A Potential Approach to Clearing Cytomegalovirus
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a herpesvirus that causes few if any noticeable issues in most people when they are first exposed to it. By the time old age rolls around, near everyone tests positive for CMV. It is thought that the presence of this virus goes some way towards explaining the age-related decline of the adaptive immune system. The immune system has in effect a limited number of cells at any given time since the replacement rate is low in adults. Since CMV cannot be cleared from the body, and continually reemerges to challenge the immune system, ever more immune cells become devoted to battling CMV rather than defend...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 8, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
FDA Approves Sandoz's Zarxio, The First Biosimilar Approved in the U.S.
Today, the Food and Drug Administration approved Zarxio (filgrastim-sndz), the first biosimilar product approved in the U.S. Sandoz, Inc.’s Zarxio is biosimilar to Amgen Inc.’s Neupogen (filgrastim), which was originally licensed in 1991. The approval comes two months after an FDA advisory committee recommended Zarxio as biosimilar to Neupogen for all five of the intended indications.
A biosimilar product is a biological product that is approved based on a showing that it is highly similar to an already-approved biological product, known as a reference product--in this case Neupogen. The biosimilar a...
Source: Policy and Medicine - March 6, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan Source Type: blogs
A patient, mortally wounded by those purported to love him
Neither of the two most important people in Aaron’s life could stand to be in the same room with each other. There was a long colorful history between his ex-wife and his brother, and as his disease began to accelerate, the feuding became quite intense. They argued over Aaron’s advance directives. They both tried to coerce and manipulate themselves into commanding positions. The shouting became louder, the fury more fierce. Aaron, for his part, was fading under the colossus of his difficult to treat leukemia. Any bit of energy left after chemotherapy was quickly snuffed out by his loved one’s ...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - February 18, 2015 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Jordan Grumet, MD Tags: Physician Hospital Palliative care Source Type: blogs
New Treatment for Obesity???
There’s some really fascinating research coming down the pike about the role bacteria in our gut (our so-called microbiome) play in our overall health. Rapidly becoming mainstream is the idea of “fecal transplants” to cure resistant gut infections with a particularly nasty germ called clostridium difficile (or C. diff to its friends — er, to those who know it well).
Now there’s a case report of a patient who was cured of her C. diff infection with a fecal transplant from an overweight donor, who is now packing on the pounds. While we need to be cautious about that whole correlation-causation t...
Source: Musings of a Dinosaur - February 5, 2015 Category: Primary Care Authors: notdeaddinosaur Tags: Medical Source Type: blogs
Mortally Wounded
Neither of the two most important people in Aaron's life could stand to be in the same room with each other. There was a long colorful history between his ex-wife and his brother, and as his disease began to accelerate, the feuding became quite intense. They argued over Aaron's advance directives. They both tried to coerce and manipulate themselves into commanding positions. The shouting became louder, the fury more fierce. Aaron, for his part, was fading under the colossus of his difficult to treat leukemia. Any bit of energy left after chemotherapy, was quickly snuffed out by his loved...
Source: In My Humble Opinion - January 26, 2015 Category: Primary Care Authors: Jordan Grumet Source Type: blogs
Another Promising Example of Adoptive T Cell Therapy
Adoptive T cell therapies are one of the most promising methodologies for immunotherapy at the present time. This small trial is for pediatric cancer, and one might argue that you'd expect better results from immunotherapy in children, however. The aged immune system is much less effective at all of its jobs. As is the case for stem cell therapies and their issues in treating the old, we can hope that the challenge of immune aging will simply be an incentive for the research community to develop means to overcome it so that cancer immunotherapies can work at peak effectiveness. After all, cancer in children is rare in comp...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 16, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Growing a New Thymus From Engineered Cells
The thymus is vital to generation of new immune cells, and the fact that it atrophies early in life, turning a river of new cells into a trickle, is one of the factors placing an effective cap on the adult immune cell population. In part because of this limit in later life competent immune cells capable of dealing with new threats are crowded out by other immune cell types. Solutions to this issue include restoration of a larger supply of new cells by restoring the thymus or targeted destruction of the excess cells to free up space and spur the body to generate replacement immune cells that are capable of doing their jobs....
