Health Care Article

HAMBURG: Faced with strict German laws banning the use of human embryos, a team of German scientists came up with a radical new “ethical” source for stem cells – men’s testicles.

The scientists believe their breakthrough may offer a whole new range of treatments for diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes and for spinal cord injuries involving use of men’s own stem cells to replace damaged or diseased cells in their own bodies.

The researchers from the Universities of Tuebingen and Cologne in Germany, and King’s College London, say routine biopsies of men’s testicles could provide a new source of stem cells which could be as good as embryonic stem cells for researching and developing treatments for a range of diseases, but without the ethical and legal problems of embryonic stem cells. (more…)

The AIDS virus is especially hard to fight because few people develop antibodies to neutralize it, but U.S. researchers said on Thursday they have found an immunity gene that may offer a new way to fight back.They said the gene Apobec3 helps mice develop antibodies against an HIV-like virus, and they think the same gene in humans could lead to a potent vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.

“This gene is central to HIV biology,” Dr. Warner Greene of the Gladstone Institutes at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a telephone interview.

So far, efforts to make a vaccine against HIV have failed. (more…)

Women have puzzled over it for years-why the heck do men do the things they do? Why do they profess their love for you one minute, then ignore you the next (say, when an Attila the Hun special turns up on TV)? Why can they not remember our birthdays? Let science explain some of these conundrums-and help you rev up your relationships!

Be patient with his memory
The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a smaller percent of the male brain than the female brain. If on your first date he can’t remember where you work, even though you told him all about it when you met, just remember that size matters … hippocampus size, that is. Don’t take it personally. (Oh, and don’t be surprised when, months down the line, he has no clue you’ve just changed your hair.) (more…)

PETALING JAYA: Two local medical experts give their opinions on the case of a Malaysian been diagnosed as suffering from “food poisoning” after eating starfruits in Shenzhen, China.

Prof Mustaffa Ali Mohd, of the Pharmacology Department of the Medical Faculty, Universiti Malaya (UM), told theSun the common starfruit (averhoacarambola) is not known to contain neurotoxins that may cause adverse neurological complications when consumed.

However, he said the fruit has certain biological compounds called oxalates that can cause the formation of stones in certain organs in the body. “When oxalates bind with calcium and other mineral salts in the human body they could calcify (solidify) to form stones in certain internal organs such
as the kidneys, as well as the gall and urinary bladders,” According to news reports on Monday, the 66-year-old Malaysian, Tan Gong Sean, a retired Chinese school headmaster from Butterworth, and more than a dozen Chinese locals were in comatose in a hospital in Shenzhen, after eating the popular tropical fruit, also known as coromandel gooseberry or fivefingers.

Two other locals were said to have died after eating the fruit which an American health website, www.pubmed.gov, claims contains neurotoxins that can cause severe neurological complications, especially in patients, with chronic renal disease. However, Mustaffa, who also heads the Shimadzu-UMMC Centre for Xenobiotic Studies and is a deputy dean of the UM medical faculty, said he is not aware of such toxins being present in the fruit or of any such study published in any pharmacological or medical journals. (more…)

In a bid to sidestep the ethical debate over the use of human embryos in medical research, scientist have developed a way to derive viable stem cell lines without harming the embryo. They did so by extracting a single cell from the embryo - as in vitro fertilization clinics do when they test for genetic defects and introducing a common molecule called laminin to keep it in a stem cell, or pluripotent state.

Subsequent development of the embryo was unaffected by the biopsy, according to the study published by the journal Cell Stem Cell. The new technique holds the promise of dramatically speeding up clinical applications of stem cell therapies for a wide range of debilitating disease and illness.

Stem cells are considered a potential magic bullet because they can be transformed into any cell in the body and potentially used to help replace damaged or diseased cells, tissues or organs. However, embryonic stem cell research is highly controversial because, until now, viable embryos were destroyed in the process of extracting the stem cells.

The groups of scientists recently bypassed this problem by transforming human skin cells into stem cells. Skin cells will likely become the most common source of stem cells, said Australian researcher Alan Trounso, who heads the world’s biggest stem cell research project at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

But skin cells are still far from ready for clinical use because the transformation process introduces potentially deadly genetic alterations and viruses.