Discovery! Heart Attack Damage Healed by Stem Cells
You may already know that heart attacks are the leading cause of deaths in both men and women in the US. Long term damage isn’t rare either, as the cardiac cells become deprived of oxygen, so die after a short time.
A healthy heart
What’s less well known is that after a heart attack, the bloodstream needs to be replenished with certain proteins to help prevent further long-term damage to the heart.
Anyone’s first thought for an obvious solution would be to directly add stem cells to the damaged area to encourage recovery – however, after a little research, it’s clear to see that the injured site of a post-attack heart is often toxic and inhabitable for injected stem cells.
This, of course, makes things a bit more complicated. A research group at Thomas Jefferson University approached this problem, and have found a potential way of managing it.
Their paper in Circulation explains how a single protein, called CTPR9, may enhance the healing properties of stem cells in these patients. This protein generally becomes depleted after a heart attack, so it’s vital that concentration levels are recovered. The group discovered that after giving damaged tissue CTPR9, new stem cells can survive there longer.
This gives the stem cells the chance to begin repair work and prevent scar tissue forming – meaning less long-term damage!
This work has only been completed on model organisms so far, and the group are currently working on applying these methods to humans. Once again, stem cells are proving themselves to be the ‘miracle cure’ we keep hearing about… but is it too good to be true? We will see in time!
Light It Up for Argus II: The First Treatment for a Type of Blindness
The NHS has teamed up with company Second Sight to develop a bionic eye to treat people with severe ‘retinitis pigmentosa’. Trials began in 2016 for 10 patients – and it was a success!
Participants in the trial reported seeing Christmas lights for the first time in years, and recognising their family members. One man said how grateful he was to just be able to tell if another person had entered or left the room. The recovery of these little things sighted people would usually take for granted could have such a huge effect on the lives of patients with this disease.
The innovative device is called the Argus II. On the outside, it just looks like a normal pair of glasses or sunglasses – until you notice the tiny camera and a processing part on the side. It is this that captures and processes the image, which is then transmitted to the cells on the retina of the patient’s eye. From this, the information is sent to the brain, where it can be recognised and give the person some sort of visual recognition.
This heartfelt video from the New York Times explores how an individual is impacted by the device:
This is the first treatment for retinitis pigmentosum, and I can’t wait to see what’s next for this device. Will it be able to be developed in a way that can restore sight significantly, or for other types of blindness involving the retina? Only time will tell.
Students at the Winchester School of Art have joined forces with Southampton Neuroscience Group (SoNG) to help raise an understanding of some of the most hard-hitting neurological diseases. They have adopted unique angles through fashion to explore the many ways the diseases affect patients personally, in order to bite back at the stigmas surrounding them. Thanks to SoNG, they have used actual scientific ideas to influence their work.
“The students were taught by experts to help raise awareness of these diseases, and how the patients feel,” said their representative. “This is seen in their fashion designs.”
A designer’s brainstorming
What did the students need to know? The fundamentals of neuroscience. For example, neurons are the structures that make up most of our nervous system. These provide a passageway for electrical impulses, known as ‘action potentials’, to move back and forth from the brain. This allows the function of movement, senses, speech, and so much more… basically, they’re extremely important to humans and many other organisms, which is why issues with them can be especially devastating. ‘Neurodegeneration’ is when these neurons start to break down, particularly the ones in the brain.
Synapses are the gaps between two neurons. They are responsible for the movement of action potentials from one neuron to the next. They also control these impulses, and are involved with memory storage. Issues with these, too, can have a massive impact on neurological function. This is why the students’ work is so important - art can make the understanding of this accessible to a less scientific audience.
(Click keep reading to see some of the outstandingly innovative work)
The students were taught about the principles of synaptic function, neurodegeneration, and brain function, to allow them to choose one disease as the focus of their designs.
Nicola Day chose schizophrenia. This is a condition where the patient cannot always distinguish their own thoughts from reality, and can result in hallucinations, delusions and muddled thoughts. Although the cause remains elusive, drugs affecting the function of synapses have shown positive effects. Nicola’s art is based on these symptoms, using the pattern of neurons as influence.
“The dress is tight and slightly restricts movement to reflect the effect these brain cell malfunctions can have,” she explained. “Illustrating the biological mechanisms of the conditions demystifies them and thus renders them less frightening.”
This approach will hopefully take away some of the mystery behind these conditions, making them less intense for the patients. Furthermore, if the perceptions of the patient’s family and friends are improved, they may be able to offer more appropriate support. Although these methods aren’t looking to directly cure the cases SoNG is looking at, they may help the recovery processes be more understandable, and therefore smoother, for the patient.
We all know him as the author of On the Origin of Species... but there’s lots more to Darwin than this single book. We visited his absolutely stunning house, currently run by English Heritage (100% recommend going!).
Check this out:
He loved to make lists (no way, me too)
He even made a pros and cons list about marriage... just before he tied the knot with Emma Wedgwood
It was the death of one of his daughters that confirmed to him that all life is just a fight for survival
He started training as a doctor, until he realised he hated blood
When he saw slavery in South America on his voyage on the HMS Beagle, he was incredibly shocked by the injustice - not a common view at the time
He had a undiagnosed disease for most of his life, now believed to be Chagas disease, caused by tropical kissing bugs
Baby sand cats filmed in the wild for the first time!
... and they are just TOO cute. I’ve always been a huge fan of this species (and not just because they are ridiculously adorable, promise), and Gregory Barton and his team have managed to find a litter of three in their natural habitat.
The only cat species to be mainly found in true deserts
Not aggressive :)
Their full water intake comes from food
Ears can detect noise below the surface of the sand
They hunt solitary at night
They take shelter from the sun during the day under rocks or shrubbery
They are near-threatened as a species... due to habitat destruction from humans...
In your post you sound like you've seen a sea squirt before, have you had the fortune?
Hello anon,
I saw the squirtiness last year in south Spain in a rock pool! We went closer to see if we could actually see the organism but then one of my friends fell in the pool and injured himself so that was the end of that...
It was pretty cool though - a thin stream of water shot up about a metre up into the air. I’ve been fascinated by them ever since!
CML can be identified by many symptoms, including easy bleeding, weight loss and pain below the ribs on the left side. There is no UK-wide data for mortality rate, but it has appeared that younger people have a better chance of survival past 5 years than older people.
Gene ‘reading frames’ look at the nucleotides on DNA to see which protein needs to be coded. Translocation is the movement of genes, and can change what these frames look at. In CML, translocations cause the fusion of two reading frames, which causes a hybrid protein to be coded for.
Here, part of the ‘ABL’ proto-oncogene (pre-cancer causing gene) is fused with another region. This deregulates the ABL expression, meaning lots of growth promoting signals are released. From this, unregulated growth promoting causes a tumor, which leads to CML in this case.
Baby robins are capable fliers 10-15 days after leaving the nest. This little one hadn’t quite got the hang of it yet, and could only just use its wings to help it jump onto low branches. Gave it a good try though!
It also still had lots of spots and was extremely, ridiculously fluffy. We saw this cutie at the RSPB reserve near Chichester, UK. We were able to get quite close!
Feel free to use the image, as long as this blog is credited. Thanks!
Today... merging microscopy images of Pseudomonas fluorescens biofilms! The green you can see is the alive bacteria (dyed with SYTO 9 green fluorescence) and the red is the dead bacteria (dyed with Propidium Iodide red fluorescence).
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