Japanese researchers have succeeded in creating sperm from mice tissue samples. Takehiko Ogawa then used the sperm to fertilize eggs using IVF techniques, which produced 12 pups who went on to have mice families of their own. 

The research promises to open up the possibility of fatherhood for infertile men. In particular, when pre-pubescent men are treated for cancer (radiation or chemotherapy), they often lose the ability to have children when they grow up. Older men don't suffer this problem because they can freeze their sperm for later use.  

Dr. Ogawa stresses that his research is still in its early stages:

"[He] cautioned that the research is still at an early stage – and while it is clear the baby mice produced from the test-tube sperm were fertile, it is unclear if they were healthy in other ways."

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have proposed a novel treatment for people infected with the AIDS virus. Rather than attempt to destroy the virus itself, they've instead suggested patients be injected with a stripped-down, harmless version of HIV. By placing HIV in competition with another virus for the same resources, they hope to slow the onset of AIDS by another 5-10 years.

The treatment isn't without risks, as it ultimately relies upon a rapidly evolving virus to fight another rapidly evolving virus. Animal trials will have to follow.

“The concept and computational model are intriguing, but I’d like to see a clear demonstration of this in animal models,” said computational biologist Allen Rodrigo of Duke University, who wasn’t involved in the study. “So far, it has been almost impossible to design a strategy that HIV can’t escape from.”

Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center have discovered that the human body contains two avenues by which it replicates cellular DNA. Just like reaching a fork in the road, one path is considered "elite" where the body slowly and carefully copies crucial DNA during cell division, and the other path is more standard and swift. 

The elite path consumes more resources from the body, but these DNA copies tend to govern extremely important functions in the body.  

Led by Dr. Robert Bambara, the next step is to figure out how to trigger the elite process for more of the DNA. If successful, this research will not only length the average life span, but also make it more disease-free. Bambara estimates his research will lead to some kind of therapy within 25 years.

Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos of the University of Minnesota saved his department over $100,000 by integrating a Kinect with his research. The Kinect is being used to observe and diagnose children who may be displaying symptoms of various mental disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit disorder.

With the Kinect, Papanikolopoulos hypothesizes doctors will one day be able to receive simplified data that can help with diagnoses...Initially, Papanikolopoulos envisioned purchasing a $100,000-plus system that would do similar observations of a child...

"Is a $100,000 system being outsmarted by a $150 toy?" Papanikolopoulos said of his initial reaction to the idea..."Indeed this is the case."

In a bid to allow parents some control over whether a baby inherits an incurable disease or not, Britain is assessing the feasibility of fetuses born from the DNA of 3 parents, after British scientists declared the ability to do so using cloning technology.

The process includes removing defective genes and replacing them with healthy ones.

It involves intervening in the fertilisation process to remove malfunctioning mitochondrial DNA, which can lead to a range of conditions including fatal heart problems, liver failure, brain disorders, blindness and muscular weakness...

Within a day of uniting egg and sperm using IVF, nuclear DNA is removed from the embryo and implanted into a donor egg, whose own nucleus has been removed and discarded.

The resulting embryo inherits nuclear DNA, or genes, from both its parents, but mitochondrial DNA from a second "mother" who donated the healthy egg.

Researchers at the University of Manchester discovered that nano-scale hairs off tunicates, also known as sea squirts, can be used to create "cell alignment" which allows for artificial muscle growth. When placed in parallel, muscle tissue rapidly grows and fuses along the hairs as a guiding structure. 

This announcement is actually pretty huge news despite the brevity of the linked press release above. The ability to create artificial muscle tissue will revolutionize many areas of healthcare. Even better, the same technique can be used to regrow other critical human tissue such ligaments and even nerves.

These are tunicates. They grow on rocks and even artificial man-made structures. Lovely, yes?

According to this latest study, a metastatic cancer's resistance to chemotherapy contributes to 90% of treatment failures. Overcoming a cancer's ability to resist chemotherapy would dramatically increase survive rates. 

Enter nano-diamonds.

In earlier Logic-Cool posts, we’ve highlighted attempts to use nano-particles to treat cancer…in particular gold nano-particles. Now, diamond nano-particles have joined the fight.

This time, the effects are a little different. The diamond nano-particles enable chemotherapy to stay inside tumors for longer periods of time. In drug-resistant cancer, the body’s normal response to expel the drugs prevents chemotherapy treatment from having enough time to work on the disease.

