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Home / News / Tags / medical breakthrough
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Stories about: medical breakthrough |
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Bacteria are extremely small organisms, and in many cases, they consist of only a few cells. There are species that only have a single cell, and therefore keeping it intact is a major priority. Over the course of their evolution, the organisms have set up a clever and ingenious defense mechanism against aggressive ox... |
21 November 2009
04:49 GMT |
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In a new study conducted on unsuspecting mice, Swedish researchers at the medical university Karolinska Institutet managed to accomplish a major breakthrough in the field of neuroscience, when they identified a mechanism related to the formation of long-term memories. Their find essentially controls the brain's ... |
10 November 2009
17:31 GMT |
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Bacteria are the most helpful and the most harmful organisms for the human body in the world today. While the thousands of species in our guts keep us healthy, and help us digest food, other species, just as numerous, can cause us significant damage, and even death. Therefore, knowing how these microorganisms functio... |
9 November 2009
14:31 GMT |
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Lung diseases such as cancer and edema can easily cause a person to die, if advanced enough. For these people, getting a lung transplant is oftentimes the only chance they have at life. In the United States alone, there are currently over 1,800 people waiting on transplant lists, but the thing is that insufficient or... |
30 October 2009
11:59 GMT |
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Out of the people who develop life-ending cancer, 90 percent die because their condition metastasizes, as in the cancer spreads from one organ to another, non-connected, non-adjacent organ. In other words, pancreatic cancer may affect the liver, lungs or the brain, with an inevitable outcome. Once the disease spreads... |
29 October 2009
06:36 GMT |
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In case of an infection, when pathogens pour freely through an open wound inside the body, the immune system must be quick on the spot with its response. Various types of immune cells need to be activated, and all of this must be done within moments of the time when the invading microorganisms were first detected. Fa... |
26 October 2009
09:55 GMT |
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According to a new scientific study, it may be that conditions such as epilepsy (a disease of the brain) and heart arrhythmia (irregular beats of the heart) may have a single molecular root problem. Misfiring electrical signals cause both these afflictions, and researchers say that the newly found knowledge may help ... |
19 October 2009
21:01 GMT |
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One of the most important types of immune-system cells in the human body is the natural killer (NK) cells. They are among the first to respond to an emergency, such as a pathogen infection, by arriving at the scene and immediately beginning to kill off the intruders. Once activated, these little killers stop at nothi... |
2 October 2009
09:05 GMT |
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Gene therapy is one of the most promising forms of treatment out there today, and experts hope that it may one day be used against a large variety of diseases, from cancer to AIDS. But there are still numerous problems associated with it that need to be dealt with first. One such issue is understanding exactly the ro... |
22 September 2009
06:23 GMT |
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In a breakthrough accomplishment that could have significant implications for humans as well, experts at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) managed to cure rats suffering from spinal-cord injuries, using nothing more than electrical stimulation, and a daily routine of exercises. The small rodents were... |
21 September 2009
02:58 GMT |
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One of the most impressive things about our immune system is that it is essentially everywhere in the body. Where there's blood, there are bound to be at least a few white blood cells (WBC) just patrolling around and doing their job. When a chemical trigger runs through the blood, announcing that a pathogen has ... |
17 September 2009
06:39 GMT |
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For the first time ever, scientists at the Imperial College London (ICL) identified the gene that controlled the expression of NK (natural killer) cells, which are an important part of the human immune system. The gene's action in fact triggers the differentiation of blood stem cells into NK cells, which makes i... |
14 September 2009
02:44 GMT |
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Particular DNA segments can be found in various amounts from one person to another, even if they are in the same line, as in family. These variations play an important part in our evolution. They can hold the key to boosts of the immune system and to developing resistance to certain diseases, but can also make it a l... |
31 August 2009
04:44 GMT |
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Experts from the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, have recently announced that they are working on a new electronic nose that will have the ability to detect early signs of lung cancer, before the disease advances far enough to show up on conventional viewing methods such as X-rays and MRI. Relying on the po... |
31 August 2009
01:40 GMT |
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Scientists have known for a long time that a causal connection exists between diabetes and obesity, but new drugs and therapies developed in the lab have always focused on treating either one of the two, and not both at the same time. However, as Reuters reports, a new medicine apparently has the ability to make lab ... |
28 August 2009
15:11 GMT |
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In groundbreaking, new studies, genetics engineers have managed to create monkeys that have none of their parents' mutations, which are usually passed from one generation to the other via mitochondrial DNA. In their experiments, the research team, from the Oregon National Primate Research Center, in Beaverton, s... |
27 August 2009
06:19 GMT |
