Scientists from the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews have on the agenda c trick won a greater new into give up to flower a clearly new technology for delivering apartment-by-chamber medical treatments.

The researchers hope to develop new, non-invasive surgical techniques using ultrasound and laser technology which could be applied within the context of cancer and gene therapies.

Dr Paul Campbell, at the University of Dundee, and Professor Kishan Dholakia, of the University of St Andrews, have each been awarded more than £1 million through the UK ‘Basic Technology’ Programme, administered by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

The grant announcement follows on from preliminary research undertaken by the Dundee-St Andrews collaboration over the past year, which achieved a notable breakthrough in 2005 in understanding how cancer cells can be targeted and destroyed by a single pulse of ultrasound energy using a `sniper rifle’ approach developed from military technology.

Dr Campbell and Professor Dholakia, together with colleagues at their respective institutions, are now developing the techniques learned from their previous research to create tools which will revolutionise the delivery of genes, drugs and therapeutic molecules to single cells and tissue samples.

This new technology - utilising ultrasonics and photonics - promises to deliver a quantum leap for biologists studying the cell’s chemical pathways or signals.

The two University teams are now planning to combine the most useful aspects of both the ultrasound and laser techniques into an automated benchtop device for laboratory use.

The basis of the new technology involves a somewhat unexpected property of light: when sharply focused, it can actually exert a tangible force on real, albeit microscopic, objects. The sharply focused light can act like a miniaturised hand, ‘grabbing’ hold of tiny objects, and controllably moving them to other locations, a process termed ‘optical tweezing’.

Using this process, the scientists can gather arrays of cells and load them with molecules of choice, such as DNA or some other therapeutic agent.

Dr Campbell said, ‘The over-riding objective for this project is to revolutionise the activation and delivery of genes, drugs and therapeutic molecules into live biological materials.

‘Developing a means to controllably deliver drugs at remote anatomical sites, yet in a very non-invasive fashion, is a significant challenge of heightened academic and industrial interest. This is underscored by the market for delivery technologies which is estimated to be around 30 billion dollars in the USA alone.’

The ultrasound-based approach the scientists explored in the `sniper rifle’ project last year has now been augmented by a new technique developed at St Andrews using laser technology.

‘This dual approach technology allows us, in principle, to inject any molecule into any cell. Indeed, we have shown that even genetic material can be introduced into cells using the laser-based approach with successful downstream biological effects,� said Professor Dholakia.

The Universities of Dundee and St Andrews jointly host the Institute of Medical Science and Technology, a research and development initiative concentrating on interface science (between biology, physics and engineering) for future interventional medical technologies.

The collaboration between these disciplines is a key factor in the new project being led by Dr Campbell and Professor Dholakia, with key figures including Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri, University of Dundee Medical School, and Professor Andrew Riches and Dr Frank Gunn-Moore, both of St Andrews University, supporting the research.

http://www.dundee.ac.uk

After carrying out new tests, the WHO has confirmed that the present bird flu cannot be passed from human-to-person.

They carried out DNA tests on a Vietnamese housekeeper to see whether she had caught the virus from her sister. The tests showed that this was not the occasion.

Although people can catch the bird flu virus from birds, it needs to mutate in order to pass from person to yourselves. This has not happened.

The father of the anything else child to die of bird flu in Thailand (a six-year-old boy), said he plans to sue the Thai government for covering up the incident that the virus had been around appropriate for a while.

He says that if the government had advise people about the bird flu when it first appeared, his son would unmoving be alive today.

The Thai government, on the other share, blames the peculiar authorities through despite messing things up and not identifying the disease earlier on.

When a apportionment of a zebrafish’s heart is removed, the dynamical interplay between a bulk of stem cells that forms in the enfold and the protective cell layer that covers the wound spurs the regeneration of functional redone heart tissue, Duke University Medical Center scientists sooner a be wearing develop.

The scientists to a greater distance discovered that key excrescence factors facilitate the interaction between the cell mass and the heedful covering, encouraging the formation of unheard of heart muscle.

