FASEB

From Magic Bullets to Super T Cells: Immunotherapy encompasses multiple approaches, including harnessing or enhancing immune cells, hormones, and other weapons of the immune system to destroy tumor cells, as well as releasing the brakes on the immune response that tumors trigger. This new article takes the reader on a journey from the origins of using toxins to prime the body’s immune system to attack tumors through today’s advances that genetically alter immune cells to fight cancer.

Liquid Biopsy is a new technology developed to advance cancer treatment. By using this innovative approach, physicians can enhance their ability to track cancer progression and to create highly individualized treatment plans for specific types of cancer. This complements existing approaches that use surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy to save lives.

Transmission of the Zika virus throughout South and Central America has become a rising global public health threat. Spread mainly through infected mosquitoes, this virus poses substantial health risks because it can be passed from a pregnant women to her fetus, potentially causing severe birth defects. The newest issue of Breakthroughs in Bioscience examines the brain development process, placing special emphasis on how the Zika virus affects the growing fetal brain.

In 1984, Charles Hull patented a process he called “stereolithography.” Now called three-dimensional (3D) printing, this technology has been used to manufacture rocket engines, custom-fit athletic shoes, and other 3D printers. The medical field also has reaped the benefits of 3D printing. Imaging data from computed tomography (CT) scans, ultrasounds, or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can produce 3D images on a computer, and precise 3D-printed anatomical models can be used for teaching or to help in surgical planning.

Throughout history, medical experts have dreamed of healing untreatable wounds, replacing a disfiguring scar with healthy skin, growing replacement lungs in the laboratory, and replacing a leg lost to injury or disease. Today, regenerative medicine has the potential to heal damaged tissues and organs, offering hope for those who have lost organ function due to age, disease, or injuries.

Just a generation ago, one out of five children in the United States died before reaching adulthood.  Repeated epidemics swept through the world, killing as many as one-quarter of the population. Today, that frightening world no longer exists because of tremendous progress made in vaccine development and use. Vaccines save 2.5 million lives globally every year—the equivalent of preventing 7,000 deaths each day.

The ability to peer inside the body non-invasively has revolutionized modern medicine. With positron emission tomography (PET), physicians can not only look at the body’s internal structures, but can see the metabolic signs of disease.

Imagine if, before you ever took a drug, doctors could predict which drug would work best for you, because they already had information on how organs in your body were likely to respond. Organs-on-a-chip research is bringing that day closer. This emerging technology allows scientists to watch the cascade of events that takes place in organs in response to drugs or during disease. Organs-on-chips are 3-D biochips, no bigger than a computer memory stick, that contain living human cells from an organ or tissue. Engineered in layers and channels, substances such as air or blood can be delivered continuously, and the cells can interface with other living tissues as they do in the body.

Imagine being able to treat and control debilitating neurological disorders with a flash of light! The emerging field of optogenetics represents a promising new approach to the eventual understanding and treatment of a number of devastating neurological and psychiatric disorders. A word first coined in 2006, optogenetics uses light-responsive proteins, genetically introduced into the cells of living organisms, to control the behavior of highly specific cell populations.

Seventy percent of our drugs for pain and infection are either derived from or inspired by natural products of rainforests and other ecosystems. These medicinal compounds have dramatically improved quality of life and significantly extended the human lifespan. Through decades of basic research to identify new drugs and unravel the underlying mechanisms of action, researchers are developing newer, more powerful therapies.

Despite a four-decade “war on cancer,” this year, 1.5 million Americans will be diagnosed with a form of this broad group of diseases, and a half million will die as a result. Beginning in the late 1930’s - early 1940’s, researchers were inspired by the success in treating infectious diseases with chemicals isolated from microorganisms and other natural products, such as penicillin from a fungus. Could chemicals battle cancer too?

For more than three hundred years, scientists have observed, identified, and implicated individual microorganisms in specific diseases. More recently, with a convergence of scientific disciplines, an explosion in technical capabilities and revolutionary new ways of thinking, we are exploring the organisms with which we share our bodies. The effects of these organisms—our microbiome—on our health are only just being recognized.

CRISPR/CAS GENE EDITING has been called the biggest biotechnology  discovery of the century, even though the 21st century is less than two  decades old. Laboratories around the world have adopted this technique  to edit genes simply, quickly, and inexpensively. It is already revealing new insights in basic science and may eventually be used to fight infectious diseases, genetic disorders, and cancer.