A cancer cell

Researchers of the Genetics Engineering School of Amir Kabir University have developed a new technique for early diagnosis of ovary and prostate cancer by using blood mass spectrum.
The project manager, Amin Assareh, said that one of the best ways for fighting cancer is early diagnosis of the illness and before it is spread in the body, ISNA reported.
“Since becoming afflicted with cancer results in minor changes in blood proteins that cannot be diagnosed through ordinary laboratory methods, the new and most recent method the research paper of which was published in 2002, a blood protein model will be analyzed by using mass spectrum equipment,“ he added.
Assareh pointed out that breakthroughs in bioinformatics, particularly genomics and proteomics have opened a new landscape for early diagnosis of cancer.
“Recent studies show that processing the model related to genes and their products such as proteins helps to early diagnosis of different kinds of cancer. Blood protein mass spectrum comprises relative frequency in proportion with thousands of proteins that are available in blood,“ he added.
Assareh opined that since the mass spectrum equipment are sophisticated, expensive and limited, they are not popular in medical centers.
However, he pointed out that it is anticipated that they will become popular in the near future.

HydroPak has zero emissions, is lightweight, and operates with minimal noise.

The HydroPak fuel cell is a portable power generator that can provide up to 14 hours of power with a single disposable cartridge. The $20 cartridges are water-activated, and have a shelf life of several years.
The HydroPak stems from a collaboration between Horizon’s fuel cells and Millennium Cell’s “Hydrogen-on-Demand“ storage technology, said Physorg.com.
The companies hope to attract consumers and professionals who currently use generators and batteries for their remote power supply needs. The HydroPak could have applications for camping, construction, emergency, and other uses.
The device, which is still in beta, is relatively inexpensive for a fuel cell product, costing around $400 in addition to the disposable cartridges. The HydroPak also has zero emissions, is lightweight, and operates with minimal noise.
A water-activated cartridge can crank out 400 Watts through an AC outlet and two USB ports, so it can be used to power everything from portable lights, notebook computers, portable televisions and ad hoc communications networks, for a total of 14 continuous hours.
Horizon and Millenium Cell plan to publicly debut the HydroPak at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at the Las Vegas Convention Center from January 7-10.
On January 29-30, the companies will also demonstrate the product for the US military at the Tactical Power Sources Summit 2008 at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In addition to the HydroPak, a HydroPak Mini will also be unveiled, which can be used in consumer devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and portable media players.
Underwriters Laboratories is currently evaluating the product, and Horizon and Millenium Cell expect it to be approved by mid-2008. Then Horizon will manufacture several thousand units, which it plans to sell later in the year, with additional products appearing in 2009.

A device designed to eliminate mistakes made while mixing compounds at a hospital pharmacy was 100 percent accurate in identifying the proper formulations of seven intravenous drugs.
Five potentially serious medication errors were averted over an 18-month period in a test at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in the University of Michigan Health System by using the technology, said Jim Stevenson, associate dean of Clinical Sciences at the U-M College of Pharmacy.
Stevenson also directs Pharmacy Services at the U-M Health System, according to ScienceDaily.
Stevenson said the hospital is the first in the world to use this device to test patient drugs compounded in the pharmacy. The U-M Health System already has many safeguards, such as bar coding, in place to avert mistakes.
“Errors in compounding these types of medications are rare. However, when they occur they can have a significant negative impact on patients and staff,“ Stevenson said.
The table-top device manufactured by ValiMed, a division of Tuscon, Ariz.,-based CDEX Inc., uses a technique called enhanced photoemission spectroscopy to determine if the compounds are correct.
Light is shot into the drug compound, which excites molecules, and the energy emitted by the excited molecules is measured by a spectrometer.
Each drug compound tested has its own so-called light fingerprint, which is compared to the fingerprint of the control compound. If they match, the drug is considered correct.
There are many potential safeguards that are being pursued to improve medication safety, Stevenson said. However, the primary safeguard for intravenous drugs compounded in hospital pharmacies today remains a visual check by the pharmacist.
Using a technology like this helps prevent mistakes that can occur due to human error, he said.
“Our goal needs to be to have zero tolerance for errors,“ Stevenson said. “If we wanted to eliminate errors completely we knew we couldn’t continue to rely completely on human visual checking.
We needed to implement some sort of technological solution to overlay our human process for these drugs to be failsafe.“
The hospital tested 40-50 samples daily, at strengths and at variations below and above the proper dosage amount. The process takes about a minute, so the technology was able to be integrated into the workflow of the pharmacy when used for select high risk products, the paper said.

