A University of Michigan Medical School physician and medical historian says that the law that has helped medical discoveries make the leap from university labs to the marketplace for more than 30 years needs revising. In a new commentary in the iNew England Journal of Medicine/i, Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., director of the U-M Center for the History of Medicine, looks at the fluke-ridden history of how the law known as Bayh-Dole Technology Transfer Act was ...
Hundreds of different cell types, all with the same basic DNA are present in the human body. The surprising fact is that all of these cells can ultimately be traced back to identical stem cells. Despite this fundamental similarity, a bone cell has little in common with a brain cell when it comes to appearance or function. The fact that bone is rigid and mechanically distinct from soft fat or brain had been speculated to play some role in differentiation to new cells ...
Studying the diseases of the brain is a massive challenge for researchers as extracting brain cells, or neurons, from a living patient is difficult and risky. At the same time, examining a patient's brain post-mortem usually only reveals the disease's final stages. And animal models, while incredibly informative, have frequently fallen short during the crucial drug-development stage of research. But scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, ...
Some loose breast cancer cells are more likely to prosper in bone tissue due to the genes that they express, a team of researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has discovered. The team also found that whether or not cancer cells turn on those genes depends on what their surroundings were like in the primary breast tumor. If the breast tumor had molecular patterns similar to those found in bone, the tumor is more likely to spread to bone later. "It''s ...
New research indicates that pollution could be the reason if you are not seeing any health improvements despite eating better and exercising regularly. According to the research report published in the September issue of The FASEB Journal, what you are eating and doing may not be the problem, but what's in what you are eating could be the culprit. "This study adds evidences for rethinking the way of addressing risk assessment especially when considering ...
