When it comes to research on HIV and AIDS treatments, it can be hard to know when to celebrate a small advance–everyone wants to see progress, but so many experimental avenues that seemed promising have turned out to be dead ends. Still, a new study that tried a sophisticated form of gene therapy as an HIV treatment seems cause for cautious optimism. If it bears out under further testing, the technique could lead to a one-shot, long-lasting treatment that could replace the punishing regimen of daily medications.

Treating HIV currently comes down to managing the viral load with a mixture antiretroviral drugs. Researcher John Rossi and his colleagues tried to craft a more direct treatment by genetically modifying the HIV-infected patients’ own blood stem cells and increasing the cells’ ability to fight off the virus. The researchers weren’t able to truly combat the virus in this experiment–the patients’ viral loads remained the same–but their work moved beyond previous attempts in two ways: They successfully modified blood stem cells by giving them anti-HIV genes, and those cells survived for two years in patients.

Earlier clinical studies the group conducted with the same strategy made little headway, but now the researchers have overcome two key obstacles, says Rossi, a molecular geneticist. One is that they managed to stitch the anti-HIV genes into a high percentage of the appropriate stem cells. The other is that the cells lived for a long time. “If we could increase the number of modified cells by 10- or 100-fold, we might be able to stop the virus itself,” says Rossi. [ScienceNow]

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Yes, it’s in the early stages of research. And yes, it’s been tested only on mice. But the procedure developed by Vincent Tuohy and his team, billed as a preliminary breast cancer vaccine, has raised hopes once more that one day in the not-too-distant future such a procedure could be available for humans.

In a study this month in Nature Medicine, Tuohy tested the vaccine on mice genetically engineered to be more cancer-prone. The ones that received the full vaccine, with a protein called a-lactalbumin, didn’t develop breast cancer. All the others did.

Cancer presents a quandary that viruses don’t in terms of developing vaccines, experts point out. While viruses are recognized as foreign invaders by the immune system, cancer isn’t. Cancer is an over-development of the body’s own cells. Trying to vaccinate against such cell over-growth would effectively be vaccinating against the recipient’s own body, destroying healthy tissue [CBS News].

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Remember the sunscreen speech? The Chicago Tribune column, which became an urban legend and then a bizarre spoken word hit for Baz Luhrmann, began

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

But is even this sage advice subject to the “it’ll cause cancer, no wait, it’ll cure cancer” back-and-forth that plagues medical studies? Reading some headlines today, you might think so. Don’t toss out your tube of Banana Boat just yet, though.

The non-profit Environmental Working Group released another of its reports on the sunscreen industry, coming down hard on the chemicals it uses and the claims it makes in its advertising. Some stories about the report drew headlines like “Sunscreen May Hurt, Not Help;” “Your Sunscreen May Give You Cancer: Study;” and “Study: Many Sunscreens May Be Accelerating Cancer.”

EWG’s report claims that a Vitamin A compound called retinyl palmitate, used in some 40 percent of sunscreens, breaks down and causes skin damage under exposure to sunlight. The report cites research done under the Food and Drug Administration. But, according to dermatologist Henry W. Lim of Henry Ford Hospital:

These claims, says Lim, are based on a study in mice, which are far more susceptible to skin cancer than humans. “It’s dangerous to apply a finding in mice to humans, and I’ve spoken with a number of my colleagues about this and we all agree that it’s very premature to even cast doubt about the safety of this chemical.” The EWG also flagged products with oxybenzone, which it calls a “hormone-disrupting” compound. This, too, is based on mice data, says Lim; the animals were fed significantly greater amounts of the chemical than what’s commonly applied in sunscreen. Other research found no significant changes in blood hormone levels in human volunteers who were told to apply sunscreens containing oxybenzone every day for two weeks [U.S. News & World Report].

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Yesterday, a government entity called the President’s Cancer Panel released an alarming report declaring that environmental toxins are causing “grievous harm” to Americans. The authors of the report (pdf) went on to say that while much more research needs to be done to determine the long-term effects of exposure, they believe that the “true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.”

But no sooner had they released the report than other cancer experts came forward to say that it wasn’t alarming, but rather alarmist.

First, the panel’s findings. In the 240-page report, the advisory panel noted that Americans are exposed to chemicals whose safety hasn’t yet been definitively established–like the chemical BPA that’s found in some everyday plastics, pesticides, and the substances found in industrial pollution. They write:

“With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread” [TIME].

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Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration gave its OK to Provenge, a new treatment for prostate cancer. It’s not a “vaccine” in the old-fashioned sense, but it could be a way to make the immune system wake up and take notice to the presence of cancer.

