Science Market Update

As humans, our bodies have the ability to naturally regenerate both skin and hair, but we only get two sets of teeth, and that's one set more than many other mammals. Reptiles and fish, on the other hand, have the ability to regrow teeth throughout their lifetime. Though we have guessed that specialized stem cells are involved, the cellular and molecular mechanisms behind tooth renewal in these animals have not been well understood until now. A research team at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, led by Dr. Cheng-Ming Chuong, has recently published an article in PNAS detailing their study into the regrowth of alligator teeth. They chose a crocodilian model because the dentition is well-organized and implanted in sockets of the dental bone, similar to that of mammals (if more extensive) yet with the capacity for renewal. Contributors to the research included colleagues in Georgia, China, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, who presumably provided the live research subjects.

Nerves play a vital role in the well-being of our body. Nerve damage is among the most crippling physical damage we can sustain, which is why it is in our best interest to protect them when at all possible. So when new bioresearch from Washington University in St. Louis lays out a method to prevent the body from destroying axons, which transmit nerve signals throughout the body, it’s a sure signal of improvement in the field of nervous studies.

A great deal of new biotech funding in North Carolina is calling national attention to the state's status as a life science research hub. Lab suppliers marketing life science solutions and university lab products will find high quality biotech sales leads at life science marketing events in North Carolina, given the state’s wealth of research funding available. The Republic recently reported that David Murdock, leader of Dole Food Company, Inc., is creating a permanent fund for a center known as the North Carolina Research Campus. The $50 million gift will be used for the campus’s health, agriculture and food research projects.

It is implicit that marketing life science solutions at a high quality life science marketing vendor show in Boston will result in excellent biotech sales leads, especially when one takes into account The Boston Globe’s recent report on the biotech industry boom in Boston. At least nine life science companies in Massachusetts could go public this year, making the boom one of the biggest since 2007.

Researchers at the Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research on the Parnassus Campus of the University of California San Francisco have just published the results of two related studies involving differentiated brain cells transplanted into mice. In one case, the cells were human brain cells integrated successfully into a mouse brain; in the other, epileptic mice were cured with specialized mouse brain cells. In both studies the differentiated cells were a type of interneuron progenitor called medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cells.  Unlike other brain stem cells that can turn into any number of specialized cells, these differentiated MGE cells have a specific function, which is to inhibit signaling in overactive nerve circuits. These experiments hold promise for future treatment of neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and the chronic pain and spasticity caused by spinal cord injury.

As humans, we like to think of ourselves as superbly evolved, which is a completely valid standpoint if you place emphasis on things like consciousness and inventiveness. But our cohabitants of Earth have developed some impressive abilities of their own, many of which we can only barely understand. Take for example the bacteria that are shocking several researchers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities lab with their unique ability to change the electrical state of metals.

The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center recently announced that it will be giving $9 million in grants to Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital to update research labs. Harvard Medical School will be receiving $5 million of the money and plans to use the research funding to create a Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology, which will be multidisciplinary in nature and will help to supply better information on clinical trials while drugs are in the process of development. Boston Children's Hospital will use the $4 million it receives from the state to establish the Children’s Center for Cell Therapy, which will include renovating labs to create specialized stem cell culturing facilities.

If significant research is any indication of the quality of lab sales leads at life science marketing events held on Columbia University’s campus, this next story is worth reading about. Columbia University Medical Center researchers conducted a significant study that has identified a number of metabolic expression changes in the gene expression data from 22 tumor types. The analysis also points to hundreds of medications that could remove a tumor’s fuel supply or inhibit a tumor’s synthesis. The study was published in Nature Biotechnology.

Given the widespread use and abuse of alcohol for recreation, a drug that could interrupt its effects would have enormous value in treating alcoholism. Since addiction is based on stimulating pleasure centers, scientists have been looking for a way to block that interaction between alcohol and the brain. The challenge has been to find a key protein that carries out this transmission and identify its binding site. Now, biologists in the Harris Lab at the University of Texas Austin have made a major research breakthrough validating the importance of certain ligand-gated ion channels in that process and locating a cavity where the binding takes place. Remarkably, they were able to push their research forward thanks to an obscure alpine cyanobacteria recently sequenced in France.

Bioresearchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have invented an ingenious method for shining light on one of the most mysterious organs we have: the brain. Their tool of choice is a thin, flat LED that can be seamlessly and innocuously injected, causing minimum invasiveness and disturbance. The LEDs will help advance our understandings of bodily organs like the brain through the field of optogenetics.