Scientists found that diamond nano-particles allow chemotherapy drugs to stay inside the body 10 times longer. In addition, the drugs remained inside the tumors longer as well. The study suggests that diamond nano-particulars will enable them to substantially reduce the chemotherapy dosage required for treatment, lessening ...

read more

Apparently, the touchsceen interface of an iPad is able to bridge the communication gap between autistic children and their parents struggling to understand them. The iPad allows autistic children direct control over its interface, as opposed to a normal computer's keyboard and mouse, which they can suffer immense difficulty with.

There already exist 3 dozen iPad apps for autistic children.

Experts say the Apple iPad lessens the symptoms of the disorder, helping kids deal with life's sensory overload -- in a sense "curing" the disorder, one parent says.

That's what Laura Holmquist believes, at least. Her son Hudson was having 8 or 9 violent meltdowns per day. One morning he started screaming in his bedroom -- and didn't stop until late that evening. The family of eight could not go to public events or out to dinner and had a hard time communicating with him.

"The iPad has ...

read more

Scientists at the Medical University of South Carolina have developed a prototype replacement disc by printing an organ scaffold and seeding it with living cells.  Their new spinal implant disc closely mimics the basic structure of a real spinal disc.

Currently, the only options for someone suffering chronic back pain from damaged discs would be 1) infuse the bones, which limit movement and risk damaging other discs, or 2) implant a metal or plastic disc which risks infection and has no shock absorption.

Either way, people who suffer chronic back pain injuries may soon find permanent relief in the coming years.

“Compared to the metal and plastic implants used today, an artificial scaffold swathed in living tissue could repair itself…Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina, led by Xuejun Wen, professor of bioengineering and regenerative medicine at Clemson University and the Medical University of South Carolina, tried to ...

read more

In a huge breakthrough for the treatment of Parkinson's Disease, researchers at the CU School of Medicine have found a drug that stops the disease from worsening. Current drugs only treat Parkinson symptoms.  

Led by Wenbo Zhou and Curt Freed, the team found that the drug Phenylbutyrate activates a gene called DJ-1 that protects brain neurons.

Mice with Parkinson's disease were able to move normally with no decline in mental function when Phenylbutyrate was placed in their drinking water. Human trials have already begun back in 2009 to test the drug's safety.

Their findings will be published later in 2011.

Freed and Zhou are now looking for other drugs that might turn on the DJ-1 gene. One drawback of phenylbutyrate is that patients must take very large doses, 16 grams per day or 32 large tablets taken at frequent intervals. While the drug is approved by the ...

read more

I find it interesting how similar topic news always seems to cluster around each other. Two separate alcohol studies released today showcase the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption.

First, a summary review of thousands of previous studies found alcohol consumption indicated a 25% reduction in cardiovascular disease, 29% for coronary heart disease, 25% for coronary heart disease mortality rates and a 13% reduction in mortality overall.

"The public health messages should (and in many countries do) acknowledge the reduced risk of incidence and mortality of coronary heart disease associated with moderate drinking. However, we should not expect official recommendations of light drinking on a par with exercise, vegetables, and not smoking. The caveats would be too many, and official recommendations should be based on prospective, randomized studies. The role of alcohol drinking is best discussed in a scenario of a patient taking medical advice from his personal physician."

Second ...

read more

I'm not sure "stillborn" is the correct term, but that was the headline at News.com.au today.

British doctors are using an advanced method to save the lives of critically ill newborn babies. In this recent case, an infant named Ella had the mother's placenta rupture during the labor process, which starved the baby's brain of oxygen to the point of severe brain damage. Doctors had to work 25 minutes before reviving the heart beat.

However, using a new procedure, they froze the baby's body for 3 days. The news article doesn't explain how it works. The video does a better job. Basically, by slowing the metabolism of the brain, it gives the organ the ability to bring itself back from the shock of oxygen deprivation. After 8 days, Ella was able to return home happy and health.

read more

As readers are probably aware, researchers are currently using stem cells to create treatments for a breathtaking array of diseases. However, before scientists can be sure they're using "pluripotent" stem cells in their research, their cell lines must pass through an exhaustive quality control test that can take 6-8 weeks and involves animal testing.

No longer.

In a study published by Nature Methods, Scripps researchers have developed a way to test stem cells in 10 minutes or less, without using animals. The only task required of stem cell researchers is to upload thousands of DNA sequences from their cells online and compare them to an enormous database of genetic information compiled by Scripps.

