BF2S Forums D&ST - Science

Last edited by Spark (2012-01-16 03:46:27)

Spark wrote:

A few years I go I went to a decathlon event where one of the tasks was to present a potential novel treatment for cancer. And I swear every fourth entry was drugs bound to nanoparticle/nanobot. Unfortunately doing so is ridiculously hard, to the point where no one's really bothered yet.

To actually seriously develop the idea at a rigorous research level, and a practical one (using resin is a fairly inspired move) is seriously impressive for a high-schooler though. The creativity of youth.

BACTERIA that can resist nearly all antibiotics have been found in Antarctic seawater.

Björn Olsen of Uppsala University in Sweden and colleagues took seawater samples between 10 and 300 metres away from Chile's Antarctic research stations, Bernardo O'Higgins, Arturo Prat and Fildes Bay. A quarter of the samples of Escherichia coli bacteria carried genes that made an enzyme called ESBL, which can destroy penicillin, cephalosporins and related antibiotics (Applied and Environmental Microbiology, DOI: 10.1128/AEM.07320-11).

Bacteria with these genes can be even more dangerous than the better known superbug MRSA. That's because the genes sit on a mobile chunk of DNA that can be acquired by many species of bacteria, increasing the incidence of drug-resistant infections such as the E. coli outbreak last year in Germany.

The type of ESBL they found, called CTX-M, is common in bacteria in people, and the Uppsala study found that concentrations of resistant bacteria were higher close to the sewage outfalls from the stations. Some Antarctic stations started shipping out human faeces for incineration after gut bacteria were found nearby. Chile's research stations have virtually no sewage treatment in place, says Olsen.

Recent work shows the bacteria may hang on to the genes for CTX-M even when no longer exposed to antibiotics, suggesting that superbugs can survive in the wild, with animals acting as a reservoir. Penguins near the Chilean stations have been checked and are free of ESBL, though Olsen is now looking at the area's gulls as he has found ESBL-producing bugs in gulls in France.

"If these genes are in Antarctica, it's an indication of how far this [problem] has gone," he says.

Russian scientists are reporting success in their quest to drill into Lake Vostok, a huge body of liquid water buried under the Antarctic ice.

It is the first time such a breakthrough has been made into one of the more than 300 sub-glacial lakes known to exist on the White Continent.

Researchers believe Vostok can give them some fresh insights into the frozen history of Antarctica.

They also hope to find microbial lifeforms that are new to science.

Spark wrote:

v interested to see where this goes.

What a quick turnaround: a drug used to treat cancer can reverse Alzheimer's disease in mice – and it takes just 72 hours to work its magic. It remains to be seen if the drug has the same effect in people with Alzheimer's, though.

Alzheimer's diseaseMovie Camera is associated with deposits of beta-amyloid peptides in the brain. The build-up is thought to underlie the abnormal brain activity that leads to memory problems, and also kick-starts a chemical cascade that ultimately leads to the death of neurons.

Paige Cramer at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, reckoned it might be possible to prevent that build-up using bexarotene, an anti-cancer drug. She reasoned that a healthy brain can clear beta-amyloid deposits through a process facilitated by a substance called apolipoprotein E (ApoE). ApoE is activated in part by a receptor called RXR – and bexarotene enhances the action of RXR.

When mice with Alzheimer's-like brain damage were given bexarotene orally, they were able to clear more than half of the beta-amyloid peptides from the brain within 72 hours. They also showed a rapid reversal of cognitive and social deficits.

Cramer says she hopes to begin phase 1 clinical trials in the next few months. "We believe that because bexarotene is approved [for use in humans], we will be able to transition much more quickly from basic research to the clinic," she says.

Other researchers caution that the study, while encouraging, does not mean that the drug will work so well in people with Alzheimer's. Many drugs that have shown promising results in mice fail to have similar effects in humans.

"The drug development world is littered with drugs that seemed to work on transgenic mice, but didn't work on people," says Derek Hill at University College London. "A programme of clinical trials is needed to assess whether these potentially promising results translate into an effect on the human disease."

David Allsop, a neuroscientist at the University of Lancaster, UK, agrees. "It looks promising in the mouse model, but in recent years these types of experiments in mice have not translated well into humans, and so it is too early to get excited about the prospect of an effective therapy for Alzheimer's disease," he says

Last edited by Spark (2012-02-10 05:15:43)

Peer review is one of the cornerstones of science and is an essential part of its error control process. At every level in science we use peers to check for errors. Within well-run collaborations, results are reviewed by the peers within the collaboration before submitting for publication. I will get my peers to read my papers before submission. Even the editing of these posts before being put on line can be considered peer review. Then there is the formal peer review a paper receives when it is submitted to a journal. In many ways this is the least important peer review because it is after a paper is published that it receives its most vigorous peer review. I can be quite sure there is no fundamental flaw in special relativity, not because Einstein was a genius, not because it was published in a prestigious journal, but because after it was published many very clever people tried very hard to find flaws in it and failed. Any widely read scientific paper will be subject to this thorough scrutiny by the author’s peers.  That is the reason we can have confidence in the results of science and why secrecy is the enemy of scientific progress. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.