Human serum albumin is used in everything from vaccines to cell culture.

Human blood is in demand these days. Donor blood is required for transfusions, of course, but it also contains human serum albumin, a blood protein used to treat shock, severe burns, and liver injuries that also shows up in vaccines and in cell culture materials. Worldwide, we use about 500 tons of human serum albumin (abbreviated HSA) a year.

Shortages of the protein and the potential for contamination by blood-borne viruses have encouraged scientists to look beyond donor blood for sources. One promising approach, inserting the gene for HSA into plants and then harvesting the resulting protein, has always yielded too little for the method to make sense financially, but a new paper details a way to get around that: get the plant to make HSA in its seeds, which are lean, mean protein-concentrating machines. HSA made up 10% of the soluble protein in the rice seeds produced by the research team, one of the highest yields on record from a transgenic plant. And when the team put it through its chemical paces, it worked exactly like normal, human-grown HSA, indicating that its sojourn in the plant world hadn’t impaired its usefulness. If all goes as planned, the team will be testing rice-grown HSA in people in clinical trials in the next two years, with an eye towards supplanting donor blood as a source.

[via Nature News]

Image courtesy of Borislav Mitel / Wikimedia Commons

What’s the News: When vampire bats bite their victims, their saliva releases an enzyme called desmoteplase, or DSPA, into the bloodstream, which causes blood to flow more readily. Several years ago, scientists realized that the same enzyme that gives bats more blood for their bite may also help stroke victims by breaking down blood clots. Dubbed Draculin, this blood-clot-bashing drug has now entered a phase 2 study: In hospitals across the country, scientists are currently comparing Draculin with traditional anticoagulants to see if it increases the three-hour window doctors have to treat post-stroke blood clots. “This is one of the studies that actually extends that window up to 9 hours,” says lead researcher Michel Torbey. “We’re hoping the bat saliva, in itself, dissolves the clot with lower risk of bleeding in the brain afterwards.” (more…)

What’s the News: Scientists found that periodic fasting may decrease the risk of coronary artery disease and diabetes, and also causes significant changes in heart-disease risk factors like cholesterol, blood-sugar, and triglyceride levels, which hadn’t been linked to fasting before. “We’ve shown it is not a chance finding. Fasting is not just an indicator for other healthy lifestyles,” says lead researcher Benjamin Horne of the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute. “It is actually the fasting that is working to reduce the risk of disease.”

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What’s the News: Scientists have developed a new carbon nanotube device (pictured above) that’s capable of detecting single cancer cells. Once implemented in hospitals, this microfluidic device could let doctors more efficiently detect the spread of cancer, especially in developing countries that don’t have the money for more sophisticated diagnostic equipment. Any improvement in detecting cancer’s spread is important, says MIT associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics Brian Wardle, because “of all deaths from cancer, 90 percent are … from tumors that spread from the original site.”

What’s the Context:

• The researchers’ original microfluidic device from four years ago featured tens of thousands of microscopic silicon posts coated with tumor-sticking antibodies: when cancer cells bumped into the posts, they’d stick. But if cancer cells didn’t bump into a silicon post, they’d go undetected. The group says their new version is eight times better.
• When cancer cells migrate, there are “usually only several [cancer] cells per 1-milliliter sample of blood” containing billions of other cells, making cancer exceedingly difficult to detect.
• This new dime-sized microfluidic machine works in the same way, but the solid silicon tubes were switched out for highly porous carbon nanotubes. This allows the blood to actually flow through the tubes instead of just around them, increasing the likelihood of catching a cancer cell.
• In other cancer detection news, some are using dogs to sniff out cancer and others use genetic tests to figure out cancer risks.
• Combating cancer ranges from new cancer-fighting drugs to just ignoring cancer (sometimes).

Not So Fast: The process of commercializing a technology like this takes quite a while; the previous version from four years ago is being tested in hospitals now and is may be commercially available “within the next few years.”

Next Up: The scientists are currently tweaking the device to try to catch HIV.

Reference: Grace D. Chen et al. “Nanoporous Elements in Microfluidics for Multiscale Manipulation of Bioparticles.” Small. DOI: 10.1002/smll.201002076

Image: Brian Wardle/MIT

Talk about early intervention. One day, a fetus with a genetic disease may be able to get treatment before it even leaves the womb–and that treatment will come in the form of an extra gift from mom. While this scenario will only come to pass if new mouse research can be translated to humans, the finding are exciting.

The new work solves a medical mystery. When researchers realized they could diagnose a fetus with certain genetic illnesses as early as the first trimester, they plunged into the search for in utero treatments. Ailments like sickle cell anemia and some immune disorders might be treatable with blood stem cells taken from a donor’s bone marrow, researchers thought: the transplanted cells would multiply and populate the fetus’s bone marrow with healthy blood-forming cells, and the fetus’s immature immune system wouldn’t reject the foreign entities. But when researchers tried such transplants, they didn’t work.

