Pokemon Go Players Rescue Dozens Of Abandoned Animals.

Animal rescue ,and animal welfare activist have the pokemon Go players for rescuing dozens of animals. Twenty-seven small animals can thank Pokemon Go for saving their lives. Sara Perez and her friend Matthew Teague were playing the game at a park in South Houston on Tuesday when they stumbled upon a cage full of 20 hamsters and seven newborn mice, apparently abandoned in the strong heat. Read more

NEW STEM CELL REPAIR SYSTEM.

Stem cell therapies capable of regenerating any human tissue damaged by injury, disease or ageing developed following landmark research led by UNSW Australia researchers.The UNSW-led research has been published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. The repair system, similar to the method used by salamanders to regenerate limbs, could be used to repair everything from spinal discs to bone fractures, and has the potential to transform current treatment approaches to regenerative medicine. The Study lead author, haematologist and UNSW Associate Professor John Pimanda, said the new technique, which reprograms bone and fat cells into induced multi-potent stem cells (iMS), has been successfully demonstrated in mice. The team are currently assessing whether adult human fat cells reprogrammed into iMS cells can safely repair damaged tissue in mice, with human trials expected to begin in late 2017. There are different types of stem cells including embryonic stem (ES) cells, which during embryonic development generate every type of cell in the human body, and adult stem cells, which are tissue-specific. There are no adult stem cells that regenerate multiple tissue types. "This technique is ground-breaking because iMS cells regenerate multiple tissue types," Associate Professor Pimanda said. "We have taken bone and fat cells, switched off their memory and converted them into stem cells so they can repair different cell types once they are put back inside the body." The technique developed by UNSW researchers involves extracting adult human fat cells and treating them with the compound 5-Azacytidine (AZA), along with platelet-derived growth factor-AB (PDGF-AB) for approximately two days. The cells are then treated with the growth factor alone for a further two-three weeks. AZA is known to induce cell plasticity, which is crucial for reprogramming cells. The AZA compound relaxes the hard-wiring of the cell, which is expanded by the growth factor, transforming the bone and fat cells into iMS cells. When the stem cells are inserted into the damaged tissue site, they multiply, promoting growth and healing. The new technique is similar to salamander limb regeneration, which is also dependent on the plasticity of differentiated cells, which can repair multiple tissue types, depending on which body part needs replacing. The therapy has enormous potential for treating back and neck pain, spinal disc injury, joint and muscle degeneration and could also speed up recovery following complex surgeries where bones and joints need to integrate with the body. Research shows that up to 20% of spinal implants either don't heal or there is delayed healing. The rates are higher for smokers, older people and patients with diseases such diabetes or kidney disease.Spinal implants currently used to replace damaged or troubled discs don't always weld with the adjacent bones, so by transplanting these reprogrammed stem cells,it will fuse these implants better to the host bone.

EXERCISE SLOWS CANCER GROWTH.

There is a new benefit of exercise: mice who spent their free time on a running wheel were better able to shrink tumors (a 50% reduction in tumor size) compared to their less active counterparts. Researchers found that the surge of adrenaline that comes with a high-intensity workout helped to move cancer-killing immune (NK) cells toward lung, liver, or skin tumors implanted into the mice. "It is known that infiltration of natural killer (NK) immune cells can control and regulate the size of tumors, but nobody had looked at how exercise regulates the system," says senior study author Pernille Hojman, at the University of Copenhagen. "In our experiments, we tried to inject our mice with adrenaline to mimic this increase you see during exercise, and when we do that we see that the NK cells are mobilized to the bloodstream, and if there's a tumor present then the NK cells will find the tumor and home to it." "It is known that infiltration of natural killer (NK) immune cells can control and regulate the size of tumors, but nobody had looked at how exercise regulates the system," says senior study author Pernille Hojman, at the . "In our experiments, we tried to inject our mice with adrenaline to mimic this increase you see during exercise, and when we do that we see that the NK cells are mobilized to the bloodstream, and if there's a tumor present then the NK cells will find the tumor and home to it." The research group also discovered that an immune signaling molecule called IL-6 was the link between adrenaline-dependent mobilization of NK cells and tumor infiltration. It's known that IL-6 is released from muscle tissue during exercise, but Hojman presents evidence that adrenaline specifically aids IL-6 sensitive NK cells and that the IL-6 molecules helped guide the immune cells to the tumors. "That was actually a big surprise to us," she says, adding that IL-6 and its role in tumor biology can be a controversial topic. "In this study we show that the exercise-induced IL-6 seems to play a role in homing of NK cells to the tumor and also in the activation of those NK cells." This study appears Feb. 16, 2016 in Cell Metabolism, excerpts culled from science daily.

MALARIA PROTEIN USED FOR CANCER TREATMENT.

Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to the malaria parasite because it produces a protein that binds readily to a sugar molecule in the placenta. This same sugar molecule is also found in most cancer cells; researchers have shown it is possible to attach anticancer drugs to the malaria protein and use it to deliver them precisely to tumors by targeting the sugar. While the fact that the same sugar molecule (a type of chondroitin sulfate) is found in both the placenta and most cancers is not surprising - since both have cells that grow fast - the evidence for this has only surfaced recently, as senior author Mads Daugaard, an assistant professor of urologic science at UBC, explains: Once the team discovered that the malaria parasite uses a protein it produces called VAR2CSA to embed itself in the placenta, they immediately saw the potential to use the process as a way to target cancer drugs to tumors. Read more;http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/300939.php