“The more I focus on my thoughts, the more I feel like they don’t belong to me” — that is how Anna, an individual with psychosis, describes her experience.
This disruption in a person’s sense of self has long fascinated Rachel Aviv, staff writer for The New Yorker, she said in a recent campus talk sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. (more…)
Improvement enables ‘liquid biopsies’ for metastatic melanoma
Researchers at UCLA report that they have refined a method they previously developed for capturing and analyzing cancer cells that break away from patients’ tumors and circulate in the blood. With the improvements to their device, which uses a Velcro-like nanoscale technology, they can now detect and isolate single cancer cells from patient blood samples for analysis.
Circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, play a crucial role in cancer metastasis, spreading from tumors to other parts of the body, where they form new tumors. When these cells are isolated from the blood early on, they can provide doctors with critical information about the type of cancer a patient has, the characteristics of the individual cancer and the potential progression of the disease. Doctors can also tell from these cells how to tailor a personalized treatment to a specific patient. (more…)
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Health professionals may soon have a new method of diagnosing Parkinson’s disease, one that is noninvasive and inexpensive, and, in early testing, has proved to be effective more than 90 percent of the time.
In addition, this new method has the potential to track the progression of Parkinson’s, as well as measure the effectiveness of treatments for the disorder, said Rahul Shrivastav, professor and chairperson of Michigan State University’s Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders and a member of the team developing the new method.
It involves monitoring a patient’s speech patterns – specifically, movement patterns of the tongue and jaw. (more…)
The first detailed and complete picture of a protein complex that is tied to human birth defects as well as the progression of many forms of cancer has been obtained by an international team of researchers led by scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Knowing the architecture of this protein, PRC2, for Polycomb Repressive Complex 2, should be a boon to its future use in the development of new and improved therapeutic drugs.
“We present a complete molecular organization of human PRC2 that offers an invaluable structural context for understanding all of the previous biochemical and functional data that has been collected on this complex,” says Berkeley Lab biophysicist Eva Nogales, an electron microscopy expert who led this research. “Our model should also be an invaluable tool for the design of new experiments aimed at asking detailed questions about the mechanisms that enable PRC2 to function and how those mechanisms might be exploited.” (more…)