“The fact that fetal stem cell transplantation has not been very successful has been puzzling, especially given the widely accepted dogma that the immature fetal immune system can adapt to tolerate foreign substances,” said co-senior author Qizhi Tang…. “The surprising finding in our study is that the mother’s immune system is to blame.” [press release]

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Steroids. Human growth hormone. EPO. The cast of characters implicated in major athletic doping scandals are familiar to fans who follow major sports. Nor are accusations of doping anything new to Lance Armstrong, the seven-time champion of the Tour de France and most famous American participant in a sport constantly marred by scandal.

Armstrong has always denied the doping charges, and he continues to in the wake of a major investigation published this week by Sports Illustrated. But this time around, reporters Selena Roberts and David Epstein allege something new: That Armstrong illegally acquired and took an experimental drug called HemAssist, which never got beyond clinical trials.

So what is this stuff? HemAssist, developed by Baxter Pharmaceuticals, belongs to a group of drugs called hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers, or HBOC. Simply, they are blood substitutes, ones that mimic the structure of hemoglobin—the protein in red blood cells that transports oxygen. According to a scientific source we spoke to, who researched these drugs for years but preferred to provide background anonymously, the drugs mimic the structure of hemoglobin to more than 99 percent, and can deliver oxygen the way natural hemoglobin does.

Biotech researchers have been developing HBOCs for decades because of their exciting potential applications. For example, these blood substitutes could be taken out on a battlefield where stocks of real blood could not be refrigerated and preserved, and given to wounded soldiers to send a rush of oxygen to their critical organs like the brain and the heart. That ability to pack an oxygen punch is what makes HBOCs a tempting target for a doper.

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Not everybody is a big fan of being poked with needles to have their blood drawn. But from a medical perspective, blood tests are far less invasive and carry less potential for harm than other diagnostic tools. That’s why medical researchers are increasingly hunting for reliable blood tests for serious diseases, like the experimental Alzheimer’s disease test we covered last week. And this week, researchers report progress on assessing a new condition: a promising blood test for determining Down syndrome in a fetus.

The technique involves a blood test for the mother and an ultrasound for the baby. From the combined results, doctors can estimate the chance that the baby has Down’s. [CBS News]

Down syndrome happens when a baby has an extra copy of chromosome 21. Because the fetus’ DNA can cross over into the plasma of the mother, doctors can seek out the extra chromosome in a blood sample taken from the mother.

The researchers reporting in the British Medical Journal say that in a pool of 753 women, their tests had no false negatives. It accurately found all 86 fetuses with Down (The women selected were all at high risk for down in their fetus; the prevalence among the general public is only about 1 in 800). That’s a larger pool of women sampled than in similar research we covered in 2008, and with a higher success rate. The test is not perfect, though: It also identified false positives for Down in 2 percent of the fetuses that did not have the syndrome, which is why even a test more accurate than this one must have a backup to verify positive results.

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Flexibility matters.

Research teams around the world are attempting to develop new tiny synthetic particles that will enter your bloodstream to act as red blood cells, to play the part of platelets and stop the bleeding, to latch onto damaged areas and deliver drugs there, and more. And to make these lab-created particles as effective as possible, they need to stay in one’s system and not get stuck. In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Joseph DiSimone and colleagues say they have figured out a way to mimic the twistable, turnable, bendable, foldable nature of red bloods cells to make long-lasting synthetic particles, and that they’ve tested those particles on a living system, a first.

Previous studies had focused on how size, shape and surface characteristics of particles affected their movement through the bloodstream, the team wrote, but flexibility’s role is less well understood. To test it out, the researchers built artificial cells out of a gel material with “tunable elasticity” — that is, the team could control how deformable the cells were. [Los Angeles Times]

Maximizing that elasticity could allow for particles that can wiggle through tiny blood vessels:

It has long been speculated that the deformability of particles influences how long they circulate and where they are distributed in the body. Red blood cells are equipped for longevity and have an average lifespan of 120 days. As they age, they become stiffer and less capable of passing through the tiny vascular structures in the spleen, where they’re ultimately removed. [Nature]

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Suppose that Alzheimer’s disease, like a bacterial or viral infection, inspires the immune system to take action and defend the body. If this is true, then there must be antigen proteins that are specific to the disease, which the body recognizes as foreign and which triggers the mustering of a defense. Could doctors catch a glimpse of that process and diagnose the disease earlier? That’s the hope behind a study out this week in Cell, led by Thomas Kodadek.

Many new efforts to speed up diagnosis of Alzheimer’s are ongoing, with some, like Kodadek’s, looking for a signal in the bloodstream. The problem is, scientists don’t know what antigens are the signature of the disease, nor which antibodies the immune system raises to go after them. So they set a trap.

On a slide, Kodadek’s team assembled thousands of different shapes of peptoids—molecules that are slight variations of the peptide molecules found in our bodies—and exposed them to blood samples from people with Alzheimer’s and without. The idea was, if particular peptoids bound only to antibodies from people with Alzheimer’s and not to antibodies of people without, then those antibodies they snagged could be considered a signature of Alzheimer’s in the bloodstream.