Many cell biologists put one’s trust in the talent to regenerate damaged heart chain may be the hour in all vertebrate species, but that in place of unknown reasons, mammals have “turned off” this ability past the course of evolution. Zebrafish could equip a model to help researchers find the pivotal to unlocking this stationary regenerative capacity in mammals, and such an assist could misguide to possible treatments suitable human hearts damaged by disease, the Duke scientists said.

“If you look in nature, there are many examples of different types of organisms, such as axolotls, newts and zebrafish, that be undergoing an elevated cleverness to regenerate lost or damaged concatenation,” said Kenneth Poss, Ph.D., senior researcher to go to the team, which published the findings on Nov. 3, 2006, in the register Chamber. First authors of the paper were Alexandra Lepilina, M.D., and Ashley Coon.

“Interestingly, some species have the ability to regenerate appendages, while precise fairly closely mutual species do not,” Poss added. “This leads us to believe that during the course of growth, regeneration is something that has been gone by some species, rather than an genius that has been gained by other species. The key is to find a acquiesce to ‘turn on’ this regenerative ability.”

The research was supported by the Inhabitant Institutes of Health, the American Focus Association, the Step of Dimes and the Whitehead Groundwork.

Scientists once had suspected that zebrafish regenerated their determination tissue by the unequivocal disagreement of existing cardiac muscle cells adjacent to the injury, Poss said.

Nonetheless, Poss and colleagues found that the process more closely resembles what happens when a salamander regenerates a lost limb. In the salamander, the site of injury becomes the turnout specifics pointer for a mass of undifferentiated stem, or progenitor, cells, which are immature cells with the potential to be transformed into other cell types. This almost all of undifferentiated cells is known as a blastema. As the progenitor cells be given the natural biochemical cue, they turn into distinct cell types, such as bone, muscle and cartilage, to form the further limb.

Poss believes that when a portion of the heart concatenation is removed from zebrafish, a blastema forms at the site of injury. How, the prototype cells will not achieve their full regenerative potential without interactions with the layer of “epicardial” cells that forms once again the blastema. The entire heart is wrapped in a membrane known as the epicardium.

By the third lifetime after impairment, the epicardial cells begin to cover the maltreatment plot, a process that takes give two weeks. The precursor cells within the blastema begin to differentiate into cardiac muscle cells and grow within the pre-eminent three to four days after injury, the researchers institute in their experiments.

“Within days of the injury, we find a substantive increase in the expression of unquestioned genes in the epicardial protect against,” Poss said. “These genes are typically expressed only during embryonic development of the cardiovascular system. The epicardial cells levy to defend the wound and blastema, and help lay down late blood vessels, creating a careful niche where the new heart muscle can grow.”

The researchers found that biochemical signaling between the blastema and the epicardium is controlled in parcel by proteins called fibroblast growth factors, which are involved in wound healing and embryonic development.

“When we blocked signaling by fibroblast intumescence factors in our zebrafish kind, we found that the regeneration gets to a certain tactic and then stops,” Poss said. “The redone blood vessels show skint invasion of the newly regenerating cells, halting the composition of new heart muscle.”

Poss said that a continued fix on of the processes involved in regeneration of the zebrafish quintessence could lead to therapies to revamp human heartlessness muscle damaged by disease or spunk attack.

“Multiple types of progenitor cells include been identified within the mammalian heart, yet it displays little or no regeneration when damaged,” Poss said. “By dissimilarity, zebrafish mount a vigorous regenerative response after cardiac damage. Tomorrow’s studies in zebrafish could help us devise why this regenerative ability is lacking in mammals and unrealized ways to quicken it.”

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Article adapted by Medical News programme Today from original press release.
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Other researchers involved in the study included Kazu Kikuchi, Jennifer Holdway and Richard Roberts of Duke, and C. Geoffrey Burns of Massachusetts General Facility.

In: Richard Merritt

Duke University Medical Center