Tag Archives: lab

[#ThirdWorldProblems Issue 2]: World Malaria Day!

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(Picture courtesy of rollbackmalaria.org)

(Picture courtesy of rollbackmalaria.org)

Friday, April 25th was World Malaria Day! This is a date designed to raise awareness and funding for malaria- one of the Big Three” diseases that together account for one out of every ten deaths in the world. (The other two are tuberculosis and AIDS). This year, the theme was: “Invest in the future. Defeat malaria.”

And malaria definitely deserves more attention and research. Every year, more than 200 million people are infected and more than 600,000 people (mostly children under 5 years old) are killed by this disease. That’s about 20 times the number of students in Penn State!

The parasite that causes malaria is also harder to study than many others because it has such a complex life cycle. It does completely different things depending on whether it is inside a mosquito, in someone’s liver, or in their bloodstream. So researchers have to decide the exact part of the life cycle they will focus on, and consider many other ecological and social factors when talking about the disease (since mosquitoes are the main carriers). As if that’s not complicated enough, it also infects monkeys and other animals that can come into contact with people, so only treating the disease in humans wouldn’t eradicate it.

(Diagram courtesy of nature.com)

(Diagram courtesy of nature.com)

The main symptoms of malaria include nausea, fatigue, fever, chills, muscle pain, and an enlarged spleen. However, some people may develop a more serious set of complications when the parasite invades the brain– they can get hallucinations, slip into a coma, and die. As of now there is actually no way to determine which patients are at risk for these dangerous types of malaria. And so many children who have a high chance of dying are just sent home with mild malaria medication.

However, a study was published just last Wednesday about a pretty amazing discovery— researchers in Sweden have found 13 proteins that are present in the blood samples of patients with the lethal form of malaria, but are much less common in patients with mild malaria.

“Our results indicate that there is muscle tissue that is broken down, particularly in patients who have cerebral malaria (the lethal type) — something that does not occur in patients who have lighter malaria variants,” explains Dr. Nilsson, a professor at the university that published the paper. Apparently the byproducts of muscle breakdown can be identified from blood tests.

This discovery has pretty awesome implications– physicians would be able to easily identify children with deadly malaria, and then care for them accordingly. And the local governments of malaria-stricken countries (and US agencies like the FDA) don’t require approval for testing blood samples, so this can happen very quickly. If this really works, the mortality rate of malaria could be reduced drastically. World Malaria Day has definitely gone well this year.

 

Sources:

http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/malaria-symptoms

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=122119

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140423095158.htm

 

Printer-topia

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You’ve probably heard about the 3-D printer at some point in the past few years. I haven’t exactly been keeping up with it, but the word on the street is that these machines can make spoons, angel hair pasta, sculptures, airplane parts, children’s toys, and pretty much everything in between.

Not surprisingly, scientists have been researching this new technology as well. A huge breakthrough was made about twelve years ago, when a mold of a bladder was printed, seeded with a patient’s own cells, transplanted back into the 12-year-old patient, and worked perfectly. More recently, surgeon Anthony Atala discussed the need for (and implications of) organ printing in his TED Talk: “Currently, there are not enough organs to go around; in fact, in the last 10 years the number of patients requiring organs has doubled while in the same time the number of donors has barely gone up.” He described 3-D printers as pretty much cotton candy machines that can spin and weave fibers into different shapes from raw material. These structures can have the patient’s cells scattered on them, which would eventually grow into a new organ.

Screen Shot 2013-11-10 at 2.57.03 AM

A printed protein scaffold that has been seeded with liver cells. (Screen capture from the TED Talk)

Screen Shot 2013-11-10 at 3.03.13 AM

Prototype of a kidney printed by Dr. Atala. It’s still years away from being functional, but it’s definitely an interesting development. (Screen capture from the TED Talk)

So what are some implications of making new organs with 3-D printing, besides the obvious (transplants)? Since we could have a real, live human organ that reacts to chemicals just as an organ would in the human body, this would theoretically eliminate the need for animal testing because we can test how a drug works on human tissue instead of live lab animals. Of course, this technology is still very much under development and right now, it would be impossible to produce organs fast enough or accurately enough to experiment on them. But the 3-D printer was really a brilliant invention, and it will hopefully be used to do some awesome things for science.