There is new hope for patients with chronic wounds: euroderm GmbH and the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology IZI in Leipzig have been granted approval to produce artificial skin from patients’ own cells.
It sounds like something from a science fiction novel: Pluck a few of someone’s hairs, and four to six weeks later they have grown into a piece of skin, ScienceDaily wrote.
Of course, what researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology IZI in Leipzig have recently started doing in their new cleanrooms isn’t quite as simple as that.
“We and euroderm GmbH have been given permission to grow dermal tissue for grafting onto chronic wounds such as open leg ulcers on diabetics patients,“ says IZI team leader Dr. Gerno Schmiedeknecht.
At present, chronic wounds are treated by grafting on the patients’ own skin, which is normally taken from the thigh. This leaves scars on both the thigh and the treated wound.
“If we produce this skin using the recently approved EpiDex technique instead, we can achieve the same chances of recovery without hurting the patient. Moreover, the artificial skin grows onto the wound without scarring,“ says Dr. Andreas Emmendorffer, managing director of euroderm GmbH.
Another advantage is that the transplantation can be performed on an outpatient basis.
A few days later, it is already possible to see whether the new skin has adhered to the wound. 72 days later, the grafted skin can no longer be distinguished from healthy skin.
But how exactly is the new skin grown? “We pluck a few hairs off the back of the patient’s head and extract adult stem cells from their roots, which we then proliferate in a cell culture for about two weeks.
Then we reduce the nutrient solution until it no longer covers the upper sides of the cells, exposing them to the surrounding air. The increased pressure exerted by the oxygen on the surfaces of the cells causes them to differentiate into skin cells,“ explains Emmendorffer.
In this way, the researchers can grow numerous small pieces of skin, produced individually for each patient, which add up to a surface area of 10 to 100 square centimeters when pieced together.
To ensure that they comply with the safety regulations at all times, the researchers are using new cleanrooms at the IZI, a state-of-the-art facility for producing different kinds of cell therapeutics.
“We continuously measure the number of particles in the cleanrooms. If there are too many particles in the air, an alarm goes off,“ says Schmiedeknecht.

Most social insects have developed a system in which there is a division of labor between castes of related individuals.

Complex organization of some insect societies is thought to have developed to such a level that these animals can no longer survive on their own.
New research suggests that rather than organizational, genetic, or biological complexity defining a “point of no return“ for social living, pressures of predation create advantages to not living alone, Physorg.com said.
The ancient systems of sociality in bees, wasps, termites, and ants seem to have become an obligatory way of life for these organisms as there are almost no examples of species reverting to solitary lifestyles.
“This has prompted the notion of a “point of no return“ whereby evolutionary changes in behavior, genetics, and shape in adaptation to a social lifestyle prohibit the insects from living without their society--a queen bee losing her workers would be like a human being losing a vital organ,“ explains Luke Chenoweth of Flinders University, Australia.
Most social insects have developed a system in which there is a division of labor between castes of related individuals. Reproductive queens rely on sterile workers, usually their daughters, to feed them and nurture their young, but in a few examples of social bees all females in a colony retain the ability to breed but some do not, a phenomenon known as totipotency.
Chenoweth and colleagues investigated Halterapis nigrinervis, an African species thought to provide a rare example of a bee with totipotent social ancestors that has reverted to a solitary lifestyle.
By investigating this species the researchers hoped to reveal the factors that allow or prevent reversion to a solitary lifestyle.
The researchers collected nests from various habitats. Surprisingly they found that over half contained multiple females and those containing multiple females were more likely to have bee larvae in them.
“The results mean that H. nigrinervis is social and that there are consequently no known losses of sociality in this group of bees.“ As these bees lack the social and behavioural complexity of honeybees and many other social insects, the fact that they do not seem to live solitarily in any circumstances suggests that ecological pressures rather than biological factors maintain sociality.
The researchers hypothesise that sociality in H. nigrinervis is maintained by predation: multiple females not only offer greater protection to the brood in the nest but also should an adult fall foul of predators, nest-mates will raise their young.
While many social insects might retain the potential to raise young alone, the benefits of protection against predation result in sociality being maintained.