In a standard vaccination, a person receives an attenuated or dead version of a microorganism to spur them to produce antibodies (against, for example, the virus that causes smallpox). Provenge is not that—it doesn’t prevent prostate cancer—but it is a variation on the theme. To oversimplify quite a bit: with Provenge vaccination begins with a blood draw. Blood is then sent to the lab, where technicians extract immune cells known as antigen presenting cells (APCs) from the sample. From here, Dendreon combines the immune cells with proteins that are prevalent on the surface of prostate cancer cells. An immune boosting substance is also added into the mix [TIME]. That awakens the APCs, which doctors then inject back into the bloodstream. And once there, the APCs put white blood cells on high alert against cancer.

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Doctors already use concentrated sound waves to see through solid tissue and take a look inside the body, as with ultrasound scans. But in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Caltech scientists say they’ve developed a metamaterial that focuses sound to such a high concentration that it could go on the offensive, targeting cancers or kidney stones while leaving the surrounding tissues alone. Oh, and one other thing: The military could use it to make weapons.

“The beauty of this system is that it’s just a bunch of ball bearings that we control with weights,” said Chiara Daraio [Discovery News], a member of the research team. Caltech’s acoustic lens relies on the same principle as Newton’s cradle—that toy your high school science teacher probably kept on his or her desk with metal balls on strings that demonstrated the conservation of energy. In this design, 21 parallel chains each contain 21 bearings. When the team strikes one end, it starts a compression wave that carries through the system. But instead of having the last ball swing out like a pendulum and bring the momentum back into the system, like the toy does, the acoustic lens focuses all the energy at the end of the system onto one spot, just a few inches away from the metamaterial.

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In a far-reaching judgment that could have major implications for the biotech industry, a federal judge in Manhattan has struck down patents related to two human genes linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancers, BRCA1 and BRCA2.

Myriad Genetics held the patents, and women who want to find out if they have a high genetic risk for these cancers have to get a test sold by Myriad, which costs more than $3,000. Plaintiffs in the case had said Myriad’s monopoly on the test, conferred by the gene patents, kept prices high and prevented women from getting a confirmatory test from another laboratory [The New York Times]. In his decision, United States District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet found that the company’s patents were invalid because the genes are “found in nature,” and products of nature can’t be patented. In essence, he agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument that the genetic code contained in each human being’s cells shouldn’t be private property.

Tuesday’s decision, if upheld, could have wide repercussions for the multi-billion dollar biotech industry, which is built on more than 40,000 gene patents. Already, about 20 percent of the human genes have been patented. The decision, however, is not binding on other federal courts and other judges may or may not abide by it. But it does the set the stage for years of litigation over other gene patents. Myriad Genetics plans to appeal the judgment.

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So far in 2010 we’ve seen nanotubes that carry thermopower waves to create electricity, nanoparticles that latch onto only damaged cells to deliver drugs there, and more. Today there are a couple more clever uses for nanotechnology—taking the salt out of salt water, and nanobots that deliver gene therapy.

In Nature Nanotechnology, an MIT team showed they could use nanotech to desalinate water in a new way. At the moment, desalination plants employ reverse osmosis, in which pressure forces the salt ions through a membrane. But this process is an energy-gobbler and the membrane is prone to clogging, which means that de-sal plants are inevitably big, expensive, fixed pieces of kit [Sydney Morning Herald].

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After six years of legal wrangling, a New York judge is set to approve a $657 million settlement package for thousands of rescue workers and volunteers who became sick after working on the cleanup of the World Trade Center site. The workers, who had sued the City of New York and other officials for their subsequent illness, can now settle their injury claims. Marc Bern, one of the lawyers representing the workers, said many of his clients were “first responders” at the site when the twin towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. After the work, some found their health deteriorated, with many suffering from asthma, other respiratory issues and blood cancer [CNN].

The money for the claims will come from a $1 billion federal grant to the WTC Captive Insurance Co., created to indemnify the city and its contractors against the flood of lawsuits [Daily News]. The workers have 90 days to look through the proposed settlement and decide if they like it. If 95 percent of the plaintiffs approve of the package, then the settlement will stand at $575 million. If 100% approve, the settlement goes up to $657 million [Daily News].

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As the deadly facial cancer that has drastically reduced the population of Tasmanian devils continues to spread through the species, the main hope for scientists trying to save them from extinction has been to hunt for devils that might be resistant to the disease, and to try to take advantage of that immunity. Reporting in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Kathy Belov and her team say they may finally have done just that: Some devils from northwest Tasmania, they say, are genetically distinct from the rest and could be resistant to the disease.