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For decades, doctors and researchers have used electricity to study or treat the human brain. Such investigations have led to the discovery of important centers in the cortex, such as the motor center and the pleasure one. Some treatments for conditions such as Parkinson's and even depression have been developed... |
27 August 2009
02:58 GMT |
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In some serious heart conditions, patients' only hope for survival is related to receiving a heart 'patch,' a piece of engineered cardiac tissue, which is grafted directly onto their hearts. However, in order for the transplant to survive, it must receive a steady supply of oxygen and nutrients. In an ... |
25 August 2009
03:46 GMT |
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Diabetes is a severe disorder, which is characterized by insufficient insulin production in the body, or the inability for the hormone to be properly absorbed. This results in high levels of glucose (sugars) in the blood, which lead to severe complications, including blindness, vascular disease, and death, to name bu... |
25 August 2009
03:28 GMT |
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Experts at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio (UTSC) have recently identified a new molecule that is able to detect two of the most common respiratory viruses. Upon detecting the pathogens, the structure is able to mount and coordinate an immune-system attack on the intruders and annihilate ... |
24 August 2009
10:29 GMT |
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With an estimated 37,000 new patients every year, thyroid cancer is among the leading types of the terrible disease. Treating it most often implies removing parts of the thyroid gland, or even the entire formation, and this is usually done through a three- to five-inch incision in the front of the neck. Now, a new me... |
24 August 2009
02:35 GMT |
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After centuries in which meningitis was free to wreak havoc among small children and the elderly, researchers from the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences have finally managed to discover how the bacteria causing the disease move fr... |
19 August 2009
03:58 GMT |
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Most viruses that are able to infect the human body, as well as other animals, require living cells in order to replicate and create more viral agents. However, they also need specific chemicals and proteins located inside these cells, without which their replication cycle cannot be started. Researchers have, for ins... |
16 August 2009
15:31 GMT |
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Scientists have taken a major step towards curing blindness recently, when they managed to devise a method that allows patients suffering from the rare, inherited form of blindness known as Leber congenital amaurosis to see light for the first time in their lives. People born with the disease are completely blind sin... |
14 August 2009
01:52 GMT |
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Carbon nanotubes have long been touted as a very promising material in areas such as engineering and computer sciences, but it now seems that medicine has good uses for them as well. A large collaboration of scientists at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, the Wake Forest University Center for Nanotechnol... |
4 August 2009
05:47 GMT |
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New investigations have revealed an amazing fact about a large number of pathogens – bacteria, microbes and viruses – they carry within them tools that destroy them, and we can make use of them. The find, made by experts at the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (FIB) Department of Molecular and Cellula... |
31 July 2009
07:02 GMT |
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When looking at cancerous cells and their healthy neighbors under the microscope, it's very difficult not to distinguish the two, as everything about their appearance and function is different. But a new research shows that the same simply doesn't hold true for the nanoscale level, where formations as small... |
8 July 2009
18:31 GMT |
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Stem cell research is difficult from many perspectives, but one of the things that until now seemed indispensable for it were viruses, without which scientists believed that stem cells could not be converted into the required type of mature cells, and vice versa. But now, a team of experts at the Max Planck Institute... |
8 July 2009
05:41 GMT |
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In a find that could potentially revolutionize the field of medicine, experts at the Massachusetts General Hospital have found a type of human heart stem cells that are able to basically differentiate into all major types of cells that exist in our hearts. The discovery is of critical importance, and finding the stem... |
4 July 2009
03:49 GMT |
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One of the main causes for blindness in the United States is retinopathy, a degenerative eye condition that shows signs of progressive vision loss, until ultimately all sight disappears completely. However, there may still be hope for the countless patients suffering from the disease, as experts from the University o... |
3 July 2009
04:33 GMT |
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Researchers at the Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health have taken another step in turning science-fiction into reality, when they have recently announced the creation of a new viewing technique, which is able to combine light with sound to look inside living creature... |
1 July 2009
06:27 GMT |
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Over the coming months, a team of Australian researchers will proceed towards trying out on humans a therapy that has undergone constant studying for the last two years. In mouse subjects infected with human cancer cells, the survival rate after the treatment was of 100 percent, and these optimum results have given t... |
29 June 2009
04:46 GMT |
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The Martin-Bell syndrome, also known as the fragile X syndrome, is a genetic disorder in which the expression of the fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR-1) protein is impeded. This leads to poor neural development, and can result in a number of other physical, intellectual, emotional and behavioral side-effects, last... |
24 June 2009
18:01 GMT |