In rheumatoid arthritic patients, some traditional risk factors impart a greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease, while others confer a lower risk, compared with those without rheumatoid arthritis, according to a report in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.
Dr. Sherine E. Gabriel from the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota and colleagues note that cardiovascular disease is the underlying cause of death in many rheumatoid arthritis patients, but the impact of traditional cardiovascular risk factors in rheumatoid arthritis is unclear, Reuters reported.
The team therefore compared the frequency of traditional cardiovascular risk factors in 603 rheumatoid arthritis patients and 603 subjects without rheumatoid arthritis and determined the impact of these risk factors on selected cardiovascular outcomes (heart attack, heart failure and cardiovascular-related death) in the two groups.
The initial prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors was similar in both groups, the authors report.
During an average follow-up of 15 years in the rheumatoid arthritis group and 17 years in the non-rheumatoid arthritis group, the rheumatoid arthritis patients were significantly more likely to loose weight and significantly less likely to develop abnormal lipid levels, such as high or low density cholesterol.
Gender, smoking status, and personal cardiac history had a different influence on cardiovascular outcome in the rheumatoid arthritis patients compared with the non-rheumatoid arthritis subjects.
Specifically, male gender, current smoking, and personal cardiac history increased the risk of cardiovascular disease less in the rheumatoid arthritis patients than in those without rheumatoid arthritis.
“These results indicate that cardiovascular disease prevention strategies focused solely on controlling traditional cardiovascular risk factors may not have the same impact in persons with rheumatoid arthritis as would be expected based on estimates from the general population,“ the investigators note.
The weaker effect of some risk factors for cardiovascular disease in rheumatoid arthritis patients suggests that competing mechanisms have a role in the development of cardiovascular disease in these patients, they conclude.
Additional research is needed to detect the underlying factors that determine rheumatoid arthritis-associated cardiovascular disease and mortality so therapeutic approaches can be developed.

Soccer teams from high altitude countries have a significant advantage when playing at both low and high altitudes, finds a study in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.
In contrast, lowland teams are unable to acclimatize to high altitude, reducing physiological performance, according to ScienceDaily.
At altitude, lack of oxygen (hypoxia), cold and dehydration can lead to breathlessness, headaches, nausea, dizziness and fatigue, and possibly altitude sickness.
Activities such as soccer (known as football in some countries including the UK) can make symptoms worse, preventing players from performing at full capacity.
In May 2007, football’s governing body, the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA), banned international matches from being played at more than 2500 m above sea level.
So Patrick McSharry, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, set out to assess the effect of altitude on match results and physiological performance of a large and diverse sample of professional footballers.
He analyzed the scores and results of 1,460 international football matches played at different altitudes in 10 countries in South America spanning over 100 years.
Four variables were used to calculate the effect of altitude and to control for differences in team ability (probability of a win, goals scored and conceded, and altitude difference between home and away team venues).
Altitude difference had a significant negative impact on performance. High altitude teams scored more and conceded fewer goals as altitude difference increased. Each additional 1,000m of altitude difference increased the goal difference by about half of a goal.
The surprising result is that the high altitude teams also had an advantage when playing at low altitude, so benefiting from a significant advantage over their low altitude opponents at all locations.
There is still some debate over the best strategy for low altitude teams to employ when playing at high altitude to deal with this disadvantage.
He suggests that assessing individual susceptibility to altitude illness would facilitate team selection.