescence state – similar to a sleep-like state in which they can no longer divide or cause tumor growth. This condition makes the...

Laboratory equipment maker Thermo Fisher Scientific has settled a lawsuit brought by the estate of Henrietta Lacks, a long-deceased cancer victim whose “immortal” cells have lived on to fuel biomedical research for decades, lawyers for the estate have said. The story of Lacks, a young African American woman who died in Baltimore in 1951, was made famous in Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which became a movie in 2017 featuring Oprah Winfrey. The HeLa cell line, the first to survive and reproduce indefinitely in lab conditions, has been cultivated in vast quantities and used in...

Fluorescence microscopy images showing the endoplasmic reticulum network (green) wrapping around damaged lysosomes (red). The cell nucleus is shown in blue. Today in Nature, University of Pittsburgh researchers describe for the first time a pathway by which cells repair damaged lysosomes, structures that contribute to longevity by recycling cellular trash. The findings are an important step towards understanding and treating age-related diseases driven by leaky lysosomes. "Lysosome damage is a hallmark of aging and many diseases, particularly neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's," said lead author Jay Xiaojun Tan, Ph.D., assistant professor of cell biology at Pitt's School of Medicine...

SEBRING, Florida (CNN) -- A couple of hours up the road from where some September 11 hijackers learned to fly, the new head of Aryan Nation is praising them -- and trying to create an unholy alliance between his white supremacist group and al Qaeda. "You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah."

<p>According to the researchers mainly based at Stanford’s School of Medicine, studies have shown that fat cells can act as a reservoir for RNA viruses like influenza A and HIV. Their new research, which was released in an October preprint and is awaiting peer-review, suggests that the same is occurring with the CCP virus, which causes the disease COVID-19.</p>

UC San Diego researchers introduce Multi-Scale Integrated Cell (MuSIC), a technique that combines microscopy, biochemistry and artificial intelligence, revealing previously unknown cell components that may provide new clues to human development and disease. (Artist’s conceptual rendering.)Most human diseases can be traced to malfunctioning parts of a cell—a tumor is able to grow because a gene wasn't accurately translated into a particular protein or a metabolic disease arises because mitochondria aren't firing properly, for example. But to understand what parts of a cell can go wrong in a disease, scientists first need to have a complete list of parts.By combining...

The chief of the World Health Organization has honored the late Henrietta Lacks, an American woman whose cancer cells ended up providing the foundation for vast scientific breakthroughs, including research about the coronavirusThe chief of the World Health Organization on Wednesday honored the late Henrietta Lacks, an American woman whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge during the 1950s and ended up providing the foundation for vast scientific breakthroughs, including research about the coronavirus. The recognition from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus came more than a decade after the publication of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot's...

Reconstruction of the Jehol Biota and the well-preserved specimen of Caudipteryx.A team of scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and from the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature (STM) has isolated exquisitely preserved cartilage cells in a 125-million-year-old dinosaur from Northeast China that contain nuclei with remnants of organic molecules and chromatin. The study was published in Communications Biology on Sept. 24.The dinosaur, called Caudipteryx, was a small peacock-sized omnivore with long tail feathers. It roamed the shores of the shallow lakes of the Jehol Biota in Liaoning province during...

General Motors is telling owners of some older Chevrolet Bolts to park them outdoors and not to charge them overnight because two of the electric cars caught fire after recall repairs were made. The company said Wednesday that the request covers 2017 through 2019 Bolts that were part of a group that was recalled earlier due to fires in the batteries. The latest request comes after two Bolts that had gotten recall repairs caught fire, one in Vermont and the other in New Jersey, GM spokesman Kevin Kelly said. Owners should take the steps “out of an abundance of caution,”...

Previously, fields such as biochemistry operated under the assumption that chromatin and other elements of the nucleus operated in a liquid state... This new understanding of the physical properties of chromatin challenges that idea, and could lead to a more accurate understanding of how the genome is encoded and decoded. All of our chromosomes are made from chromatin, which is half histone (or structural) proteins and half DNA, organized into long strings with bead-like structures (nucleosomes) on them. Inside the nucleus of a cell, the chromatin fiber interacts with itself to condense into a chromosome. The chromatin fiber also supports...

