Latest Nature Medicine Stories

Discarded livers have potential to be reengineered into usable replacement organsA team led by researchers from the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has developed a technique that someday may allow growth of transplantable replacement livers. In their report that will be published in Nature Medicine and is receiving early online release, the investigators describe using the structural tissue of rat livers as scaffolding for the growth of tissue...

Paves way for safety testing of potential new use for asthma drugNational Institutes of Health scientists have discovered that the activation of immune cells called basophils causes kidney damage in a mouse model of lupus nephritis. These findings and the team's associated research in humans may lead to new treatments for this serious disease, a severe form of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) that affects the kidneys and is difficult to treat.In earlier research, the team found that mice...

Mouse studies promising to colon cancer patients who currently have surgery as only optionA team of University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers has discovered that common intestinal bacteria appear to promote tumor growths in genetically susceptible mice, but that tumorigenesis can be suppressed if the mice are exposed to an inhibiting protein enzyme.The research, said lead author Eyal Raz, MD, a professor of medicine at UC San Diego, could portend an eventual new form...

Researchers from the University of Leeds, UK, the Charité University Medical School and the Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin, Germany, have discovered a new driving force behind cancer growth.Their studies have identified how 'junk' DNA promotes the growth of cancer cells in patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Professor Constanze Bonifer (University of Leeds) and Dr Stephan Mathas (Charité, MDC) who co-led the study suspect that these pieces of 'junk' DNA,...

Barrett's esophagus affects more than 3 million individuals and is a primary risk factor for esophageal cancerCancer of the lower esophagus develops almost exclusively in patients with Barrett's esophagus, an otherwise benign complication of esophageal reflux that affects approximately 3 million Americans. Although the prognosis of patients diagnosed with esophageal cancer is poor, the chances of successful treatment increase significantly if the disease is detected at an early dysplastic...

Novel approach may circumvent lost response in insulin due to obesityResearchers at Children's Hospital Boston have identified a new strategy for treating type 2 diabetes, identifying a cellular pathway that fails when people become obese. By activating this pathway artificially, they were able to normalize blood glucose levels in severely obese and diabetic mice. Their findings were published online by Nature Medicine on March 28.Epidemiologists have long known that obesity contributes to...

Scientists at Duke University Medical Center have identified a new growth factor that stimulates the expansion and regeneration of hematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells in culture and in laboratory animals. The discovery, appearing in the journal Nature Medicine, may help researchers overcome one of the most frustrating barriers to cellular therapy: the fact that stem cells are so few in number and so stubbornly resistant to expansion.Researchers believe that umbilical cord blood could...

Improving on traditional screening tests for potential anti-cancer drugs, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have developed a laboratory technique that more closely simulates the real-world conditions in which tumor cells mingle with the body's normal cells.Because these neighboring cells "“ key components of what is known as the "tumor microenvironment" "“ can alter the effectiveness of anti-cancer drugs, the new technique may help researchers narrow the field of...

Mosaic vaccines show promise in reducing the spread of deadly virusTwo teams of researchers"”including Los Alamos National Laboratory theoretical biologists Bette Korber, Will Fischer, Sydeaka Watson, and James Szinger"”have announced an HIV vaccination strategy that has been shown to expand the breadth and depth of immune responses in rhesus monkeys. Rhesus monkeys provide the best animal model currently available for testing HIV vaccines.The research appeared in two back-to-back...

A set of proteins found in our intestines can recognize and kill bacteria that have human blood type molecules on their surfaces, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have discovered.The results were published online Feb. 14 and are scheduled to appear in the journal Nature Medicine.Many immune cells have receptors that respond to molecules on the surfaces of bacteria, but these proteins are different because they recognize structures found on our own cells, says senior author...