Source: Fight Aging! - August 25, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Studying Calorie Restriction and Rapamycin
Here is an example of the sort of work presently taking place in many of the labs interested in aging and longevity, consisting of exploration of existing drugs shown to have some effect on life span in animal studies, alongside continued research into the details of the calorie restriction response:
"Research has shown that consuming fewer calories, while maintaining sufficient nutrients, extends lifespan, and there are ongoing clinical studies in humans. However, aging also is associated with increased susceptibility to diseases. Remarkable extension of lifespan has been achieved in organisms by lowering calorie intake ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 12, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Outbreaks of Non-tubercuous Mycobacterial Infection in the United States
The following chronology of nosocomial mycobacteriosis outbreaks in the United States is abstracted from Gideon www.GideonOnline.com and the Gideon e-book series. [1,2] Primary references available on request.
1987 – An outbreak (17 cases) of Mycobacterium chelonae otitis media was caused by contaminated water used by an ENT practice in Louisiana.
1988 – An outbreak (8 cases) of foot infections due to Mycobacterium chelonae subspecies abscessus infections were associated with a jet injector used in a podiatric office.
1989 to 1990 – An outbreak (16 cases) of sputum colonization by Mycobacterium fortuitum...
Source: GIDEON blog - July 23, 2014 Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Dr. Stephen Berger Tags: Ebooks Epidemiology Microbiology Outbreaks ProMED Non-tuberculous Mycobacteria Source Type: blogs
Delete Blood Cancer: What You May Not Know About Bone Marrow Donation
We all know about blood drives and the importance of blood and platelet donations to save lives. And millions of people are registered organ donors (usually when they get their driver’s license). But did you know that there is another renewable, life-saving resource you could give? It’s your blood stem cells/bone marrow. Only 11 million Americans are registered with the National Marrow Donor Program to help save lives if their blood stem cells match a person fighting any one of 70 blood cancers and diseases.
Each year, nearly 20,000 people are in need of blood stem cell/bone marrow transplants as their last hope for ...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - July 22, 2014 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Access Advocacy Cancer Consumer Health Care Patients Publc Health Source Type: blogs
Using Stem Cell Transplants to Boost Thymic Function in Adults
This study describes several innovative and clinically relevant strategies to manipulate thymic function based on an interventional radiology technique for intrathymic injection of cells or drugs.
We show that intrathymic injection of multipotent hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells into irradiated syngeneic or allogeneic young or aged recipients resulted in efficient and long-lasting generation of functional donor T cells. Persistence of intrathymic donor cells was associated with intrathymic presence of cells resembling long-term hematopoietic stem cells, suggesting a self-renewal capacity of the intrathymically injected...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 30, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Improving the Infrastructure for Therapeutic Transfer of T Cells
I suspect that we'll see spreading use of immune cell transfer therapies in the years ahead. The time is right for it: stem cell researchers are continually improving their ability to generate cells to order, knowledge of how the immune system works in detail is growing, and so is the understanding of just how important immune system decline is in aging. Somewhere between today and a future in which an age-damaged immune system can be completely restored to youthful function lies a span of decades in which regular infusions of tailored immune cells are a routine part of older life, a treatment that temporarily enhances imm...
Source: Fight Aging! - June 26, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
My Favorite Neighbor I’ve Never Met
My spine shivered when I heard Drew puking. Unlike my once-a-day vomits that mimicked the Tambora volcanic eruption of 1815, Drew’s were fast, graceful and plentiful. I tracked my “Puke Count” on a whiteboard with tallies. Drew’s Puke Count would require an entire wall.Drew and I shared a wall because he was my next-door neighbor at the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Center at the University of Minnesota. That is where I received my umbilical cord stem cell transplant to treat myelodysplasia when I was 19 years old. I never formally met Drew, though I knew much about him by prying my nurses, instructing my d...
Source: I've Still Got Both My Nuts: A True Cancer Blog - June 8, 2014 Category: Cancer Tags: cancer treatment man of the year Source Type: blogs
HIV gets the zinc finger
Because all animal viruses initiate infection by binding to a receptor on the cell surface, this step has long been considered a prime target for antiviral therapy. Unfortunately, drugs that block virus attachment to cells have never shown much promise. Another approach, which is to ablate the receptor from the cell surface, is also problematic because these molecules have essential cellular functions. Removing one of the receptors for human immunodeficiency virus type 1 might be an exception.
HIV-1 must interact with two cell surface proteins to initiate infection: a T lymphocyte protein called CD4, and a second receptor,...
Source: virology blog - March 20, 2014 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Information CCR5 gene editing HIV human immunodeficiency virus lentivirus viral zinc finger nuclease Source Type: blogs