 

Sources:

http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html

http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4743-odd-things-3d-printing.html

http://www.dvice.com/2013-11-12/3d-printed-human-flesh-could-replace-animal-testing

 

Will Research For $

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Let’s talk about the government. Again? You say. But this blog’s about science! What cures got discovered this week?

Well, the answer is, profitable ones. When people hear the word “science,” what comes to mind are test tubes, fruit flies, spaceships, and cancer treatments. But the thing is, the government is actually behind all of it— not in a creepy way, but their funding is needed for any type of research.  Every scientist has to apply for grants to get enough money to keep their lab and their job.

The problem is that the government has limited funds and mostly gives grants to research about diseases whose treatment could eventually benefit the government economically. They’re basically making an investment. As a result, many serious diseases that affect poor countries (but not developed ones) are being neglected; out of 336 new drugs and vaccines developed in 2010-2011, only 1% were for diseases that are mostly common in developing countries (like tuberculosis, malaria, diarrheal and tropical diseases, etc.), even though those diseases account for 11% of the global health burden.

These diseases have become known as “neglected diseases.” Dr. Bernard Pécoul, the director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), says that “We must keep pushing to keep these diseases on the international policy agenda and move quickly to deliver truly transformative, life-saving treatments.”

Dr. Nathalie Wourgaft, medical director of DNDi, points out that “[There are] deadly gaps in new medicines for some of the world’s least visible patients.” And this is definitely true; research is ridiculously expensive and it often takes years and years of developing a cure, and then doing animal experiments and clinical trials, before a drug is approved. People in non-visible countries just can’t afford to pay enough money in order for all the research behind the cure to be profitable. So the government’s probably not interested.

This is obviously a pretty bad situation. But what changes in the international policy agenda could be made to fix it? Should the government set aside funding for neglected diseases? Or would it be better to provide science education in poor countries in hopes that someone will grow up to discover a cure?

Sources:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131024121923.htm

http://www.dndi.org/

100% Certified Lab-Grown

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As the population continues to increase exponentially, world hunger is becoming a much more widespread and serious issue, and more extreme measures are being taken to solve it. One of those ways is growing meat in petri dishes.

This August, a completely lab-grown burger was fried and eaten in London after having been grown from cow stem cells in a lab. This burger is all muscle– because there were no fat or skin or cartilage cells to begin with, there was no such tissue in the meat. This development could have some interesting implications for world hunger– if meat can be mass-produced in places with climates that can’t support large numbers of animals, everyone can get their protein.

Widespread use of this discovery could also help environment in some major ways. Right now, it’s estimated that confined animals produce three times as much waste as humans in the US, and account for a huge percentage of carbon and methane emissions. Runoff from factory farms ends up in groundwater and ecosystems, causing diseases to develop in places that they shouldn’t be developing in.

So how much value do lab-grown burgers have? Are they the next “pink slime”? Or are they the solution to world hunger and the destructive consequences of factory farming?

Or do you think hunger can be fixed in a much less creepy and “scientific” way? After all, meat is being produced so fast, and there is so much of it, that it has already become less expensive than vegetables. Things like Epic Meal Time, a Youtube series that features recipes for 60-pound 6 piece chicken nuggets, among other food items, show that getting enough animal protein in your diet is clearly not an issue in some places. Should we focus first on the politics and socioeconomic barriers that contribute to world hunger, instead of trying to fix everything with science?

 

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/science/a-lab-grown-burger-gets-a-taste-test.html

http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-factory-farms-and-environment