-Stem cell shots rescue terminally ill children
06 January 2008
Andy Coghlan
NewScientist Magazine issue 2637
Children who had seemed doomed to die within weeks may have been rescued by injections of stem cells originally extracted from healthy bone marrow donors. The children all had graft-versus-host disease, a condition in which bone marrow transplants aimed at treating diseases such as leukaemia end up attacking the child instead. Between 30 and 60 per cent of children receiving such transplants develop the condition. While the majority of cases are mild and can be resolved with immunosuppressive drugs, a minority of patients do not respond to treatment and die within three months from liver failure, diarrhoea and bleeding in the gut.
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-Blood substitute to be tested in humans
04 January 2008
Andy Coghlan
NewScientist Magazine issue 2637
After decades of clinical failures and ethical controversy, could 2008 mark a new dawn for artificial blood? That's the hope of HemoBioTech of Dallas, Texas, which claims to have developed a blood substitute that is safer than rival products. It plans to test the blood in surgical patients in India and the US later this year. Like many previous blood substitutes designed to keep people alive when donor blood is unavailable, HemoTech is based on a form of oxygen-carrying haemoglobin extracted from cow blood, in which the haemoglobin molecules have been chemically bound together. This is necessary because free haemoglobin is toxic and can cause blood vessels to constrict, restricting blood flow. However, in many previous trials of blood substitutes, more deaths occurred among patients given the blood product than in controls receiving saline, suggesting that the toxicity problem had not been overcome.
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-Universal flu jab works in people
Friday, 4 January 2008, 10:18 GMT
BBC News
A single jab that could give lifelong protection against all types of flu has produced promising results in human trials. The vaccine, made by Acambis, should protect against all strains of influenza A - the cause of pandemics. Currently, winter flu jabs have to be regularly redesigned because the flu virus keeps changing. The new vaccine would overcome this and could be stockpiled in advance of a bird flu outbreak, say experts.
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-Global impact of bird flu
Thursday, 3 January 2008, 14:50 GMT
BBC News
Bird flu continues to hold much of the globe in its lethal grip, with more than 60 countries affected. Millions of birds have died or been destroyed as a result of outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain as far apart as northern Europe and the Far East. The number of cases among humans is also rising since the strain emerged in South-East Asia in 2003 before spreading to Europe and Africa.
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-HIV Isolate From Kenya Provides Clues For Vaccine Design
ScienceDaily (Jan. 6, 2008)
Two simple changes in its outer envelope protein could render the AIDS virus vulnerable to attack by the immune system, according to research from Kenya and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.The results could provide important clues for designing an effective AIDS vaccine, which is badly needed to decrease the number of new HIV infections, now estimated at about 2.5 million per year worldwide.
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-Growing Artificial Skin From Hair Roots
ScienceDaily (Jan. 4, 2008)
There is new hope for patients with chronic wounds: euroderm GmbH and the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology IZI in Leipzig have been granted approval to produce artificial skin from patients’ own cells.It sounds like something from a science fiction novel: Pluck a few of someone’s hairs, and four to six weeks later they have grown into a piece of skin. Of course, what researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology IZI in Leipzig have recently started doing in their new cleanrooms isn’t quite as simple as that. “We and euroderm GmbH have been given permission to grow dermal tissue for grafting onto chronic wounds such as open leg ulcers on diabetics patients,” says IZI team leader Dr. Gerno Schmiedeknecht.
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