In this month's issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, doctors report of using skin flaps to deliver anti-cancer proteins on rat tumors, resulting in a 79 percent reduction in tumor volume.

"This new technique may allow us to reprogram skin flaps, using gene therapy, to provide a blueprint for anti-tumor agents like Interleukin-12 to be produced in the tumor to kill cancer, while avoiding adverse side effects," said Geoffrey Gurtner, MD, ASPS Member and study senior author. "In this study we took skin flaps in animal models and delivered IL-12 directly to the tumor area with tremendous success. Since skin flaps are used thousands of times each year in cancer patients, this may potentially open up an entirely new area in plastic surgery and bring the specialty, once again, to the center of medicine."

In addition, this technique seems to have the advantage in that serious side effects previously documented with systemic use of IL-12 were not found in the rats applied with skin flaps.

Source

German scientists have successfully re-implanted a patient's ovarian tissues following cancer therapy, thus allowing the patient the possibility of becoming pregnant. The case report may be downloaded from the Deutsches Aerzteblatt International (pdf file).

Anal carcinoma was diagnosed in this young patient in 2004 and chemotherapy followed by radiotherapy was recommended. As the ovaries lie near to the tumor, they are often damaged by therapy of this sort and the women become infertile. The Erlangen physicians succeeded in removing healthy ovarian tissue from the woman before treatment and to freeze it. The patient was then given the recommended cancer treatment. She tolerated this well and has not suffered any relapse. On the other hand, her menstrual periods had stopped, in spite of hormone treatment, for two years. For this reason, the patient's conserved ovarian material was inserted endoscopically into her pelvis. She subsequently reported her first menstruation. After this operation, it may be possible for her to become pregnant, although this has not happened yet.

Photo: Wikimpedia

Scientists from Japan and China are exploring the use of the brown seaweed, Undaria pinnatifida, known as wakame as a means to extract organic and inorganic pollutants in seawater. After culturing wakame in polluted seawater, it may then be used as a fertilizer,; thus, the composting process could be an effective means of degrading wakame into a useful form and so recycling organic substances containing C, N and P from seawater.

To accelerate the composting process, a novel marine bacterium, identified as a Halomonas species may help, researchers say. Partial DNA analysis helped identify the active species isolated from the seaweeds in Awaji Island, Japan, and that the bacteria grows well even at high salt (sodium chloride) concentrations and can reduce the total organic components, including pollutant content, of the seaweed significantly within a week.

The study has been published in the International Journal of Biotechnology.

Photo: http://nutratherapie.uqam.ca/Nutratherapie_FR.htm

In a study published in Nature Biotechnology, scientists discover that based on the genome analysis of Tricoderma reesei, the fungus has the genes required to break down plant cell walls, to simple sugars, indicating its possible utility in biofuel production.

The researchers believe that T. reesei's genome includes "clusters" of enzyme-producing genes, a strategy that may account for the organism's efficiency at breaking down cellulose.

On an industrial scale, T. reesei could be employed to secrete enzymes that can be purified and added into an aqueous mixture of cellulose pulp and other materials to produce sugar. The sugar can then be fermented by yeast to produce ethanol.

Photo: Microscope image of T. reesei hyphae with vesicle membranes stained red and cell wall chitin in blue. Credit: Mari Valkonen, VTT Finland. Source: LANL

A new mucosal vaccine against anthrax with a new formulation and mode of delivery (via a nose spray) has been developed.

"Our study found that a mucosal delivery system promises to add a second layer of immune protection against anthrax by priming the disease-fighting cells in mucous membranes lining the nose along with those in the blood, and with just three doses," said Mingtao Zeng, Ph.D., assistant professor within Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and a study author along with Qingfu Xu, also at the medical center. "That, along with the addition of newly precision-designed vaccine components, should represent important steps in the race to provide troops with stronger protection in a vaccine that is easier to use."

The study, testing its efficacy in mice, has been published in the Clinical and Vaccine Immunology journal. More details about the vaccine here. Photo: Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph shows splenic tissue from a monkey with inhalational anthrax; featured are rod-shaped bacilli (yellow) and an erythrocyte (red). Source: Wikipedia, Credit: Arthur Friedlander

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Canada's McGill University has brought us the world's first fully automated anesthesia system: McSleepy.

McSleepy" assists the anesthesiologist in the same way an automatic transmission assists people when driving. As such, anesthesiologists can focus more on other aspects of direct patient care. An additional feature is that the system can communicate with personal digital assistants (PDAs), making distant monitoring and anesthetic control possible. In addition, this technology can be easily incorporated into modern medical teaching programs such as simulation centers and web-based learning platforms.

The said system - nicknamed McSleepy - administers drugs for general anesthesia and monitors their separate effects completely automatically, without manual intervention.

"We have been working on closed-loop systems, where drugs are administered, their effects continuously monitored, and the doses are adjusted accordingly, for the last five years," said Dr. Thomas M. Hemmerling of McGill's Department of Anesthesia and the Montreal General Hospital, who heads ITAG (Intelligent Technology in Anesthesia research group), a team of anesthesiologists, biomedical scientists and engineers.

"Think of "McSleepy" as a sort of humanoid anesthesiologist that thinks like an anesthesiologist, analyses biological information and constantly adapts its own behavior, even recognizing monitoring malfunction."

This system is expected to be available for commercial purposes within the next five years.

Find more details from McGill University.