med-hints

  An article in the October issue Science described a new drug that could save the lives of up to 100,000 Africans.   It’s 3 years away from trials in humans but if it works—who knows.   The article claims that each year about 100,000 Africans are killed by venomous snakes and the current antivenom isn’t very effective for a number of reasons.   “This new kind of antivenom has proved protective only in mice so far. But   “It’s a potential game changer if all goes well.” To make their antivenum Laustsen-Kiel and colleagues injected mixtures of venoms from 18 African snakes into llamas and alpacas and the animals made antibodies. Their antibodies are smaller than those of horses and humans and have only one protein chain, instead of two, on each arm of the Y-shaped molecule. Each arm, dubbed a nanobody, can be separated from its base while remaining able to bind a target molecule, such as a toxin . The isolated arms lack the animal-specific sections th...

  THIS years nobel prize in medicine was awarded to researchers – for their discoveries regarding the role of regulatory T cells in keeping the immune system in check. Faulty regulatory T cells can result in autoimmune disease.  There has been considerable interest in this system from drugmakers. In the 1980s Sakaguchi removed the thymus from three-day-old mice, who then developed autoimmune disease.   He injected them with mature T cells developed in genetically identical mice and found that the T cells protected the mice from autoimmune disease. In 1995 he showed that regulatory T cells carried CD4 and CD25 proteins on their surface. Brunkow and Ramsdell mapped the x chromosome in detail and found a faulty mouse gene that caused an auto immune disease in the mice and two years later Sakaguchi proved that the  Foxp3  gene controls the development of regulatory T cells.   Julia Robinson chemistry world.  Two years later Sakaguchi, followed...