Belov says that most Tasmanian devils have immune systems so closely related that they’re all susceptible to the disease, which spreads when the devils bite each other on the face and leave behind tumor cells. The bitten devils’ immune systems don’t recognize the tumor cells as foreign, allowing them to take hold. Scientists have given the iconic marsupial as little as 25 years left if efforts are not made to solve the cancer riddle. The population has dwindled by a whopping 70 per cent since the first reported case of devil facial tumour disease in 1996 [Sydney Morning Herald]. Previous research showed that the marsupials are more socially linked that researchers initially believed, which is bad news for those trying to contain the disease.

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Doctors who are torn over how aggressively to treat a cancer patient, not knowing whether a tumor has fully regressed or is coming back, might someday be able to find out just by testing the patient’s blood. In a study forthcoming his week in Science Translational Medicine, John Hopkins researchers say they have tested a way to spot the “fingerprint” of cancer–the changes to the DNA inside cells that make up cancerous tumors.

Jeffery Schloss of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who wasn’t involved in the study, likened the approach to drawing a map. Sequencing the letters of the genetic code would be akin to plotting every house in a large neighborhood. The Hopkins team was looking only for neighborhoods—in particular, neighborhoods out of place compared with where they would be in normal tissue [Wall Street Journal]. The researchers in the study looked at tissue from people with breast or bowel cancer, and found multiple DNA rearrangements in each of the samples of cancerous tissue.

In each patient, the genetic changes in the cancerous cells amount to a unique marker of the patient’s tumor, the researchers say. Using blood samples from two of the colorectal cancer patients, they found the test was sensitive enough to detect this marker or “fingerprint” DNA that had been shed by tumours into the bloodstream [BBC News].

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Does the human brain have a “God spot”–a particular region that regulates feelings of spirituality and connection to the universe? One year ago, DISCOVER reported on a  scientific study of spiritual people that couldn’t pinpoint one location in the brain as key to controlling religious feelings. But now a new study proposes that there is a link between the physical make-up of the brain and attitudes towards religion and spirituality.

By observing brain cancer patients before and after brain surgery, researchers in Italy have found that damage to the posterior part of the brain, specifically in an area called the parietal cortex, can increase patients’ feelings of “self transcendence,” or feeling at one with the universe. The parietal cortex is the region that is is usually involved in maintaining a sense of self, for example by helping you keep track of your body parts. It has also been linked to prayer and meditation [New Scientist].

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You might not be a smoker yourself, but hanging around people who are smoking can cause you to inhale noxious cigarette fumes. For years, scientists have cautioned against the ill-effects of such second-hand smoke. Now they’re warning about the dangers of “third-hand smoke”—the chemical traces that cling to a smoker, and that are left behind in a room where someone has been smoking.

A team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that remnants of a smoke don’t just inertly settle onto surfaces, they can react with a common gas (nitrous acid, which is emitted from gas appliances and vehicles, among other sources) to create carcinogenic compounds known as tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs) [Scientific American]. The study (pdf) was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The mysterious and deadly facial cancer that has sent populations of Tasmanian devils crashing now has a known source, according to findings published last week in the journal Science. The ailment originated in nerve cells of the devils themselves.

A genetic analysis of tumors from Tasmanian devils widely separated geographically shows that all the tumors are virtually identical and distinct from the animals’ own genomes…. The tumors probably arose from Schwann cells, which normally play a role in protecting and cushioning nerves [Los Angeles Times]. Tasmanian devils have a lot of nerves on their faces near their whiskers, the researchers note, and therefore have Schwann cells there. Team member Jenny Graves says the tumor could have arisen in one cell in one animal two decades ago, and then passed from devil to devil as they bit each other. The disease has already killed 60 percent of the population.

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The genomes of lung and skin cancer have been decoded by scientists at the UK-based Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, which is the first time an entire cancer gene map has been created.

The scientists say they have pinpointed specific DNA errors that may cause tumors in these two cancers, both of which have direct known causes—smoking for lung cancer and sun exposure for skin cancer. Researchers predict these maps will offer patients a personalized treatment option that ranges from earlier detection to the types of medication used to treat cancer. The genetic maps will also allow cancer researchers to study cells with defective DNA and produce more powerful drugs to fight the errors, according to the the study’s scientists [CNN]. News reports are heralding the new research as revolutionary, however it will be years, perhaps decades, before the full implications of the work are understood.

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