By shaving roughly 2 months off of research time, we'll soon see even faster research breakthroughs in the use of stem cells.

In research promising major breakthroughs in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, researchers at Northwestern University have successfully converted stem cells into brain cells that are crucial to sustain human memory.

Led by Dr. Jack Kessler, the research team reprogrammed ordinary skin cells to create pluripotent stem cells, which in turn, were used to create fresh brain cells.

Currently, there exist no treatments or drugs that prevent Alzheimer's disease from progressing. Dr. Kessler's work promises to change that fact in the next decade.

We knew amazing things would be coming out of TED this year, the only question was "How amazing?" Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine produced a fresh kidney on stage at the TED conference.

"It's like baking a cake," Atala said.

Atala uses 3D scanners to capture an image of the kidney that needs replacing.  Then, using a tissue sample for the patient the size of a postage stamp, the organ "printer" builds a replacement kidney layer-by-layer.

A college student at TED named Luke Massella, received one of Atala's "printed" kidneys when he was only 10 years-old.

"This surgery saved my life and made me who I am today."

Right on the heels of my previous post about mind-body connections, I got e-mailed this inspiring article by CNN.

We all know THE KING'S SPEECH is a fabulous movie. What we didn't know was that David Seidler, who won an Academy Award for best original screenplay, suffered the same cancer as King George VI did.  

However, David Seidler survived. How did he do it? I pasted a long quite below, but its worth it.

"I know it sounds awfully Southern California and woo-woo," he admits when he describes the visualization techniques he used when his bladder cancer was diagnosed nearly six years ago. "But that's what happened."

Seidler says when he found out his cancer had returned, he visualized a "lovely, clean healthy bladder" for two weeks, and the cancer disappeared. He's been cancer-free for more than five years.

"When I was first diagnosed in ...

read more

This is an old news story back in 2010, but I ran across it today and it seemed like a nice thing to remember.

Neuroscientists at the Stanford School of Medicine have linked the euphoria and well-being associated with new love relationships to an activation of the reward system in the human brain. This activation was found to significantly reduce pain in 15 test subjects, who had recently entered a romantic relationship within the previous 9 months. Simply viewing pictures of the person they loved was enough to "significantly" reduce pain, opening the possibility of non-drug treatments for chronic pain by finding ways to stimulate the rewards center of the brain.

These findings seem to dovetail nicely with the recent conclusions published by British and German scientists that belief was a requirement for pain killers to even work. Clearly, we need vast amounts of more research into the ability of ...

read more

New research from Tel Aviv University in Israel has found that common ingredients in Indian curry, namely Turmeric, can strongly enhance the anti-inflammatory drugs used to fight colon cancer.

The active ingredient within Turmeric, called Curcumin, was found not only to enhance the effectiveness of anti-cancer drugs, but it also reduces toxic side effects because of the lower doses needed to treat colon cancer patients, side effects that include heart attacks and strokes.

Since chronic inflammation can cause several of the cancers related to the digestive system, the Curcumin/Turmeric alone can aid prevention when added to food.

A review of 160 different studies found a striking correlation between a positive state of mind and overall health and longevity. In fact, the connection between happiness and health/longeveity was found to be even stronger than trying to link health to obesity. 

This isn't any surprise.  A few years ago I had to deal with anxiety-related health issues which led me to honestly believe that 99% of all diseases are actually caused by chronic, long-term stress over many, many years.  As your basic high school Health Ed. class taught, stress activates "fight or flight" and shuts down your body's natural regenerative abilities. 

Logic-Cool also posted another article here describing how belief was actually a near-mandatory requirement for pain-killers to even work at all.

These latest results are published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, which is one of two official journals run by the International Association ...

read more

An overwhelming amount of tech news was released today in various media. The first that caught my eye was two independent research teams have found ways to cause cancer cells to commit suicide. 

At Queen's University in Belfast, Dr. Helen McCarthy successfully packaged genes into nano-particles, which then directly transported the gene into breast cancer cells. The gene is iNOS and forces cancer cells to produce toxic nitric oxide which accumulate and self-destruct the breast cancer. Her technique leaves no negative side effects. Dr. McCarthy expects to begin human trials within 5 years. Her next step will be figuring out how to turn the nano-particles into a dried powder that can easily be transported through the health industry and then reconstituted for treatment in patients. 

And then, halfway around the world, a team of researchers at Wayne University in Michigan have developed a "personalized" therapy by which naturally occurring ...

read more