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to three scientists — William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza — for their work on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability. The Nobel Assembly announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday. Their work established the genetic mechanisms that allow cells to respond to changes in oxygen levels. The findings have implications for treating a variety of diseases, including cancer, anemia, heart attacks and strokes. “Oxygen is the lifeblood of living organisms,” said Dr. George Daley, dean of Harvard Medical...

The fountain of youth just might be filled with sweat: Certain types of exercise can help you age better, new research published in the European Heart Journal suggests. In the study, researchers enrolled 266 young, healthy participants who were generally inactive. Then, they split them into four groups: an endurance training group, a HIIT group, a circuit-based weight lifting group, and a sedentary control group. The three exercise groups performed 45-minute sessions three times per week (the control group continued doing what they were doing, which, well, wasn’t much). At the end of six months, researchers looked at the lengths...

If you thought your cell were mostly normal, it might be time to guess again. Your body may in fact be a shrine to colonies of mutant clones. It's common knowledge that mutations in cells are what give rise to cancer, but far less is known about what gives rise to mutations in the first place. Now, scientists have discovered even healthy people's tissue can be "riddled" with genetic mutations, to the extent researchers describe as shocking. "We discovered that by the time an individual reaches middle age, they probably have more mutant than normal cells," says oncologist and cancer...

Researchers recently discovered certain drugs, including one developed to treat Alzheimer’s, stimulate innate self-repair mechanismsFor dentists, a cavity is a conundrum—in order to save the tooth they must further damage it. Currently, the primary way to treat a cavity is to excavate the decay and the surrounding area before filling the resulting crater with a durable surrogate material such as metal, plastic or glass cement. But what if instead of drilling holes into teeth and patching them up with synthetic fillers, dentists could coax our pearly whites to regrow themselves? Recently, Paul Sharpe, a bioengineer at King’s College London, and...

WASHINGTON, DC – Is old age a disease? Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC], says a significant amount of scientific research indicates that aging is, indeed, a disease. “More important there are many who believe it is a disease with a cure.” Weber cites the work of Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a well-known biomedical gerontologist. His focus is on extending life spans by intervening at the cellular level, repairing damaged cells and in turn extending life. Some call de Grey a “mad scientist” but there is lots of independent study being conducted by those in...

The State Department on Thursday released its annual report on global terrorist activity, listing Iran as the top state sponsor of terrorism and labeling ISIS "the greatest threat globally." The report also includes statistics on terrorist activity worldwide, and said 11,774 terrorist attacks in 92 countries occurred in 2015. Iran's designation and continued sponsoring of terrorism is bound to fuel criticism of the Iran nuclear deal. Critics of the deal have charged that the removal of economic sanctions would allow Iran to increase its support of terror groups.

Israeli 3D printer firm Nano Dimension has successfully lab-tested a 3D bioprinter for stem cells, paving the way for the potential printing of large tissues and organs, the company said on Wednesday. While 3D printers are used already to create stem cells for research, Nano Dimension said the trial, conducted with Israeli biotech firm Accellta Ltd, showed its adapted printer could make large volumes of high resolution cells quickly....

All sophisticated life on the planet Earth may owe its existence to one freakish event. At first glance, a tree could not be more different from the caterpillars that eat its leaves, the mushrooms sprouting from its bark, the grass growing by its trunk, or the humans canoodling under its shade. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Zoom in closely, and you will see that these organisms are all surprisingly similar at a microscopic level. Specifically, they all consist of cells that share the same basic architecture. These cells contain a central nucleus—a command center that is stuffed with DNA and...

Cancer Cells Can't Proliferate and Invade at the Same Time The new findings could inform cancer treatments, which typically target only cells that are dividing By Viviane Callier on January 1, 2016 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Email Print Share via Google+Stumble Upon Lumps and hairlike projections are characteristic of cancer cells, such as the cervical cancer cell shown here.STEVE GSCHMEISSNER Science Source Advertisement The worst cancer cells don't sit still. Instead they metastasize—migrate from their original sites and establish new tumors in other parts of the body. Once a cancer spreads, it is harder to...

Researchers say it may be possible to slow and even reverse aging by keeping DNA more stably packed together in our cells In a breakthrough discovery, scientists report that they have found the key to keeping cells young. In a study published Thursday in Science, an international team, led by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte at the Salk Institute, studied the gene responsible for an accelerated aging disease known as Werner syndrome, or adult progeria, in which patients show signs of osteoporosis, grey hair and heart disease in very early adulthood. These patients are deficient in a gene responsible for copying...