PARKINSONS: Dr. Smeyne of St. Judes Hospital has his eye on parkinson’s research, to determine what causes it and eventually how to cure it. “One of the critical new findings we’re looking at, some of the influenza viruses can lead to degeneration of the brain and may actually impact on developing parkinson’s disease”
CANCER: A cure for prostate cancer — sans chemotherapy and radiation treatments — could be on the horizon, according to promising new research in mice. Mayo Clinic researchers successfully cured mice of prostate cancer using a human vaccine that has no side effects, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature Medicine.
If the vaccine is also able to work in humans, it would enable people with prostate cancer to be rid of their tumors without having to suffer from the side effects that come with chemo and radiation, researchers said.
The vaccine works by signaling the mice’s immune systems to recognize and attack the prostate cancer tumor and leave healthy tissue unharmed, said Mayo Clinic researchers, who collaborated with scientists from the United Kingdom for the study.
\BALDNESS: Gray hair is, along with premature balding, one of the greatest fears of image-conscious men and women everywhere, but it may soon be a thing of the past. Scientists at the Ito Lab at New York University’s Langone Medical Center have identified the proteins that cause gray hair, which could lead to an eventual cure.
Scientists have known for years that hair color is determined by the stem cells that guide the development of hair follicles working together with color-producing stem cells called melanocytes. Today, NYU researchers announced they had isolated the wnt protein, which serves to coordinate pigmentation between the two types of stem cells.
Already, scientists have managed to start with black mice and once they inhibited the Wnt pathway in their melanocyte stem cells, they eventually turned gray.
Ito Lab/NYU Langone Medical Center – Scientists were able to take normal mice, inhibited the Wnt pathway in their melanocyte stem cells, and eventually turn their hair gray.
“Mouse and the human hairs are very similar in the way that they are structured and the way they contain melanocyte stem cells. We found that the wnt signaling pathway is activated the same way,” said Piul Rabbani, a grad student in NYU’s Langone Medical Center who led the study, told ABC News.
GSS:Jeremy Smith, Governor’s Chair for Molecular Biophysics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has helped reveal a key trigger of Gerstmann-Strussler-Scheinker (GSS) syndrome, a rare but deadly neurodegenerative disease. The finding could have far-reaching implications for the treatment of other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s.
Smith conducted his research with two collaborators in Italy: Isabella Daidone, a former postdoctoral researcher of his who is now at the University of L’Aquila, and Alfredo Di Nola of the University of Rome “La Sapienza.”
Most GSS patients begin developing symptoms in their late fifties. Symptoms include loss of memory, difficulty speaking, and unsteadiness and lead to progressive dementia, and then death within a few months or years. There is presently no cure or treatment. The disease results from a single, tiny mutation in a protein, resulting in it having a wrong shape–through “misfolding”–then aggregating to form amyloid plaques in the brain.
“Ever since the ‘mad cow’ scare in Britain in the 1990s, which led to several hundred human deaths and 4.4 million cattle being destroyed, I’ve been interested in finding out more about these fascinating diseases of wrongly-shaped proteins,” said Smith, who was born in England.
The team compared high-performance computer simulations of the structures of the normal and the GSS-mutant proteins. They found the GSS protein looks dramatically different from the normal form and revealed how its shape is primed for plaque formation.
“This research shows how computer simulation can be used to pinpoint changes in molecular structure that lead directly to disease,” said Smith. “We think that a similar line of investigation should prove beneficial in understanding the origins of other amyloid diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and rheumatoid arthritis. Once the origin is understood at molecular detail, strategies to rationally prevent and cure a disease can be conceived.”
The findings can be found in the article, “Molecular Origin of Gerstmann-Strussler-Scheinker Syndrome: Insight from Computer Simulation of an Amyloidogenic Prion Peptide” in this month’s edition of the Biophysical Journal