Free Republic

Note to journalists: Please report that this research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. NEW ORLEANS, April 11, 2013 — In a classic case of turning an enemy into a friend, scientists have engineered a protein from flesh-eating bacteria to act as a molecular “superglue” that promises to become a disease fighter. And their latest results, which make the technology more versatile, were the topic of a report here today at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society. “We’ve turned the tables and put one kind of...

About 1 in 4 deaths in the United States are due to cancer, but primary tumors are rarely fatal. Instead, it's when tumors metastasize that cancer becomes so deadly. To help patients and physicians make treatment decisions, teams of researchers have been working on various methods to detect cancer's spread – via the bloodstream – before secondary tumors develop. Now, one team reports a nearly perfect method for separating breast cancer cells from blood. They describe their proof-of-concept device in a paper accepted for publication in Biomicrofluidics, a journal of the American Institute of Physics. Detecting and separating circulating tumor...