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Already, researchers have imagined and built ways to detect one-in-a-billion cancer cells in a person’s bloodstream in order to catch cancer in the act of spreading. Now, that technology is a little closer to moving out of the lab.

Mehmet Toner and colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital, the brains behind the tech, announced an agreement with a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson to begin commercial development of their “liquid biopsy.”

The microchip is dotted with tens of thousands of tiny posts covered with antibodies designed to stick to tumor cells. As blood passes over the chip, tumor cells separate from the pack and adhere to the posts. Scientists are wagering that this type of test, if successful, might also detect cancer early in its course, predict the odds for a recurrence, and assess a patient’s general prognosis. [Healthday News]

Toner’s team developed the prototype of the test back in 2007, and for the last several years have refined the extreme sensitivity needed to catch stray cancer cells roaming the bloodstream.

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Forensic scientists of the future may soon have a new tool at their disposal. Given a drop of blood, researchers in the Netherlands have roughly determined the age of the person it came from. But for now, it really is rough–the researchers found they could only estimate a person’s age to within 9 years.

Currently, a crime scene investigator who obtained a spot of blood can check its DNA to see if it matches a known suspect or someone in a law enforcement database, and can use the DNA to determine a few other characteristics like gender and eye color. But age is tougher to estimate. Lead researcher Manfred Kayser, who works on forensic molecular biology at Erasmus University Medical Centre, explains that the best methods of determining age rely on testing bones or teeth, but he wanted to find a method that didn’t require skeletal remains.

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Could a blast of radio waves keep the hypertension away? For patients whose high blood pressure doesn’t respond to regular medication, a treatment reported in The Lancet aims to do just that.

The minimally invasive procedure is similar to angioplasty for heart disease but involves deactivating nerves in the kidney which play a key role in regulating blood pressure. A catheter is inserted into the femoral vein in the thigh and threaded through to the kidney. Then a burst of radio-frequency energy is used to disable the nerves [The Independent].

Normal systolic blood pressure is considered 120; hypertension is defined as being over 140. In this trial, the team led by Murray Esler studied the effect of the radio treatment on more than 100 people who had very high levels—an average of 178—despite taking high blood pressure medication.

After six months, the systolic blood pressure had fallen by at least 10 mmHg in 84 per cent of those who received the treatment. This is expected to reduce their risk of stroke by more than 30 per cent. Esler is unsure why it was not effective for all patients. He speculates that some were not “zapped enough”. [New Scientist]

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It may not be as miraculous as turning water into wine, or as wealth-generating as turning dirt into gold, but we still think this is a very cool trick: Researchers have transformed mature skin cells directly into mature blood cells. Crucially, this was done without reverting the cells to a flexible, “pluripotent” stage in which the cells can grow into any form.

The technique, described in Nature, could lead to lab-grown blood cells for transfusions and transplants for people with bone marrow diseases. Researchers think this new process may be safer than previous methods.

By skipping the pluripotent step, the researchers believe they have skirted the risk that the replacement cells might form dangerous tumors. [Los Angeles Times]

The research team, lead by Mickie Bhatia, coaxed the skin cells into becoming blood cells via a harmless virus that carried a gene called OCT4 into the cells–this reprogrammed the cells, turning their developmental clock back part of the way. Then the cells were incubated in a mixture of cell-stimulating proteins, called cytokines, which directed them on their new paths as either red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. The ability to grow a specific kind of blood cell has exciting clinical possibilities.

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When people suffer a concussion, is the evidence of that head trauma just hanging out in their bloodstream, waiting to be found? A U.S. Army project made news late last week by claiming to have found a biomarker for traumatic brain injury, which could allow for a simple diagnosis via blood test.

Make no mistake—a biomarker would be a tremendous medical advance in catching an elusive and hard-to-quantify condition. But don’t get too excited just yet: This was a preliminary study, and some other neuroscientists are not convinced the test will work on in a real, clinical trail.

Army Col. Dallas Hack, who has oversight of the research, says recent data show the blood test, which looks for unique proteins that spill into the blood stream from damaged brain cells, accurately diagnosing mild traumatic brain injury in 34 patients. Doctors can miss these injuries because the damage does not show up on imaging scans, and symptoms such as headaches or dizziness are ignored or downplayed by the victims. [USA Today]

Hack certainly wasn’t going to downplay the achievement by his team, which partners with the Florida-based company Banyan Biomarkers on this project.

Army Col. Dallas Hack says the new technique could rival the discovery of unique proteins in the 1970s that help doctors identify heart disease. “This will in fact do for brain injury what that test did for chest pain,” Hack said. “It’s going to change medicine entirely.” [UPI]

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The winners of the Lasker Awards, the top medical prizes given out in the United States, were announced today.

The Laskers, awarded by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, are $250,000 awards generally regarded as good predictors of who will go on to win a Nobel Prize for medicine or chemistry. [ABC News]

The driver of obesity

Douglas Coleman and Jeffrey Friedman took home the prize in the first category, basic medical research. The pair discovered leptin, a hormone that governs body weight and appetite. Its discovery helped to explain parts of obesity that had never been understood.

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