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Ebola is one of the most deadly viruses on the face of the Earth, and, although it has mostly been eradicated from most parts of the world, it still poses a threat of infection, if new strains appear. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston have recently taken the first steps towards creati... |
24 June 2009
16:01 GMT |
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Despite decades of research, scientists have not yet been able to come up with efficient drugs to treat conditions of the neurons associated with the loss of myelin insulation, such as multiple sclerosis and diabetic neuropathy. One of the main difficulties in this line of research is the availability of test materia... |
24 June 2009
06:54 GMT |
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Being able to assess the health of an organism starting from a cellular level has been one of the long-standing dreams in medicine and health care, and it would appear that good things do happen to those who wait (or do serious research instead). After years of study, experts at the US Department of Energy (DOE) Lawr... |
17 June 2009
20:01 GMT |
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For quite some time now, researchers have known that, in people addicted to drugs or medicine, the pleasure center in the brain gets “confused” and mixes up the responses it normally gives out in response to certain stimuli. Scientists have hypothesized that, by learning to control the action of this nerv... |
29 May 2009
09:18 GMT |
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British researchers announced yesterday that they'd created a new type of stem cells, directly derived from bone marrow, which had been genetically altered to seek out and destroy cancerous cells throughout the human body. They manage to destroy mutated cells by delivering a special protein directly into their m... |
20 May 2009
09:44 GMT |
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Experts from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center have managed to crack one of the most difficult problems in modern-day medicine, when they published a new study in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, detailing how the vaccine commonly used to fight tuberculosis (TB) could be augmented to boost its efficiency. Tha... |
20 May 2009
05:51 GMT |
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Having large batches of skin samples of different varieties at their disposal for numerous types of tests has been a dream of doctors, bioengineers and pharmaceutical companies for many years. Everything from beauty creams to burn bandages could be tested on these samples, in order to ensure that they do not cause an... |
19 May 2009
09:23 GMT |
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Scientists and researchers from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in the US, have managed to create a synthetic immune system-like molecule, able to fight the dreaded human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in monkey test subjects. After being injected with the new chemical, the animals proved able to withstan... |
18 May 2009
16:51 GMT |
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A new find made by experts at the University of Michigan shows that anxiety may actually be favored by a chemical that was originally meant to aid our brains develop normally. The new study reveals that rats who were bred in such a manner that they suffered from higher degrees of anxiety than others exhibited a signi... |
13 May 2009
10:18 GMT |
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Throughout our bodies, cells that conventional medical wisdom places in certain parts of it do not always remain fixed, but rather travel around, accomplishing such important processes as cellular development, tissue regeneration, and even metastasis, in cancer cells. However, over the years, it has proven very diffi... |
13 May 2009
06:00 GMT |
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Understanding how the human brain processes its desire to move, before the actual movement command is issued for the muscles, has been a long-term impossibility for neuroscientists, mostly because of the difficulties they've experienced in determining which areas of the cortex are involved in the process. Only r... |
8 May 2009
17:01 GMT |
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Thus far, the estrogen hormone, of which women have more, has been known only for its effects on determining the female traits and for its role on the reproductive system. But a brand new study conducted by researchers at the University of Rochester comes to show that the stuff also plays a pivotal part in the way th... |
6 May 2009
06:50 GMT |
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Taking ultrasound images usually implies making an appointment at a hospital, and then spending a few hours until the entire scanning process is complete. But a new approach to the investigation method, devised by experts at the Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL), has the potential to make this type of test av... |
22 April 2009
05:50 GMT |
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Researchers in Utah and Texas have recently announced the discovery of a new sound-amplification system in the ear, made up of tiny, hair-like tubes atop “hair cells” in the auditory canal. These devices apparently function just like “flexoelectric motors,” which are the ones that drive, for e... |
22 April 2009
04:54 GMT |
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Compounds inside scorpion venom have come under intense scientific scrutiny over the years, since it was discovered that certain combinations had the ability to stop the spread of brain-cancer tumors. By combining this knowledge with recent advancements in nanoparticle technologies, researchers at the University of W... |
17 April 2009
05:21 GMT |
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Unborn babies' sleep patterns have been an enigma for researchers since modern observation techniques have been devised. Measuring the brain activities of people sleeping is easy when they are outside the womb. Electroencephalograms can yield a pretty detailed insight into someone's subconscious mind, and t... |
14 April 2009
10:51 GMT |
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Conventional medical knowledge held that while the skin and the bones could heal once they got damaged, some organs such as the heart and the brain could not. It also pinpointed that cells inside the heart and the brain did not regenerate throughout a person's life, and that those who were destroyed never got re... |
3 April 2009
03:40 GMT |
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